Lockdown at Schools North of Green Lake

From the Times (partial):

Seattle police are investigating a shooting at a Seattle Parks and Recreation shops building at North 82th Street and Densmore Avenue North.

Police say Broadview-Thompson School, Bagley Elementary and Wilson Pacific are in shelter in place during the search for the shooter.

King County sheriff’s deputies have been sent to home of the alleged shooter’s boyfriend near Bitter Lake to check on his welfare, according to spokeswoman Sgt. Cindi West.

I talked with district communications.   If you are picking up a child at the school, please be patient and follow the lead of police officers.  Community centers with after-school programs/care may also be closed because of this situation so be advised of that.

Update (4:20 pm)

Due to the City of Seattle’s closure of all community centers citywide, Seattle Public Schools is returning all students who were on buses bound for after-school programs to their schools of origin. In some cases, students were delivered to community centers before the closure announcement was made. In that case, the community centers are calling parents and asking them to pick up their students. Students returned to their school will remain at school with adult supervision until their parents can arrange for pick up.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Anonymous - this is not harming everyone citywide. It is a precaution because if you read the story the alleged shooter is a Parks and Rec employee who may have keys to all these facilities.

Better safe than sorry in our parks and schools. But hey...glad your brother thinks Blanchet is AOK. Plenty of us wouldn't get in a car anywhere near a situation like this. You might remember the Cafe Racer shooter earlier this year on the North End who subsequently shot a random driver Downtown and then killed himself in West Seattle. But, hey, wouldn't want to inconvenience afterschool track and swimming and soccer.

And whether we need a new mayor has nothing to do with this.

Maybe society has gone completely mad, but apparently you have too.

Older and Wiser
Anonymous said…
Well apparently the blog administrator just deleted the comment to which I responded.

The commenter thought shelter in places were a bunch of hooey and was proudly stating that his brother just took his kid to track practice.

And that this is all the mayor's fault.

It was a disturbing comment all around.

Older and Wiser
mirmac1 said…
Did the district use its robo-call capability to alert families. Do they have the ability to send a text alert?

All this should have come from the Cafe Racer tragedy.
Eric B said…
All Parks and Rec facilities are closed today as well, per email from the City.
Anonymous said…
Nothing wrong with shelter in place, but why return kids from community centers to schools, putting them in motion and exposed like that if we have a shooter on the loose?
Anonymous said…
WSDWG above,

And if SPD on the scene say its safe to proceed through the area, is it, or is it not, safe to proceed? Can we trust our police, or not?

WSDWG
Maje said…
Anonymous @ 4:31 - They closed the community centers because they think the suspect has keys to all of them. It was safer to send the kids back to the schools.
Anonymous said…
KOMO is reporting that the suspect is in custody. She was arrested at her home, in Burien.

-North End Mom
Yes, the point was that the shooter shot someone at a public building. Could that person have gone on to another public building? Possible. Hence, you close the community centers.

Thanks NE Mom for that update.
Maureen said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said…
Bagley Parent says our household got a phone call about the incident around 2:50 stating that the shelter in place was over. We later got a district call about the community centers being shut and the plan to return students or not send them there.
Anonymous said…
[SPD Spokesman]"Whitcomb said they don’t believe she is out to hurt other people." True or False?

MW: I concede the possibilities are endless with gun violence. But SPD chooses their words carefully and information is all we have to rely on. So, when the police are saying one thing, while the Mayor is doing something completely different, it makes me wonder. The Mayor's actions indicated something quite different than his own PD's "unlikely threat" assessment.

It's easy to say "do everything possible" to prevent further tragedy, but I recall not long ago when people were Saran Wrapping their trailers to prevent chemical attacks by terrorists, responding to a threat level rated by color, and of extremely dubious reliability. Not to understate the seriousness of gun violence, but analyzing and measuring risks and threats, and communicating that effectively to the public is preferable to all-or-nothing measures, which will eventually lead to "boy who cried wolf" apathy. WSDWG
Anonymous said…
Bagley Parent: Can you estimate how long it was between those two calls? And when you got the call that S.I.P. was over, did you take that to mean the safety concerns were lifted, or something else, like "come get your kids now?" WSDWG
Anonymous said…
BTW, "True or False" above is entirely rhetorical. A better question is: "Rely on it, or not?"
Anonymous said…
WSDWG
Anonymous said…
Where were the good people and their guns? This is getting so crazy. We either need everyone armed or disarmed. I would prefer the latter.

