A 17-year-old student shot outside Garfield High School on Thursday died at Harborview Medical Center as police continued searching for the shooter.
The shooter is believed to be a high school-aged male, Deputy Chief Eric Barden said in a news conference.
Shots were fired in the school’s parking lot during lunchtime, injuring the student. He died later Thursday at the hospital.
“I can’t use the word trauma enough to describe what our children are going through,” Mayor Bruce Harrell, a graduate of Garfield High School, said at a news conference. “This is not the first shooting at Garfield, and these kids deserve better.”
Thursday’s shooting came as Garfield nears the end of a school year riddled by gun violence and community members demand intervention from local officials.
A student was shot in March while waiting for her bus outside the school. There was also a shooting outside the school in October and a string of nearby shootings last June that did not involve students but prompted increased security on campus.
Garfield classes are canceled Friday and Monday. Support and wellness staff members will be available Friday for drop-in counseling at Meredith Mathews East Madison YMCA.
Harrell on Thursday emphasized partnership with community organizations and reiterated his stance toward investing in crime-fighting technology. He said he is directing the Seattle Police Department to enhance patrols.
Interim police Chief Sue Rahr said the department would “redouble” its efforts in the Central District to help students and families feel safe.
“We’re not coming in here to be hard-core policing,” Rahr said at the news conference in the Central District’s Mount Calvary Christian Center. “We’re coming into the neighborhood to gather with the community, work with the community.”
Seattle Public Schools’ website on Thursday linked to a page for Gun Violence Awareness Day, which falls on Friday.
“Each time I must report an incident of gun violence on or near our campus, it is tough, but this message is the hardest yet to send,” said Garfield Principal Tarance Hart in an email to families Thursday night. “I am deeply saddened by the violence in our community and profoundly disturbed by the devastating impact it continues to have on our school.”
“Kids shouldn’t have to deal with this — it’s too much,” said Jeff Scott, whose daughter is a freshman at Garfield. “I honestly don’t know what we do about it.”
Responding to the school after another shooting so soon after the last one felt “surreal,” he said.
He said he was relieved when his daughter emerged from the school.
“I’m really raw,” said Melanie Skinner as she waited for her daughter, a Garfield student, to come outside. “It’s become so normalized.”
After the shooting in March, Skinner said, she helped organize a protest calling for more intervention to prevent gun violence near the school. Skinner said she doesn’t want her daughter returning to campus. She will be at graduation, she said, but Thursday was her last day at Garfield.
Skinner isn’t the only parent who made that decision. A Garfield mom and former police officer who went to the victim’s side to perform CPR afterward said she decided she was pulling her son out of the school, KUOW reported.
Some parents, community members and city officials met outside the school Thursday evening.
Many expressed frustration at the district and city for not taking more action.
SPD public safety liaison Victoria Beach discussed reintroducing school resource officers — police officers placed in schools — at Garfield, and said she heard from students who want to see a police presence.
“After George Floyd’s murder, there were parents and there were students that went to the School Board and said, ‘We do not want school officers,'” said Lt. Brandon James, who oversees community outreach. “Environments change, dynamics change … It is time to reconsider that.”
Mount Calvary Bishop Reggie C. Witherspoon Sr., who said he knows the victim’s family, said his heart is “crushed.” Witherspoon said community, not just police, is responsible for transforming the growing tide of gun violence. Staff members with the youth violence intervention organization Urban Family were also at the news conference.
“We have an epidemic on our hands,” Witherspoon said. “We’re on the verge of losing an entire generation of young people.”
Governor Jay Inslee expressed his condolences for the family on X late Thursday, also thanking the police officers who responded to the shooting. “I am grateful to the legislators & organizations working to reduce gun violence and support youth. We are not consoled merely by thoughts and prayers,” he wrote.
Officers responded at about 12:30 p.m. to reports of gunfire at the school and found the boy on the ground, Barden said. Officers applied chest seals and gave first aid until Seattle Fire Department paramedics arrived and took the boy to Harborview, where he went into surgery, Barden said. Police later confirmed his death.
Detectives learned that before the shooting, the 17-year-old tried to break up “an altercation” between two boys, Barden said. Sometime after that, he said, one of the boys was “apparently angry” and exchanged words with the victim before shooting him and running away.
Police have not identified or found the suspect, who fled on foot and was wearing a red sweatshirt, light blue jeans and white sneakers.
Barden said police “flooded” the areas where witnesses saw the suspect run.
Detectives are reviewing surveillance camera footage and interviewing witnesses. Barden encouraged anyone with information about the shooting or the shooter’s identity to call 206-233-5000.
“This is an extraordinary tragedy for the community,” Barden said. “It’s the community’s top priority to protect young people.”
Serafina Alberoto, 16, and Meriyem Roba, 16, both Garfield sophomores, were buying lunch nearby when they saw seven Seattle police cruisers zoom toward the school, they said.
At 12:32 p.m., Roba’s freshman brother called her and begged her not to walk back to the school.
“He said, ‘Don’t come, don’t come — the whole school is on lockdown,’” Roba said. “He was panicked.”
Roba and Alberoto said they feel numb as shootings have become so frequent around their school. From a perch on a patio outside the school, they pointed out the locations of recent shootings.
“We feel unsafe — imagine if that was one of us?” Roba said.
“It can be one of us anytime,” Alberoto said.
The sophomores said Garfield students are struggling emotionally, and some have been drawn into gangs. Their social media feeds often show fellow students posing with guns, they said.
The students said their counselors are overworked, and appointments with the school’s therapist are rare.
“We need to give them hope of a future, because if they think they’ll die at 25, why not do this?” Roba said, gesturing at the crime scene tape.
Garfield students and staff have faced the threat of gun violence on or near the campus for decades.
Since the 1990s, there have been roughly five on-campus gun violence incidents in Seattle schools. Two of those were at Garfield. In 1994, a student pulled out a gun and started shooting during a fight in the lunchroom, injuring two students. In 2008, a teenage gang member shot and killed a Garfield student from a rival gang behind the school building.
Michelle Martine, a first-grade teacher at Stevens Elementary School and a parent of a 16-year-old Garfield sophomore, said she raced to the school after learning of the shooting.
Standing behind the yellow crime scene tape, Martine yelled at the officers gathered next to the school to close the school Friday.
“Don’t send our kids back here, it’s cruel,” she yelled. “No school for the rest of the year.”
Martine said she taught the 17-year-old girl who was shot outside Garfield High School in March. Her son is friends with the girl and was standing next to her when the shooting happened, the bullets missing him by inches, she said.
While her son doesn’t want to miss school or time with his friends, Martine said, he’s been afraid to walk to Garfield ever since.
Martine said Garfield did not close the day after the shooting roughly two months ago. She said early Thursday afternoon she hoped the district would close the school Friday or for the rest of the year to protect its students.
“My job as a teacher and a parent is to keep kids safe,” she said. “I just don’t want to see a kid end their school year on the ground, dead.”
Seattle Times staff reporters Dahlia Bazzaz and David Gutman contributed to this report.
Editor’s note: An initial version of this article was updated with information that counseling will be provided at the Meredith Mathews East Madison YMCA, not at Nova High School.