A 17-year-old Roosevelt High School student was fatally shot Wednesday afternoon in the school’s parking lot, according to D.C. police.
The high school, in the 4300 block of 13th Street NW, was placed on lockdown after the incident along with nearby MacFarland Middle School and Dorothy Height Elementary School, according to D.C. public school officials.
Kane said that the victim had gone to school Wednesday and that detectives were investigating when he had left the building. The shooting occurred just before 2:25 p.m., about an hour ahead of the school’s regular dismissal.
Less than two hours after the shooting, students piled out of Roosevelt High and into school buses and their parents’ cars. The front of the red-brick building showed little evidence of the violence that had transpired. But behind the school, yellow police tape blocked off a large area around the parking lot. Rows of cars remained parked, and police officers paced around the scene.
Mariam Aydoun, 36, said her 2-year-old daughter had been on the playground at a nearby day care when the shooting occurred. Staff rushed the children inside and locked down the building, she said.
By 4 p.m., mother and daughter had reunited. But Aydoun said her anxiety lingered. She feared that one day, the call she received would be different and her daughter would have been the victim of the gun violence.
“I fear it might happen, and that is a thought I can’t outsmart because it really might,” she said. “I feel hopeless.”
Aydoun said she wants the city to address what she called a “youth crisis,” in part by providing more after-school engagement opportunities for 11-to-13-year-olds — students she feels are still young enough to be saved from violent influences.
She has put her faith in the city government to make her community feel safer, she said, mostly because she feels she has no choice but to stay.
“I’m a low-income mom,” Aydoun said. “I don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing.”
One 15-year-old boy strolling outside with a friend said he spent the afternoon locked down in biology class, checking social media for updates and texting friends to try to figure out what had happened. He learned that a boy about his age had been shot and would probably die. But he said he was not scared. He was used to hearing about gunshots.
The incident came days after a 10-year-old girl riding in a vehicle with her family was fatally wounded in a barrage of gunfire and a 12-year-old was grazed by a stray bullet while sleeping in her bed. As of May 11, D.C. police said, 43 juveniles had been shot this year, double the number at the same time last year.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) came to the shooting scene early Wednesday evening — a tragic cap to a three-day stretch in which she proposed new public safety legislation and appeared before Congress to discuss crime in the nation’s capital.
Standing in front of crime-scene tape, Bowser said that the city needs to fundamentally change its approach to talking about public safety.
“We can’t think of our juvenile rehabilitation system as punishment,” she said, adding that her administration is advocating to give young people shelter if it will help them stay out of trouble. “There are a lot of things that we have to do, but we have to act urgently.”
The mayor then spoke to residents who had gathered nearby. Some asked for a greater police presence during and just outside school hours, and the mayor said they could expect to see more police in the area.
“We’ll figure out what happened,” she told one resident, who held her 3-year-old daughter.