Lucy
Anonymous said…
After she shot Bill Keller, she went to the Bitter Lake CC and confronted an employee there. She brandished her gun at the woman, then left. I think at that point, knowing she had keys to parks facilities and that she had entered two different facilities already with a weapon, the prudent thing to do was to evacuate or lockdown other parks buildings. It is a GOOD thing they kept kids away from the centers and sent parks employees home. In hindsight we can assume she only targeted one person, but no one knew that earlier. She could just as easily have gone into multiple facilities, gun blazing. Kudos to the police, parks, and SPS for getting this right.

-Garfield Mom
Anonymous said…
Bagley Parent says I think the second call about community centers
being closed and students not being sent there did not come until
about 4 PM, but I don't recall precisely. The message from Bagley was quite clear that everything was fine by 2:50 and that the students had resumed their normal activities (though shelter in place means they were having normal activities at that time, too, just with modifications, like no outdoor recess and some other safety precautions). I think "lockdown" would mean lights out and quiet with no activity.
My bigger concern is hearing that the 911 call was around 1:55, but
Bagley's shelter in place reportedly started around 2:15. Since the shooting took place only a couple blocks from the school, the danger would have been in the time between the shooting and the start of shelter in place. And there would have been plenty of time for the shooter to get to the school. That's not necessarily meant as a criticism of the response; just the reality of the danger and that is disconcerting to
me. Bagley has had at least two shelter in place incidents this year.
reading said…
Well - I think you have to give some "benefit of the doubt" when it comes to announcing the "shelter in place" - the situation, as I understand it, was rather chaotic at first, and no one, including the police, were exactly sure what was happening at a precise moment in time. 20 minutes between the 911 call and the sheltering is not really troubling - they had to know there WAS a danger before they could do something about it, right? Easy to armchair quarterback after the fact - but we all really don't know the minute-by-minute chain of info that the emergency responders were dealing with - just glad it ended with only the one violent incident frankly.
Anonymous said…
I'm glad the victim survived and will cut slack aplenty given the circumstances. Kudos also to SPD for good police work.

However, I remain concerned about the mixed messages between SPD and the Mayor's Office, the departure from standard protocols that have worked well for years, and the increased vulnerability to kids caused by shuffling them out of buildings instead of locking down and sheltering in place.

And while I wish I could agree that they "got it right" yesterday, I can't when luck was the determining factor. Community centers could just as easily be secured by two SPD posted at opposite corners who could've easily nabbed the suspect had she approached one as many feared. It's all speculation, but so was yesterday's building closures.

Sorry to be a thorn in the side of those who believe all's well that ends well, but I can't relax and say "glad it's over" with the increasing likelihood that we are going to see this again.
Anonymous said…
WSDWG above, again.
Anonymous said…
WSDWG -

"And while I wish I could agree that they "got it right" yesterday, I can't when luck was the determining factor. Community centers could just as easily be secured by two SPD posted at opposite corners who could've easily nabbed the suspect had she approached one as many feared. It's all speculation, but so was yesterday's building closures."

I disagree, and not even respectfully; this generalization is flat-out wrong. Two SPD are insufficient to secure all of the entrances into Green Lake/Evans Pool, as an example. Think about all of the doors in that building, and realize that there are at least two that you missed because the public never goes through them, but she quite likely had the key to.

Further, this takes SPD investigative assets out of an active role in apprehending a subject and places them squarely in a passive role.

They did a good job and the only reason they needed any luck was because they were ultimately trying to guard against someone in Parks, which is something they didn't know at the outset of the SIP and evacuations. That's a Parks problem, not an SPD or a SPS one.

--Fremont Dad.
mirmac1 said…
Well, I'm glad the district has learned to keep families informed. There was a robo-call on my voicemail at 3:58 Friday afternoon. Now, to add texting capability...

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