Fearful McEachern High School parents were reunited with their children Thursday after two people were shot outside the Powder Springs school, prompting a lockdown and shelter-in-place order, officials said.
The two victims, who were not students, were shot in the parking lot, district spokeswoman Nan Kiel said. Cobb County police and school police eventually secured the campus, which was under a code red, but no suspects were arrested, authorities said.
“The students are safe, the campus is secured and has been for some time,” Cobb police Chief Stuart VanHoozer said Thursday afternoon.
Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC
Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC
Officials said an investigation is underway into what led to the shooting and the identities of the victims, who suffered non-life-threatening injuries. They were taken to Wellstar Kennestone Hospital and are expected to survive.
Jadyn Hill, a senior at McEachern, said she spent more than two hours in her economics class. She sat down at her desk around 2 p.m. and overheard people talking about a shooting. Then the alarms went off and the lockdown started.
She and her classmates spent most of the time playing on their phones, Hill said.
”We’re so desensitized to it,” she said. “I’m not saying this happens super often, but it happens so many times that people aren’t scared how they used to be.”
Other students, including Gabby Moore, were in the school’s gymnasium when the lockdown began. She described a scene of panic as students sprinted into the locker rooms.
As a freshman, she said she was confused about what the procedures were and felt ill-prepared.
“This is the first time I’ve gone through something like this ever,” she said. “I’m not going to school tomorrow because of, I feel, the lack of safety.”
VanHoozer said he saw videos posted online that he assumed were of the shooting, though he wasn’t able to confirm that. He said police were looking for several suspects, who likely left the area.
“We don’t know that we have multiple shooters, just that there were multiple people on site when this shooting occurred,” the chief added.
Nervous parents gathered about a half-mile from the high school as they waited for district officials to release their children. Among them was Anne Joseph, a laboratory technician who rushed there from work after receiving a text from her son about a shooting on campus.
She was messaging her 15-year-old, a McEachern freshman who said he was lying on the ground and sheltering in place along with fellow students.
“I’m a mom and my baby’s in there,” Joseph told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the scene.
The only vehicles allowed on Macland Road at one point were empty school buses. Traffic eventually started to move again after being backed up for miles during the lockdown. Parents looking for their children were directed to the nearby Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Despite the disruption and traffic around the school, Hill was able to get on the bus and made it home only about 15 minutes later than normal.
Looking back, it was a tense day for the senior, who said she could count at least two times in the past year that the threat of a shooting kept her home from school. But things were different Thursday, when a police officer knocked on the door at one point to let in another student, and all she could see was a rifle.
“It scared everyone in the classroom,” she said.
