The deadly June shooting that killed a 17-year-old in the school’s parking lot has spurred calls for more to be done to address gun violence at 23rd Ave’s Garfield High School.
As families and school officials prepare for the return of classes in September and hoped-for improvements in campus safety, details of another gun incident inside a Garfield classroom only 20 minutes before that deadly shooting have added urgency for real changes and brings questions about the campus response that day.
CHS has learned about the following previously unreported incident from police reports and a person familiar with the situation. Seattle Public Schools has not responded to our inquiries about what happened that day before the afternoon shooting.
UPDATE 9:00 PM: The school district has confirmed it is reviewing the incident and says that the teen involved in the classroom assault “is no longer an SPS student.”
Calling the assault a “very frightening experience for those who witnessed it,” the district says the incident was “dealt with promptly and firmly by the school administrators.” The full statement from Seattle Public Schools is included at the end of this report.
Just after 12:30 PM on Thursday, June 6th students at Garfield witnessed the deadly shooting that left 17-year-old Amarr Murphy-Paine dying in the school’s parking lot. But it was not the first time the crisis of school gun violence erupted at Garfield that day.
Just 30 minutes earlier, according to the SPD report and a person familiar with the situation, a teacher and students in their class were horrified to be in the middle of the first moments of an apparent school shooting after a student raced into a classroom wearing a ski mask and armed with what appeared to be an automatic rifle.
The student opened fire. The teacher later told police they expected to die.
According to the SPD report on the incident, the teacher told police they were assisting students with a project when another student entered the classroom that Thursday around noon seeking the teacher’s assistance. The teacher said the student became angered and began yelling when they told the student he would have to wait.
The student left, the teacher said. Moments later, he burst back into the room, this time wearing a ski mask and carrying the rifle.
According to the SPD report, the student opened fire on the teacher, holding down the trigger “for 10 – 15 seconds nonstop.”
The realistic looking gun was an air rifle and police say the teacher reported being struck by multiple rubber bullets. The student, according to the SPD brief, “then left the classroom without saying anything.”
Before the bullets hit, the teacher said they thought the gun was real and thought they were going to die.
In the chaotic moments that followed, police and emergency vehicles would swarm the campus — but not for a classroom shooting. Outside, police say Murphy-Paine was shot and killed while trying to break up a fight. Though the teacher reported the air rifle assault and talked to police the next day, the earlier, apparently unrelated classroom incident was not included in reports on the deadly shooting.
Students and parents who have heard about the air rifle incident have only heard details from other students and rumors. School officials did not include details of the incident in messages sent to the campus about the June gun violence.
CHS has asked the district and SPD for more information about the response to the Garfield schoolroom incident, when police were called, and the status of the student involved.
The student, who was an adult at the time of the incident, has been charged with misdemeanor assault.
Following that June day of gun violence at the school, Garfield students honored Murphy-Paine. In a vigil on the campus sports field, the teen was remembered as a dedicated athlete and friend gunned down as he tried to keep the peace. Police have not made an arrest in the murder.
As King County faces a surge in deadly shootings involving both young victims and young perpetrators, families and school officials are calling on the district and the city to do more to make Garfield safer in time for the start of classes for the new year in September.
CHS reported here on calls from families and principal Tarance Hart for strengthened safety measures including some calling for the return of a dedicated police officer assigned to Garfield and hallways metal detectors.
Members of the Garfield PTSA have also said they were working on a Safe Schools Action Plan and the group voted to demand the Seattle School Board make a decision on restoring the school resource officer program and placing a dedicated SPD officer at Garfield before the start of the 2024/2025 school year.
In the summer of 2020, the board suspended a partnership with SPD that provided five armed officers with rotations and placements across Seattle’s public schools.
Superintendent Brent Jones said earlier that the district is considering “several safety changes for next school year in our high schools” to “ensure the well-being of our students and staff” including increasing district security and “neighborhood safety organization patrols around our buildings,” requiring identification badges on campus, requiring clear backpacks, and closing campuses for lunch.
With the start of school only weeks away, there has been no official announcement of what changes will be in place at Garfield.
