WARNER ROBINS — A shooting inside a restroom at a high school here Wednesday that left a ninth grader with a bullet wound to the leg may have been prompted by a dispute over a vaping device, authorities now say.
“What we’re being told is that it possibly started over a vape that a student had,” Houston County Sheriff Matt Moulton told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in an interview Thursday.
“A verbal confrontation began, which escalated quickly. … (It) was described to me as a little hand fighting, kind of pushing and shoving, and then the suspect retrieved a firearm from his bookbag and discharged one round.”
The suspect, Denzelle D. Willis Jr., 14, also a freshman at Warner Robins High School on this Middle Georgia city’s south side, was arrested about an hour after the shooting in a nearby neighborhood.
He is being charged as an adult and was arraigned in Houston Superior Court on Thursday on allegations that include aggravated assault with a firearm, disrupting operation of a public school, carrying a weapon within a school safety zone and theft by receiving, a charge related to the gun said to have been used in the shooting.
Willis was still arranging legal counsel and was not accompanied by a lawyer at the arraignment. His mother, who attended, declined to talk to a reporter afterward. Willis was being held at an area Youth Development Campus.
Credit: Joe Kovac/Atlanta Journal-Consti
Credit: Joe Kovac/Atlanta Journal-Consti
After Willis’ first-appearance hearing, Moulton, the sheriff, told the AJC that the handgun Willis allegedly used had been stolen from a car here within the past week.
The weapon, a powder-blue SCCY 9 mm pistol, considered a low-budget pistol, was recovered by investigators. It had been tossed about a block from the school, Moulton said.
The sheriff said Willis and the wounded student, also 14 and whose name has not been made public, were acquaintances. Moulton said the bullet that struck the wounded teen was believed to have struck a major artery.
The sheriff praised the efforts of an unidentified teacher and sheriff’s deputy Cody Nelson, who is posted at the high school as a resource officer, with helping save the wounded student’s life.
“Deputy Nelson was on another hallway and he observed a couple of students running,” Moulton said. “They told him they thought somebody just got shot.”
Nelson sprinted toward the scene, the sheriff said.
“He located a blood trail in the hallway,” Moulton said, which led to a classroom. “There was a teacher that was extremely courageous. … She immediately allowed the victim into her classroom. She barricaded the door and she held him in her lap until (Nelson) got there.”
Moulton said that upon reviewing surveillance footage from inside the school that it appeared the alleged shooter, before fleeing, had tried to enter the classroom, possibly pursuing the victim, “but couldn’t get in because it was locked.”
Moulton said Nelson arrived and cinched a pair of tourniquets, nylon straps that officers carry with them, on the student’s leg to stanch bleeding.
The student was being treated at a Macon hospital on Thursday and Moulton said the teen was expected to recover.
The sheriff also shared details about what happened in the moments after Wednesday’s shooting, which has prompted education officials here to close the school until Monday.
Moulton said that Willis, whom investigators promptly identified through security-camera footage and other means, called a family member who was simultaneously talking to a sheriff’s investigator.
Moulton said the investigator was soon talking to Willis by phone and that Willis “told us where he was at, that he was hiding and that he was scared he was gonna be shot.”
The investigator guided other deputies to a spot about half a mile from the high school where Willis was taken into custody.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
