Two students were shot at Gardena High School on Tuesday when a student’s loaded weapon accidentally fired from inside his backpack.
The weapon went off after the student entered a classroom and set his backpack on a desk, wounding a 15-year-old girl in the head and a 15-year-old boy in the neck, according to a statement by the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The two wounded students were transported to a local hospital for treatment, and the suspect was taken into custody, according to the statement. The name of the boy who was arrested has not been released.
“When I heard that there was a shooting at Gardena, I was actually not that surprised,” said Ngoc Hanh Pham, a second-year sociology student who graduated from Gardena High School in 2009.
Pham said that when she was a student at the high school, there were frequent fights because of racial tensions.
But nothing escalated to a shooting during her time at the school, which is located about 20 miles southeast of Westwood.
Deans and assistant principals have metal detectors to scan for weapons, said LAUSD spokeswoman Monica Carazo.
Carazo said that the wands are used on a “periodic but regular basis,” but not on every student and not necessarily every day.
A LAUSD policy bulletin recommends that these searches occur daily.
Carazo said there will be an increased police presence and crisis counselors at the school for the remainder of the week.
UCLA alumnus Hieu Pham, Ngoc Hanh Pham’s brother who attended Gardena High School when another shooting occurred in 2002, said the school instituted the metal detector search policy after that shooting, but he does not know if they maintained it.
“I knew the kind of environment that is around me,” Hieu Pham said.
“When it happened to me, I was scared also, but I wasn’t shocked back then, either.”
Both Ngoc Hanh Pham and Hieu Pham said they were worried that the student was able to enter the school with a gun.
When Ngoc Hanh Pham was a student, she said students were subjected to random metal detector tests, but she did not see a specific pattern or regularity in the searches.
With reports from Sonali Kohli, Bruin senior staff.