On Tuesday morning, a 17-year-old male student at Great Mills High School shot two other students before a school resource officer stopped him. The shooter was Austin Wyatt Rollins. He was armed with a handgun and shot a male and female student. According to St. Mary’s County Sheriff, Tim Cameron, Rollins had a prior relationship with the female student he shot.
School resource officer, Brian Gaskill, responded to the shooting in less than a minute according to Cameron. Gaskill and the shooter shot at each other simultaneously. Rollins was later pronounced dead and Gaskill was unharmed. The 14-year-old male student shot, Desmond Barnes, is in stable condition, but the 16-year-old female student, Jaelynn Willey, passed away after several days of being in critical condition with “life-threatening injuries.”
Cameron praised Gaskill’s quick response to the situation. “He responded exactly as we train our personnel to respond,” he said. “This is what we train for, this is what we prepare for, and this is what we pray that we never have to do. On this day, we realized our worst nightmare. The notion of ‘it can’t happen here’ is no longer a notion.”
After the shooting, safety measures were implemented.The school was put under lockdown and the students evacuated to a reunification center at a nearby high school.
Jonathan Freese, a student at Great Mills, described his thoughts during the lockdown after the shooting. “I’m still a little shaken up,” he said to CNN. Freese also said that although the school had held drills to prepare for these situations, the incident was very unexpected. “I didn’t really expect for this to happen. I do always feel safe, though, because they always have police at the school,” he said.
This incident occurred after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed. Many students from Stoneman Douglas High School offered their condolences to Great Mills High School and renewed their call for more action on preventing gun violence in schools.
“The words school and shooting should not be next to each other. Headlines like this should not have to be typed up every week. All of these incidents have one thing in common. My thoughts are with Maryland right now,” tweeted student activist Adam Alhanti.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan also offered his thoughts on the need for school safety. “Although our pain remains fresh and the facts remain uncertain, today’s horrible events should not be an excuse to pause our conversation about school safety. Instead it must serve as a call to action,” he said.
President Donald Trump also commented on the shooting. “The shooting was a terrible thing,” he said.
Many students from Montgomery County Public Schools have shown their support for the movement against gun violence. Some students participated in the National School Walkout on March 14th in Washington D.C. by protesting against gun violence or will be heading out to D.C. again on the 24th for the national march.
Article by MoCo Student staff writer Bilal Choudry of Winston Churchill High School