3rd-grader charged in classmate shooting made ‘terrible mistake’

Reporting from Seattle — 

An 8-year-old girl who was shot in her elementary school classroom in Bremerton, Wash., is “out of the woods,” her doctor says, though she remains in critical condition on a ventilator.

Meanwhile, there are shattered lives all around her: The teacher who couldn’t believe a gun had just fired, apparently accidentally, in her third-grade classroom. The frightened 9-year-old boy who had the weapon in his backpack, clad in an orange jail jumpsuit and breaking into tears at his court hearing. The boy’s father, still looking stunned as he apologized.

“I just want everyone to know that my kid made a mistake. It was a terrible mistake,” the father, Jason Cochran, said outside the courthouse Thursday after his son’s bail was set at $50,000.

Students at Armin Jahr Elementary School in the working-class Navy town not far from Seattle were back at school Friday, and local news outlets were full of stories about how one goes about keeping guns out of third-grade classrooms — an exercise that produced no answers.

“You’re not going to put a metal detector in an elementary school,” Frank Hewins, who chairs a Washington state committee on school safety, told the Seattle Times.

The injured girl, Amina Kocer-Bowman, remains in critical condition but is expected to live, surgeon Eileen Bulger said at a news conference Thursday with the girl’s father, Jason Bowman. She said the bullet penetrated the girl’s right arm and abdomen before lodging near her spine. She faces multiple surgeries over the next few weeks.

“Anybody who has kids knows that you’d do anything to take away the pain she’s feeling and put it on yourself,” Bowman told reporters.

Teacher Natalie Poss said in an interview with KING television that she heard “a loud bang” in the classroom Wednesday, and at first couldn’t figure out what it was.

“I knew I didn’t have any balloons in the room, loud sound, the kids were stirred. And then I saw Amina start to slump over. So, I knew something had happened, but it was very puzzling,” she said.

Poss said she immediately ushered the other students out of the classroom and saw a “large hole” in Amina’s side when she lifted up the girl’s shirt. She applied pressure to the wound until paramedics arrived. Then as she and the principal searched the classroom, they found a gun under the flap of a student’s backpack — resolving the “what happened” part of the incident.

The “why” part remained.

The gunshot was described as an accident. Students told police the “bang” happened when Cochran’s son slammed his backpack down on his desk. Authorities have charged the boy with unlawful possession of a gun, bringing the weapon to school and third-degree assault. Later hearings will determine whether a child so young can actually be held criminally responsible in such a case.

Todd Dowell, senior deputy prosecutor for Kitsap County, told the Los Angeles Times that Washington state law requires a judge next to make a “capacity” determination in cases of crimes committed by juveniles between the ages of 8 and 12.

“Basically, did the kid know that the acts that constitute the offense were wrong? They don’t necessarily need to know they were criminal acts, but did they know they were wrong?” he said.

Charging documents said the boy apparently got the weapon during a visitation at the home of his mother, with whom he is not living. Cochran and the boy’s mother have troubled histories with the courts, and a relative has legal guardianship of the boy and his two siblings.

In an affidavit, prosecutors said the boy told a classmate about five days before Wednesday’s incident that he was going to bring his “dad’s gun to school and run away.”

Family friends helped the Cochrans raise bail, and the boy has gone home.

“He has a lot of good in his heart,” Poss said in her TV interview. “I know he didn’t intend this to happen.”

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