Prosecutors Say Natomas High School Shooting Was Self-Defense

This story just took a turn I don’t think anyone saw coming.

When the shooting first happened at Natomas High School, in Sacramento, California, it looked like another entry in the same grim pattern. A teenager dead, another in custody, and a school campus turned into a crime scene. The kind of story I’ve covered too many times, where the details slowly fill in and the ending is always the same.

Now we’re finding out that wasn’t the full picture.

According to the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office, homicide charges will not be filed in the death of De’Jon Sledge.

What reportedly happened sounds less like a typical school shooting and more like something that never should have been able to happen on a school campus in the first place. Investigators say Sledge and another teen allegedly came onto campus wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun while looking for a specific student. They found the Natomas student they were looking for and tried to rob him.

Then comes a plot twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan in his prime.

The student they tried to rob was also armed.

At some point during that confrontation, the intended victim pulled their own gun and fired, with Sledge dying from his wounds. Prosecutors reviewed the case and decided there isn’t enough evidence to prove a homicide beyond a reasonable doubt, pointing to self-defense as the likely explanation.

This shooting raises a question that’s hard to ignore. How did we get to a place where two 16-year-olds show up to the same confrontation with guns? That’s not a one-off mistake or a single bad decision. That’s a situation that had the potential to spiral into something even more deadly than what already happened.

It’s not hard to imagine how this could have gone differently. More shots fired with more students caught in the middle who had nothing to do with any of it. The fact that only one person was killed almost feels like luck.

There’s another part of this that shouldn’t get lost either. The teenager who survived, the one who fired the gun, isn’t walking away from this without consequences. The district attorney says that teen is still facing weapons charges. Even in a case where self-defense may apply, bringing a gun onto a school campus is still a crime.

This shows just how broken the situation really is. A kid may have felt the need to carry a gun to protect themselves, and that decision may have saved their life, but it still puts them on the wrong side of the law.

Nothing about that is normal.

The DA even said it outright in their statement. Kids shouldn’t feel like they need to bring guns to school for protection. Yet here we are, with a case where doing exactly that might be the reason one teenager is still alive.

This wasn’t just a shooting. It was a collision between fear, access to guns, and whatever led two teenagers to believe this was how things had to be handled. One of them is dead, and the other one now has to deal with the legal system for carrying the very weapon that may have saved them.

If this is what passes for self-defense in a school, then something has gone very wrong long before the first shot was fired.

(Source)