If you’ll recall, at Highland Middle School in Hobbs, New Mexico, a teacher named Kelly Matthews walked out a back door and straight into gunfire this past Friday.
According to police, the shooter had been in class that morning, slipped out the rear of the building between periods without anyone noticing, and opened fire the second Matthews came around the corner. Matthews was hit multiple times, rushed to a hospital in Hobbs, and then transferred to Lubbock, where as of Sunday evening he was said to be in stable but critical condition. School nurses kept him alive until the ambulance showed up, and they did it without knowing whether the shooter was still nearby.
The shooter turned out to be a 13-year-old boy. Police caught him within minutes after a short foot chase, and they’ve released a description of what he was wearing: a white male in a black hoodie, black pants, and a long white shirt. Officers also found a gun along the path they believe he took when he ran, in a residential area east of the school.
Police say they already know how that kid got his hands on the gun, and they just aren’t telling the rest of us yet. In the same breath, they note that no charges have been pursued against his parents “at this time.” That is an oddly peculiar thing to say, because you don’t tack “at this time” onto a sentence unless you want people to hear that the door might still be open.
My gut says that door won’t swing open and that this ends the way it did at Evergreen High in Colorado, where investigators looked over the shooter’s parents, shrugged, and announced there wasn’t enough evidence to charge anybody. New Mexico has the Bennie Hargrove law built for exactly this situation, and I’ll believe it gets used when I see it. And if it doesn’t get used, it will probably be for the same reason I thought why the Evergreen High parents were never charged.
And let’s get back to ZeroEyes again, the AI gun-detection system Hobbs Schools uses, which failed to spot a gun on a kid who, by the police’s own account, spent the morning sitting in class. If he was in that building for morning classes, the gun presumably came in with him and rode along for a good chunk of the school day. Walking the halls and sitting at a desk, it never once tripped the high-tech safety net the district was so proud of.
The district’s answer is that ZeroEyes is “only one tool,” which is a fantastic thing to say after the tool fails and a terrible thing to say before you sign the contract. A gun-detection system that can’t detect a gun until somebody’s already shooting with it is a very expensive smoke alarm that only works once the house is on fire.
And for those of you who were losing sleep over the rescheduled homecoming game, you can relax. Hobbs beat Organ Mountain 55-12 on Saturday morning.
Yay, team. Meanwhile, Kelly Matthews was still lying in a hospital bed in Lubbock in critical condition.
(Sources)
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