LA HABRA : Youth Expelled for Pellet Gun Incident
A 14-year-old Imperial Middle School student was expelled from the La Habra City School District this week for threatening to hurt three other students with a pellet gun.
The eighth-grade student allegedly thrust the gun into another student’s stomach and threatened to hurt him and two other teen-agers last week, said Supt. Richard A. Hermann. He said the four students were at a district bus stop on Walnut Street.
The youth pulled the trigger on the pellet gun, school board member Morrison M. Clements said. “There was no pellet but he did fire the” weapon, which resembled a .45-caliber gun, he said.
No one was hurt, but Clements said the three students who were threatened were so frightened they reported the boy to district officials.
A police captain compared the pellet gun to a .45-caliber gun and said that the pellet gun could easily be mistaken for “the real thing,” Clements said.
He said he hopes the expulsion, the first of its kind in the past two years, will teach other students in the district a lesson: “Don’t bring a gun to school.”
Board members recently passed a policy prohibiting students from bringing any kind of weapon or replicas to school. Since school began this year, two students have been expelled for carrying knives to school.
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