A shooting on the campus of LeFlore High School in Mobile left two students wounded Tuesday afternoon, sending the school into lockdown and prompting a heavy police response before the suspect turned herself in with the help of her parents.
Mobile Police Chief Paul Prine said the confrontation broke out around midday and appears to have stemmed from an argument between students. According to Prine, a female juvenile believed to be 16 years old pulled out a weapon and shot a 15-year-old student involved in the dispute.
The 15-year-old suffered a superficial wound, Prine said. A 17-year-old student who was not part of the altercation was also struck in the side by the same round. Both students were taken to a local hospital with injuries described as non-life-threatening.
“There was no threat to any of the other students,” Prine said, adding that the suspect fled the campus immediately after the shooting.
The suspect later surrendered to police with her parents’ assistance, according to police. Investigators said they are continuing to work to determine exactly what led to the shooting.
The school went into lockdown as soon as the incident occurred, according to Mobile County Public School System spokesperson Rena Phillips, who said the situation was never an active shooter scenario.
“We’re always looking into how we can improve and increase our security measures,” Phillips said. “We’ve hired extra resource officers. We have also brought into a partnership with the sheriff’s department. We’re doing all these things to improve protection. This is what a lot of schools across the country are facing right now.”
Word of the shooting quickly reached parents, many of whom rushed to the school to check on their children. Traffic around the campus was cleared to allow buses to get students home, and classes, which normally let out at 2:45 p.m., were dismissed 20 minutes early as a precaution.
One parent, who declined to be identified, said no school resource officer was present on campus at the time of the shooting and argued that could have made a difference.
“If there had been a resource officer there, we wouldn’t have had this incident,” the parent said.
Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson arrived at the school not long after the shooting and said he was troubled by what happened, while also cautioning that law enforcement alone cannot solve the underlying problem.
“We can’t police our way out of these challenges,” Stimpson said. “It’s going to take the community, it takes the church, it takes everybody. We need the community’s help in solving these kinds of challenges.”
Phillips echoed the mayor’s call for a broader community response, pointing to the need to keep guns away from teenagers and to provide them with more support and positive role models.
“We need to work together as a community to help with our teenagers,” she said. “We need to make sure that guns are not available for them. We need to talk with them, we need to provide positive role models. We train every day for situations like this. When this happened, the staff was able to act very quickly.”
The Mobile County Public School System has said it is continuing to evaluate its security measures at LeFlore and other campuses, including the possible expansion of its school resource officer program in partnership with the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office.