UPDATE: Here is the full SPS statement on the classroom incident:
On the day we tragically lost a Garfield student to gun violence at the school last spring, another unrelated incident involving an Airsoft pellet gun occurred in a classroom. This incident was dealt with promptly and firmly by the school administrators. These two incidents were not connected.
Seattle Public Schools (SPS) confirms that the student involved in the classroom incident is no longer an SPS student.
The classroom incident was a very frightening experience for those who witnessed it. SPS Safety and Security team is thoroughly reviewing the situation reports to ensure that all safety protocols were followed.
Safety is our top priority. For the upcoming school year, we are expanding gun violence prevention programs in high schools and increasing mental health support for all grades. Superintendent Jones has allocated over $2 million to enhance school building exteriors and campus security. We will have new procedures in place before the start of the school year. Among the measures we’re considering:
+Increasing SPS security and neighborhood safety organization patrols around our buildings.“Wearing identification badges on campus.
“Closing campuses for lunch.It is imperative that everyone in the SPS community can work and learn in a safe environment, and we’re working hard to ensure that’s the case.
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Thanks for reporting on this (no one else has). I have a child at Garfield and am very concerned about the future there. Still no arrests in the parking lot murder witnessed by many students, and no update on a school safety plan. The administration seems focused on offending no one while allowing gang activities on the premises. Progressive failure at its worst.
Surely it is the police who are responsible for making arrests, not the school administration. Your distress is understandable but perhaps it would be more useful to ask why the police are so slow to take up actionable information they receive from the community.
We need to ban guns.
..and then knives, hatchets, crossbows, and maybe children.
The state banned automatic weapons thirty years ago, but last week’s incident at the Chinatown seafair parade shows how effective that law has been at keeping machine guns out of the hands of teenagers.
Private ownership of fully automatic weapons has been banned nationally since 1986, unless manufactured before then. There’s zero evidence any recent shooting involved a 40+yr old automatic weapon.
We need to understand the causes of the violence and stop focusing on the tools. No kids should have guns. But also no kids should want a gun or think a gun will help solve a problem.
The ban on automatic weapons enacted in the 1980s had a sunset clause, and was not renewed by Congress in the early 2000s.
I am not sure whether you refer to the 1986 federal law closing the machine-gun registry, which remains in effect, or the 1994 federal assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004, but I was talking about the 1994 Washington State law forbidding possession of automatic weapons, which has never been repealed.
In any case, the fact that a few very young teenagers successfully acquired such guns and only got caught by doing something very stupid with them in a very public place, despite decades of strict federal controls and total statewide prohibition, leads me to agree with LandlordGay’s conclusion: we probably can’t ban our way out of this problem. We need to look upstream for the solution.
No. Why is cocaine illegal? We aren’t waiting to find out the reasons people use drugs. Guns are legal because of a patriarchal fantasy that has become our collective nightmare. Every single day our society will be terrorized by gun violence as long as we allow the sale of guns to the public. Look no further than reality every day for decades. At the end of the study of why humans are violent you’ll conclude that easy access to handheld pure violence isn’t helpful.
Citizens in Switzerland are required to keep weapons at home following mandatory military service. These are rifles and handguns. They don’t have our level of violence with weapons.
It’s not the weapons, it’s the people. Cocaine has no use other than getting you high. Plenty of people use these weapons for things other than school shootings.
The ban on “assault weapons” had a sunset clause btw. The ban on “automatic weapons” continues to this day.
It is ridiculous that there has not been an arrest in the murder of Ammar Murphy-Paine. Multiple students witnessed it, so why has at least one come forward (anonymously) to ID the killer? If there are laws that have prevented this from happening, they need to be ignored in this case.
As for the classroom incident, why is the shooter only being charged with “misdemeanor assault”?
From what I’ve heard (I’m a Garfield student) the shooter did not attend Garfield.
SPS should be legally required to file police reports on all incidents involving weapons, at a minimal.
SPS cares about their reputation more than their students
Thank you for posting, last year was my first year at Garfield and I was amazed by the amount of gun violence. I did not hear a word about this incident but I’m glad it finally got out.