Orinda police, with help from adjacent agencies, searched for a man a first-grade student said was observed carrying a gun in a creek bed near Del Rey Elementary School Wednesday – but did not locate the man despite an extensive air and ground search.
Both Del Rey and Miramonte High School were placed under lockdown after the schools and police heard of the report, standard procedure in such cases. Only one student reportedly saw the man, who the student described as a white man believed to be carrying a gun of some sort.
The lockdown order for Orinda schools was lifted at 1:03 p.m. Neither police nor anyone else has seen this person, despite the presence of a CHP helicopter and a police canine team.
No student was harmed in any way during Wednesday’s incident. Police Chief Mark Nagel took time out to report that his officers performed an exhaustive “room-to-room” sweep at Del Rey to stay on the safe side before the lockdown order was lifted.
Nice job everyone.
Scary moment. Unfortunately we have to have a protocol for these things and it appears it was in play today. Nice job PD.
The imagination of a 6 year old child is vast. Mine sees her imaginary friend in our back yard, in the playground, at church, all over the place.
And here were are in this post 9-11, post Newtown world. We’ve changed, haven’t we?
Do school officials and law enforcement take this threat seriously? Apparently very seriously. Glad this ended well.
Who could have imagined kids with NERF guns and a 1st grader could set off such a reaction? It is a different world now. We were lucky to have our fun while we could.
I think the pendulum may have swung too far. I’m grateful that we have the capability of such a swift and dramatic response, but you have to wonder whether to what extent the alarm was raised, and then sustained, and then amplified, and then converted to a room-by-room sweep out of people’s best JUDGMENT or by a zero-tolerance/CYA/no one gets in trouble for over-reacting type mentality.
So there was no “man” and there was no “gun.” But what if there were? So what? Without more, was the response appropriate? Should we calibrate our local policies to “irrational over-reaction” as some sort of political statement? In most parts of the country, they call a man with a gun near a school “dad dropping off kids.”
When I was a kid I saw all sorts of things. Most people just chucked me under the chin and smiled. Today a kid sees something and the adults call out the national guard. That’s the price we’re paying for what has happened to us at Columbine and Newtown I guess.