Student with gun arrested at West

Police outside West Junior High Monday afternoon apprehended a ninth-grade boy who possessed a gun around school dismissal.

School officials on Tuesday commended a concerned student who notified staff members, which allowed them to call police. They also said the incident showed that safety measures worked.

“The best outcome of this is the fact that we have students who are willing to step up and let staff know when there are concerns,” West principal Myron Melton said.

The ninth-grade student had been court-ordered to attend Douglas County Youth Services, and he was waiting on another student at the school’s dismissal, Superintendent Randy Weseman said.

Melton said he and police officers, including the school resource officer, confronted the ninth-grader in the school’s north parking lot. While they were trying to remove him from the parking lot, police discovered the gun. Police took him into custody around 3:45 p.m., Melton said.

Weseman said the boy tried to run, and the weapon fell out.

“He was arrested and taken away, never entered the building,” Weseman said. “We never had a student under any duress or threatened, but it’s a situation where some of the best security we have is just good vigilance and good communication.”

The school sent a letter home to parents Tuesday, and a school expulsion hearing for the ninth-grader is also pending.

Marlena Porter picks up her brother, a seventh grade student, daily at West.

“Honestly, it’s scary. It definitely surprised me. I didn’t know that anything like that would happen here, and it’s just a dose of reality,” she said.

This is the second time this school year that administrators lauded West students for their conduct in handling a tense situation. In December, students reported to police that a man in a car had tried to lure a 13-year-old student into his vehicle and exposed himself to others.

Police later arrested a suspect and discovered a gun in his car. Stephen R. Stout faces five felony charges related to that incident, and his trial is scheduled for May.

Weseman called it “textbook” the way the student reported and administrators and officers responded to Monday’s incident.

“Obviously we don’t want these kinds of things to happen, but we live in a society where handguns are prevalent, and people can get them. And this was a situation that ended the way we would want it to end,” he said.