In Brick, Police, Schools Hope To Identify Troubled Students

BRICK, NJ — For 15 minutes on a bright April day, a disgruntled freshman held 21 students at gunpoint in his history classroom. Armed with a shotgun, he told them to lower the blinds and move away from the windows. He didn't want police to be able to see into the room when they responded.

The student had forced the teacher, Paula Niven, to leave the classroom, despite her efforts to convince him to let her stay. She finally gave in, and went to the next classroom to alert administrators.

The year was 1990.

Dennis Filippone remembers the incident. It happened before school shootings became all too commonplace, before towns like Columbine and now Parkland, Florida, were etched in memories of tragedy. This was long before Sandy Hook referred to anything but a beach in Monmouth County.

Filippone, the acting superintendent of the Brick Township School District, remembers the incident because it happened at Brick Township High School. Filippone was a teacher at Lake Riviera Middle School at the time.

"I'm surprised anyone still remembers that," he said Thursday afternoon. The incident made regional headlines, in part because it ended when Joseph Tomaselli, an assistant principal at Brick Township High School, tackled the student to end the threat. No one was injured. No shots were fired.

"We were lucky that day," Filippone said. "It's a different world now."

On Thursday morning, he and Brick Township Police Chief James Riccio met, along with police officers from the township's juvenile unit and the school resource officers — the township police officers who run the school-based drug prevention programs — to talk about what they can do to make sure they don't have to rely on luck to prevent a future deadly incident. The meeting, prompted by Wednesday's shootings at a high school in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people and wounded more than a dozen others, had Brick officials like towns and school districts across the country re-evaluating their school security measures. The accused gunman in the Florida shooting is a 19-year-old student who had been expelled from the school, according to reports.

One of the primary issues, Riccio said, is how to identify those who are at risk of committing such an act.

"Everyone seemed to know he (the accused Florida gunman) was a troubled kid, but where did that information go?" Riccio said, echoing questions that many have raised.

That's why there will be a coordinated effort between police and the school district to educate students and teachers on how to identify someone who might be so deeply troubled, as well as setting up some means of reporting those concerns.

The plans are still in very preliminary stages, Riccio said, but will be rolled out as soon as they're ready.

Filippone said he would be proposing some additional facilities upgrades to the Board of Education to enhance security measures that already are in place at the district's schools.

"But that's with the understanding that regardless of how secure you make your buildings, preventing something like this takes more than physical measures," Filippone said. The Florida school, he noted, had a single entry and had security measures in place. They had armed security guards.

"They were doing all the right things," Filippone said, things that were put in place as a result of the shootings at Columbine and at Sandy Hook.

Filippone said he had attended an event at Georgian Court University on Tuesday night, where Frank DeAngelis, the principal at Columbine High School during the 1999 shooting rampage, spoke about those events and the aftermath.

"He was wonderful," Filippone said. "He talked about the need for counseling and faith in the wake of a tragedy. DeAngelis told those at Georgian Court about how the massacre destroyed his life and that of so many others. Of the 125 teachers who were on the job the day of the shooting, only 10 remained by the time DeAngelis left the school 10 years later. He ended up divorced and estranged from his own children, because of the deep sense of responsibility he felt for all the children who attended the high school, Filippone said.

It's a sentiment that rings true with Filippone. "There's a real sense of responsibility we all have to take as educators," he said. "They are your kids in a way."

Filippone said in the short term the district will continue to hold its emergency drills and "make sure our drills are done with fidelity."

"Many, many more could have been killed (in Florida) if not for the actions of the staff, who followed their training," he said.

That day in 1990, it was the actions of the staff that prevented tragedy, with Niven alerting administration and Tomaselli talking to the student and lowering his guard so he could tackle him.

Riccio hopes there is never another incident in the Brick schools.

"If someone has concerns, we want to know so we can investigate," he said. "We want to make sure people know where or how to let someone know there's a problem."

Filippone, too, wants to see to it there is never another incident in Brick.

"If 9,000 students get on the buses to come to school, we want to make sure 9,000 get on the buses to go home," he said.

Photo of Brick Township High School via Google Maps