Tense moments on Upper West Side as police respond to unfounded reports of gunman at school

An Upper West Side campus locked down and a school across the street sheltered inside on Thursday, while police responded to a noncredible report of a person with a gun inside the building.

No weapon was found at the Louis D. Brandeis High School campus on 84th St. between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, according to the NYPD. But the episode was unnerving for many students and their families, just over a week after a high school shooting in Georgia left two students and two teachers dead.

Multiple schools share the same building, including Urban Assembly for Green Careers, Frank McCourt High School, The Global Learning Collaborative, Innovation Diploma Plus and an elementary school location of Success Academy. Students and police said the lockdown was lifted around 11 a.m., after hours of anxiety, dread and frantic texts to students’ parents.

“So around 9 something, they said soft lockdown — and then like 10 minutes after that, hard lockdown, which means we all have to hide like for real, for real,” said a 15-year-old boy from Urban Assembly School for Green Careers, whose name is being withheld because of his age. “The room I was in, we didn’t have no covers to cover our doors, and the lock was broken.”

They ended up huddled beside their desks on the floor of their classroom for hours, he said.

“While we was sitting down, the SWAT team came down and busted down our door,” said the student, a sophomore. When they came in, he added, he was so startled that he threw his hands up in the air, in response to the uniformed men — with guns drawn — in his high school classroom.

A friend of his, also in the same grade, said she was in a classroom in the building’s basement when Urban Assembly School for Green Careers locked down.

“We all went under the table in the corner, we’re just sitting there for hours,” she said. “They were like, ‘This is not a drill.’”

Police said Emergency Service Unit officers responded to a phone call of a man locked inside a school bathroom with a firearm. They did a full canvass but did not find a gun.

Students at an elementary school across the street, P.S. 9, also took shelter, as did kids at daycares and private schools in the area.

Success Academy, the largest charter network in New York City, said the report, later deemed non-credible, was made of a suspected weapon on a different floor from where its classrooms are located.

Chancellor David Banks, who oversees the district public schools in the building, said during an unrelated radio appearance Thursday that more than half of the campus’s schools have a door-locking system installed — with the rest of the system scheduled to be fully outfitted by the end of this school year. He said they’re taking steps to ensure no school shooting like the recent one in Georgia would happen in New York.

“Well, in New York City, thank God we’ve not had anything of that nature,” Banks said on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show, “and we certainly want to keep it that way. We continue to make sure every year we solidify our security procedures.”

Originally Published: September 12, 2024 at 5:38 p.m.