Girl, 11, Brings Gun to School to Show It Off : Weapons: Officials probe whether it belongs to a sheriff’s employee. Student is suspended.

Sheriff’s officials are investigating whether a gun taken to school by an 11-year-old girl this week was loaded, how she got it and whether it belonged to her mother’s boyfriend, a Sheriff’s Department employee.

The sixth-grader at Montevideo Elementary School has admitted to the school principal and investigators that she brought the weapon to class Monday in her backpack and took five students aside during the day to show it to them, officials said. The girl said it belonged to her mother’s boyfriend, a non-sworn employee of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, Lt. Ron Wilkerson said.

Two students told the principal about it Tuesday.

It remains unclear where the gun was stored or whether it was loaded, factors that will determine whether or not the gun’s owner will be charged with a crime.

“We’re still investigating it,” Wilkerson said. “It appears as though, yes, it did occur. There’s a law that does make it a felony for you to leave a loaded firearm within accessibility to a child. That’s one of the things they will investigate: how it was stored, where it was stored and whether it was loaded.”

It also is a crime to bring a weapon onto school grounds, but it is unclear what action will be pursued against the child, he said.

The Saddleback Unified School District Board of Education has a zero-tolerance policy regarding weapons on campus, and all students and parents sign a card agreeing to comply with the policy at the beginning of the school year, said Montevideo Principal Kathy Wright.

The sixth-grader was suspended Tuesday pending an expulsion hearing, she said.

The incident stunned school officials, who sent letters home to all Montevideo Elementary School parents Thursday informing them of the incident, Wright said.

The letter “stated what happened and stated the zero-tolerance policy,” she said. “It also said that we need to work between home and school to ensure that this type of an incident can never happen again.”

The girl is a “good student” who seems to understand the severity of what happened, Wright said. The girl’s mother was “taken by surprise” by it, she said.

“It’s a sad lesson for everybody,” she said. “It’s a hard one for her and a sad one for the rest of us. It reinforces that you’ve got to make wise decisions, and parents need to know what their children are doing.”

Wright spent Tuesday afternoon and part of Wednesday morning addressing all fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade classes at the school “to give the students the facts, so the story didn’t get any bigger,” and to remind them that “that zero tolerance means zero tolerance.”

The three students who saw the gun Monday but did not report the incident to school officials were told sternly that “there’s a difference between telling on something little, and something that can be a danger to others,” Wright said. “We told them they have a responsibility to tell.”

Those children were not punished, she added.

The girl apparently never removed the weapon from her backpack and pulled peers aside individually Monday throughout the day to show it off, Wright said. When the two students reported the incident Tuesday morning, Wright immediately took the child out of class, she said.

Wright said the girl did not appear to know whether the gun was loaded.

Wilkerson said the mother’s boyfriend works as a correctional services technician and performs “various functions within the correctional system.” He is no a sworn officer and does not have a department-issued weapon, Wilkerson said.

Wilkerson declined to give the employee’s name, saying investigators had not yet confirmed that the gun belongs to him.