The look of alarm on the security guard’s face was obvious to New Mexico school resource officer Anna Romero. The Roswell Police Department officer was in the high school security office with three security guards when a teacher called the office. It was just after the school’s breakfast service on a January day in 2023. After the guard hung up, Romero learned the reason behind the disconcerted facial expression. A teacher had just relayed a student’s report that another student had a weapon in the building.
The SRO knew she needed more information, and she needed it fast. She and the security guards walked quickly to the classroom of the teacher who called, so she could speak directly with the student witness.
That’s when Romero learned that the weapon the student saw was a gun. She radioed her police dispatcher to get patrol units on their way for assistance.
The SRO then continued her conversation with the witness. She obtained a description of the gun and the name of the 16-year-old student who allegedly had it.
Romero used an app on her smartphone to access the school’s student database and learned from the suspect’s class schedule that he was in the classroom next door.
“Time is not on our side,” the SRO thought to herself. She told NASRO that she knew she had to apprehend and disarm the suspect before the next class bell rang and students flooded the hallway. She also knew she had 29 other students in that classroom to worry about. “Those are my kids,” Romero said. “I am a mom,” she continued, “Uvalde impacted me as a mom and as a law enforcement officer.”
Of the three security guards and Romero, the SRO was the only one wearing a ballistic vest. Based on that fact, Romero quickly created and communicated a plan. The security guards would begin evacuating the classroom and the SRO would rush the suspect.
Until someone went into the suspect’s classroom, he had little reason to think that school officials knew about the gun, Romero explained. She added that once a detention and confiscation operation begins, “you can’t give him any time to react.”
“Let me see your hands!” Romero yelled as she approached the student. She quickly gained physical control of the student. A security officer then approached, lifted the boy’s shirt and found a loaded ghost gun in the student’s waistband.
Romero described the gun as a Polymer80 kit-built 9mm semiautomatic pistol, equipped with a switch that made the weapon capable of fully automatic fire. It was loaded with nine bullets, including one in the chamber.
Because the suspect invoked his Fifth Amendment rights, the SRO never learned how the teen obtained the gun, or why he brought it to school that day.
Although Romero was not previously familiar with the suspect, she did her best to counsel the teen, sitting with him for several minutes in a holding cell. “I told him, ‘You can still be somebody in life, if you make better decisions,’” Romero said.
The SRO also arranged for the suspect to have a few minutes alone with his mom, which was fortunate. The mother died a week later.
A juvenile court subsequently placed the teen on probation.
Romero told NASRO there are several ways that things might have been different if the school district didn’t have an SRO program. One scenario is that the school might have waited as long as five minutes for patrol officers to arrive at the classroom. Those officers might have gone in with guns drawn, causing the suspect’s fight or flight impulse to activate, which could have led to the teen using his weapon. Another undesirable scenario, Romero said, would be unarmed security guards and administrators attempting to apprehend the suspect without appropriate tools or training.
But with a carefully selected, specifically trained SRO on campus, less than 60 seconds elapsed between the time the witness told the SRO about the gun and the situation was safely controlled.
Do you have a similar SRO success story? If so, contact NASRO PIO Jay Farlow, [email protected].