A ghost gun and ammunition were found in a bag in bushes near a Brooklyn public school Thursday morning.
Police sources said that school safety agents found the weapon after a young woman, 18, called in a tip that her boyfriend was bringing a gun to class, reported New York Daily News. Sources said that the teen student has two boyfriends. She warned school officials that one of them said that he’d be bringing a gun to school in his book bag.
Sources said that the first boyfriend to enter the school apparently didn’t have a gun. The second one wasn’t carrying a book bag. Then the school safety agents did a perimeter search and found the bag at about 11 a.m. on Putnam Avenue near Marcy Avenue across the street from the Bedford-Stuyvesant school campus. Police sources said that the gun was found in a plastic bag. A nylon case holding a ghost gun was inside it. The gun was not loaded, but there were two magazines with bullets inside the bag, said a source.
School safety agents with the New York Police Department "immediately and safely recovered this item, which was found off campus, following a concern raised by a member of the school community," a spokesperson for the city's Department of Education told NBC New York.
Mark Rampersant, the head of safety and youth development for the city's Education Department, said, "Yet another gun off our New York City streets." This academic year, it was the 21st gun found inside a New York City school. Rampersant said that a small percentage of "young people are doing the wrong thing," and that "we need to band together and rid our city of this unfortunate weaponry."
It was not the only weapon found at an New York City-area school Thursday. Three students, all seventh graders at the Cesar Chavez School in Yonkers, were found to have passed around a gun. The students were seen with the weapon by classmates, who in turn told school staff members.
Yonkers Superintendent Dr. Edwin Quezada said that police immediately responded and "three young people seem to have been involved in passing the BB gun around." The weapon was not believed to be loaded, but Yonkers police anticipate charging one or more of the students as juvenile delinquents.
Quezada said that it's adults who also need to take action, and that schools will not be safe places for children "if we, the adults, do not get it together." He urged parents to be more mindful of what their children are doing.
This comes just days after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers inside a school in Texas.
