Montgomery Schools Probing Delayed Response to Gunshot

Albert Einstein High School freshmen Josh Weil and Nia Nyamweya said at a meeting Monday night that they felt safe at the school. (By Dayna Smith For The Washington Post)

In a briefing after the incident, Hellmuth said the team leader told him that he did not contact the principal because "they couldn't make a determination of what they had."

"And he didn't want to start panicking people if it wasn't a gunshot," Hellmuth said. "These people investigate things all day long. Some of it doesn't pan out."

Hellmuth and Fernandez give this account of what happened that morning:

The gun was fired about 11:30 a.m. Within minutes, a group of students approached a pair of security workers in a second-floor hallway and asked, "Did you hear that bang?" One of the students added, "It sounded like a gunshot that came from that bathroom."

The guards checked the bathroom and found a possible bullet hole in a wall. One guard went off in search of his team leader. They returned together a few minutes later along with the educational facilities officer, the police officer assigned to the school. The hole was studied further. A custodian was summoned. He told them that the hole "was absolutely not here at 9:30 this morning."

Baur confirmed that the police officer was brought "fairly quickly" into the search. At some point, the officer called his superior at a District station in Wheaton, although it's not clear when. The supervisor and a detective arrived at the school about 12:30 p.m.

About 1 p.m., the security team gave its findings to Linda Jasper, an assistant school administrator. Jasper quickly located Fernandez, who was in a classroom speaking about college admissions. Ten minutes later, Fernandez placed the school on Code Blue, a low-level emergency procedure that requires staff to account for all students.

Ten minutes after that, at 1:20 p.m., Fernandez overheard a police sergeant say, "I'm calling it," signifying he had concluded that a gun had been fired. Baur said the detective didn't realize at the time that Fernandez was the principal. After hearing the detective's remarks, Fernandez placed the school on Code Red lockdown.