Guns That Prompted ETHS Lockdown Were For 'Personal Protection'

EVANSTON, IL — Evanston Township High School administrators said they are considering installing metal detectors following last month's three-hour lockdown triggered by the discovery of a pair of guns on campus.

Two 16-year-old boys face felony firearm possession charges in juvenile court in connection with the Dec. 17 incident, according to police. Another was charged with misdemeanor marijuana possession.

ETHS Associate Principal Taya Kinzie said the initial narrative provided by police and city officials — that a police school resource officer, or SRO, was alerted to the possibility of students smoking marijuana in a bathroom and detained the students there — turns out to have been incorrect.

"Our safety staff detected the smell of marijuana and escorted the students to the deans' office, where the deans began the search process with safety, as is part of our typical process," Kinzie told staff Monday. "So it's important for you all to know that we did not send SROs to the bathrooms for the smell of marijuana. That is not our practice and that will not be our practice."

Kinzie said the school's crisis response worked as planned during the lockdown, but administrators would work to be more collaborative with police in the future.

"Many questions have also arisen," she added. "That includes, for example, questions on metal detectors, and we are going to work with safety experts on this, and that will be researched."

Related: 2 Guns Found, Lockdown At Evanston Township High School

Principal Marcus Campbell said the security office at the 3,600-student school is currently understaffed, and the whole district presently employs fewer people than it did before the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We're down nine to 10 staff members in nutrition services, we're down four to five folks in safety, we're down six paraprofessionals in special ed, we're down subs," Campbell said.

"The workforce is shifting, so it makes a lot of these positions very difficult to fill," he added.

As part of the probe into the incident, Evanston police have found no indication that the students were planning any violence at school, administrators said.

"There is no evidence of the students bringing guns to the school to use them at the school," Kinzie said. "We understand that the students had the weapons for personal protection based on violence in the community."

The lockdown came less than two weeks after five people — including ETHS students — were shot in what police described as a "targeted attack" at a gas station on Green Bay Road, which left 17-year-old Niles North High School student Carl Dennison dead.

A 19-year-old Chicago resident, Leonard Galvez, has been charged with his murder and the attempted murder of the other four shooting victims. Prosecutors said Galvez confessed to driving around several street gang members looking for members of another gang due to a grievance involving perceived disrespect to a dead member.

Related: Chicago Man Accused Of Murder Of Skokie Teen In Evanston Shooting

Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss described the ETHS lockdown and the shooting at the gas station as "part of a nationwide trend of increasing gun violence" in a statement following the incident. He said it was unrealistic to expect to avoid episodes of horrific violence in a society with so many readily available guns.

"Additionally, the pandemic has taken a deep toll on our mental health and on our ability to treat one another with kindness, dignity, and respect. People are hurting in a way that pre-2020 life didn't really prepare them for, and we've all been experiencing this horror in varying degrees of isolation, which has left us out of practice at interacting with others. As a result, at least in my experience, we're seeing more meanness, cruelty, and intolerance," Biss said.

"Finally, social media makes all of this stuff worse. It allows ugly rumors and misinformation to spread far more quickly than clarifications and corrections," the mayor continued. "It gives people a way to interact without the in-person social cues and norms that help us restrain our worst selves. It enables feuds to continually escalate, even when people are physically separate, so that cooling-off time is basically a thing of the past."

ETHS Superintendent Eric Witherspoon told staff he found it reassuring to confirm that the students had not brought the guns to school because of something they thought about the school.

"This is how 16-year-olds apparently think," Witherspoon said.

"That they were carrying those because of the issues of violence in the community and they thought that would give them more safety: Terrible. Outrageous. No excuse for it," the superintendent added. "But it happened, and we understand that that's what their thinking was, and we're going to just make sure that we continue to hold everybody and all of our students in the school accountable for everyone else."