WASHINGTON — A student armed with a pellet gun made threats to “shoot people,” prompting officials to lock down multiple Culpeper County schools Wednesday.
Culpeper Sheriff Scott Jenkins announced that the teen boy turned himself into the police about 11:40 a.m. at a negotiated spot about a half mile from Culpeper High School.
Prosecutors will determine what charges the boy might face.
“The student had made statements in a very descriptive way of what he intended to do with the gun, to shoot other people,” Jenkins said during a midafternoon briefing.
The unnamed boy was not armed at the time he was taken into custody and would not tell police where the gun was. Police later found the weapon and determined it was a CO2 pellet pistol, sometimes called an air gun.
Several students saw the boy with what appeared to be a small-caliber handgun while on a bus headed to the high school. They reported the gun to high school officials later in the morning.
Jenkins says the students did the right thing to report what they saw, believing the pellet gun was a real firearm, and given the boy’s threats.
The tight security measures were put in place earlier in the day as police descended on the school campus to search for the boy, not knowing he had already left school grounds.
Officials locked down the high school and nearby Culpeper Middle School and a school annex through the noon hour while police continued searching for the gun, which they believed was a .22-caliber handgun after finding shell casings of ammunition of that caliber in a vehicle parked at the school.
Jenkins says active shooter training provided to all school employees and plans to coordinate with local police responding such an incident worked well.
No one was hurt.
