School shooting scare at Kennewick’s Southridge High leaves parents, students shaken

Amanda Lomax was clutching her phone as she waited for messages from her daughter locked inside of Southridge High School on Friday.

“I’m terrified,” she said through her cracked window in an SUV in the Trios Southridge Hospital parking lot.

Lomax, who works a graveyard shift, woke up to a text from the teen saying that the high school was in a critical lockdown, meaning there was a report of a shooter inside the school.

The woman was one of dozens of parents lined up in the snowy parking lot waiting for some news after police and ambulances responded to the shooting scare at the school Friday afternoon.

Police got a call just before noon saying that there was an active shooter at the school, Kennewick Commander Aaron Clem told the Herald.

The caller provided a suspect and weapon description as well as a possible location where it was taking place at the school.

Kennewick police were joined by officers from other area law enforcement agencies as they quickly surrounded the building. Nearby Chinook Middle School and Sage Crest Elementary School were also locked down as a precaution.

Oscar Mendoza, 17, was just returning from lunch as officers pulled in and was told to not return to class. He was standing outside with another senior, Caleb Munez, 17, as they waited for word about what was going on inside.

They heard conflicting accounts, ranging from rumors that there were gunshots to that the whole thing was a hoax. What they did know is that police were going from classroom to classroom searching for someone with a gun.

Police spent about two hours searching from class to class and in gyms, band halls and other areas. By 1:40 p.m. they had finished searching and didn’t find any weapons or anyone hurt.

What they did find, according to emergency scanner traffic, were students hiding anywhere they could.

Throughout the search for a possible suspect, reports of officers finding students hiding in bathrooms, auxiliary rooms and other places were common.

“I think that this is a good reminder that this could happen at any time based on what’s happening across the country,” Clem said. “We have to stay vigilant. We have to be ready to respond to something like this at anytime.”

Response from the area police and fire agencies as well as the school district was great, Clem said.

He also said the department will review what happened and see if there are ways they can improve the response.

Police have also begun investigating where the call came from.

Lockdown hoax

Lomax had told her daughter in Southridge to be quiet and if she hears anything to start recording on her phone.

She had heard that it was a possible hoax from a Kennewick School District alert.

It turned out that the call may have been part of a series of fakes that stretched across the country in recent days. It hit as close as Spokane, where a report of a shooting at Lewis and Clark High School just hours before caused three high schools in the area to close.

On Thursday, more than a dozen schools across New Hampshire received calls reporting school shootings. On the same day, schools in Oklahoma were targeted.

The calls are part of the larger issue of “swatting.” This is where someone lies to police about a violent crime going on. The officers respond as if there is an immediate threat to the people. Often that response includes the SWAT team.

The head of the National Association of School Resource Officers wrote that these hoaxes can cause real trauma to students, faculty and parents.

While swatting started with individuals, in recent months the phenomena has moved to threats at schools.

Real threats

The fear among parents and students Friday was fueled by arrests that had happened at the high school in the past year.

Two of those happened within a week of each other in September. First a 16-year-old student was arrested after bringing a gun to the school on Sept. 13. Another student had spotted the weapon and reported it to administrators.

The school’s security and school resource officers had isolated the student and found the gun on him. He was booked into the Benton County jail.

A week later, two students got into a scuffle with administrators when they were blocked from threatening another student at lunch. The students were upset that another student had been arrested because he threatened the original target.

During one of those, Lomax said her daughter saw police from the FFA clubroom and hid in the room while the school was locked down.

“People need to get their kids under control,” she said.

Munez and Mendoza both commented on what seemed like a lot of incidents at Southridge, but then said there had been issues at other schools as well.

This story was originally published December 9, 2022 at 5:53 PM.