School security found a student injured and bleeding in a bathroom at Col. Zadok Magruder High School in Derwood, on Friday, Jan. 21st, at approximately 12:53 pm. Magruder’s security team placed a 911 call for a “possible stab wound” while calling on the school nurse to tend to the student’s wounds.
12 minutes later, the school went into lockdown. The incident was announced as a gunshot wound after a sheriff’s deputy—the school’s assigned “community engagement officer”—arrived on scene, half an hour after school security found the injured student.
Later that day, police identified and arrested junior Steven Alston Jr. in a classroom during the lockdown, finding a disassembled gun on his person. This gun was later discovered to be a “ghost gun,” an unserialized, untraceable firearm that Alston Jr. had delivered to his home via online purchase in three separate pieces.
At the same time, the injured student, a sophomore, was brought to a nearby hospital where they continue to stay, undergoing several surgeries. The student will remain hospitalized until they can be discharged to a rehabilitation center.
Authorities’ further investigations revealed that this incident did not happen by chance: the two students were already engaged in an extended conflict by the time the shooting occurred, and the gun was found to have been purchased in anticipation of a possible violent confrontation during the apparently-predetermined meeting between the two.
The two students were also not alone in the bathroom when the incident occurred—they were accompanied by other students who elected not to immediately notify school officials but instead post the details of the shooting on social media.
The nature and details of the incident and the subsequent revelations of investigations have since spawned a series of countywide discussions. The events at Magruder come after a series of unrelated shootings, stabbings and violent incidents all throughout the county just this past academic year.
To many, this shooting—and others like it—come as a consequence of the removal of the School Resource Officer (SRO) program in the county this year, which had previously assigned an officer of Montgomery County PD to a permanent, full-time station at each MCPS high school. Instead, the police officers, retitled as “community engagement officers,” were to patrol the areas around school zones and instead of being contacted by school administration directly in an emergency were to be contacted by the department’s dispatch system.
Despite this, the district has asserted that they are not reinstating the SRO program.
“It’s more about what we are looking at and what type of environment… we want to see in our schools that creates a safe one, and one that’s built on the premise of relationship-building,” county superintendent Monifa McKnight said.
While county officials dedicated themselves this past month to comprehensively reviewing and updating school safety practices in the wake of the shooting, both they and the county police department have expressed their doubt that a stationed SRO would have been able to prevent the scenario.
Growing concerns reflect not only uncertainty about school safety but also the influence of social media on teen behavior. The start of the school year was marked by both widespread violence and acts of hate across the county, as well as social media trends that encouraged students to commit acts such as harassment of teachers, theft of school property and general misconduct. The involvement of social media in this shooting has prompted many to question its influence on many of the behavioral concerns that school and county officials have struggled to mitigate throughout this academic year.
“There is a place for social media, but then there is a time and a place when we need to help our fellow man. It is wiser to give people the help and get the help started that they need versus being the superstar on Twitter for the day. And that’s a reality that we have to have a real conversation with our young people about,” MCPD Chief Marcus Jones said in a press conference the Monday after the shooting.
Article by Ellie Montemayor of Walter Johnson High School
Photo courtesy of Montgomery Community Media