Students Shaken By Shooting Near San Jose High School; 'We Started Boarding Up The Door'
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- A teen shooting victim was recovering in a South Bay hospital Friday, but for the students who were forced to shelter in place in their San Jose high school classrooms, the fears and anxieties stirred up by the incident may take time to settle.
San Jose police said the shooting was reported in the area of Lucretia Avenue and Taji Drive near Yerba Buena High at 10:43 a.m. Thursday.
As officers responded, the school was told to shelter its students in their classrooms where they remained for two hours, fearing for their safety and what might be unfolding outside the doors.
"We got an announcement on the PA system to shelter in place," Yerba Buena High Senior Nathan Ayala told KPIX. "We started boarding up the door, locking it, putting desks in front of the door as barricades."
Investigators said the suspected gunman was a 16-year-old Yerba Buena High student, who was quickly taken into custody, a semi-automatic handgun discovered in his backpack.
It wasn't a ghost gun, but San Jose police were trying to discover how the teen got the weapon.
Meanwhile, the victim -- a 16-year-old student at Pegasus High, a continuation school -- suffered a non-life threatening gunshot wound and was transported to the hospital. The motive that led to the shooting has not been released.
San Jose Police PIO Officer Christian Camarillo said the shooting shed light on the problem of teens and guns.
"Now we have juveniles out here with guns," he said. "We need to do something. We are going to do something. We need to combat this problem, together. It's going to take more than just the police."
According to the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit group that tracks shootings from more than 7,000 police, media, and government sources, so far this year 1,050 teens ages 12-17 have already been hurt or killed by gun violence.
The numbers have steadily been rising over the past few years reaching an all time high of 4,623 nationwide in 2021.
"We need to get these guns, illegally possessed guns, off our city streets," Camarillo said.
