First, I want to apologize for not getting back to this story sooner, but the recent school shooting in Bend has been taking up a huge amount of my time and energy.
However, as you may know, late last month at Highland Middle School in Hobbs, New Mexico, a teacher named Kelly Matthews walked outside between buildings during the school day and was shot multiple times by a student. While the latest news coverage centers heavily on newly released body camera video showing the police response and the immediate aftermath, the underlying report actually gives us a lot of crucial new information that wasn’t available when this first happened.
For starters, we now have a name for the shooter, who has been identified as 13-year-old Ryker Teel. When officers finally caught up with him in a nearby alley, a handcuffed Teel repeatedly asked the arresting police, “Is he dead? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Is he dead?” It’s hard to hear those words and not feel like he was probably more sorry that he got caught than anything else.
The report also answers the question of whether Kelly Matthews was singled out by this kid. It turns out Matthews was not the intended target at all, as Teel admitted to detectives that he brought the gun to school that morning with the deliberate intention to shoot anyone he happened to cross paths with first.
But what really stands out to me in these new details is where the gun came from in the first place. Overheard during a conversation with his father after detectives stepped out of the room, Teel admitted that he retrieved the firearm directly from the safe inside their home.
In the past couple of years, I have written so many stories about kids who were somehow able to effortlessly access weapons from their parents’ locked safes. At this point, we are either raising an entire generation of master teenage safecrackers, or these ‘responsible gun owners’™ are not actually securing their firearms while children are living under their roof.
Deep down, you really have to keep up that absurd fantasy of needing split-second access to shoot an imaginary home invader, even if it means leaving a deadly weapon within reach of a middle schooler.
Because of how the gun was allegedly stored, we still do not know yet how New Mexico’s Bennie Hargrove law will affect any potential criminal prosecution toward the father. Proving that a parent knowingly permitted access becomes much harder when a safe is involved, leaving us to wonder if anyone else will ever be held legally accountable for what happened.
Meanwhile, Kelly Matthews is currently enduring the grueling process of physical rehab. Rebuilding a shattered body after taking multiple bullets is one of the most physically painful, emotionally draining, and wildly expensive things a person can ever be forced to go through, serving as a brutal reminder that surviving the initial gunfire is only the beginning of a lifelong struggle.
(Source)
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