Gunfire Triggers Schools’ Lock-Down

Against a surreal backdrop of police and news helicopters buzzing overhead, a line of more than 50 edgy parents and other family members snaked outside the entrance to Victory Boulevard Elementary School Friday afternoon, waiting to be reunited with their children after a day none would soon forget.

“Oh, my God! I’m really nervous,” said Patty Lopez, as she waited to sign the standard release form to pick up her 10-year-old sister, a fifth-grader at the school about four blocks from the morning’s bloody gun battle between Los Angeles police and a group of heavily armed bank robbers.

Erwin Cobar, who waited to pick up his 8-year-old daughter, Claudia, said he had heard the gunfire from his North Hollywood apartment but dismissed it as a minor dispute. It wasn’t until Cobar arrived at his job as a waiter at a Beverly Hills restaurant that he learned that his neighborhood had become a war zone.

Almost immediately after the gunfire erupted, nearby public and private schools including Victory Boulevard went into a lock-down, canceling recess and other outdoor activities and confining thousands of pupils to locked classrooms or auditoriums.

In most cases, administrators or teachers escorted children to restrooms, but in at least one school, Coldwater Canyon Avenue Elementary, concern ran so high that children were not allowed to leave class for the bathroom. Some children said they had to urinate in a trash can.

“They told us there were bad guys and they were shooting and they stole money from a bank. And they brought us into the classroom and said we would be safe there,” one little girl said.

Los Angeles Unified School District police, and in some cases Los Angeles police officers, kept watch at 10 public school campuses within a couple of miles of the fierce gun battle. But the atmosphere was generally calm, administrators said, and many students seemed mostly concerned about getting lunch, which was brought into the classrooms.

At the Victory Boulevard school in the 6300 block of Radford Avenue, half the students were in the auditorium attending a Black History Month musical program when the shooting broke out.

Chris Flannery, a program coordinator at the school, said administrators told students what was happening. “We didn’t want their little imaginations to run wild,” she said.

Students were composed, which “I attribute . . . to the calmness of the teachers,” Flannery said.

At Laurel Hall School, a private campus with about 550 kindergarten-to-8th-grade students about four blocks from the bank, children were in the midst of morning recess when they heard the pop of gunfire. “Of course it excited the kids, if it didn’t frighten them,” said Julie Sieger, one of the school’s two principals.

By early afternoon, parents were streaming to the campuses to fetch their children, and nine of the 10 L.A. Unified schools closest to the battle dismissed remaining pupils at the usual times, if not a little earlier, said school district spokesman Pat Spencer.

But at Victory Boulevard, the only public school within the inner perimeter of police activity, children were not allowed to walk home by themselves. Instead, they were held until they could be picked up by parents or guardians.

By 8:15 p.m., three children who live in the cordoned-off area remained at the school with the principal and other administrators, watching a video of “The Lion King” in the auditorium. Flannery said either police would have to bring the students home, or their parents would have to call for a police escort to retrieve their children.

As a further precaution, some 300 North Hollywood-area youngsters who ride buses to campuses outside the neighborhood were brought Friday afternoon to North Hollywood High School to await their parents, instead of being taken to their usual drop-off points.

At Coldwater Canyon elementary, where she picked up her 5-year-old son, Rosa Castro said she was rattled by the deadly shootout. “We go to the bank all the time, and do everything in the neighborhood, so this was scary for us.”

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