Boy, 11, opens fire on school buses: High-powered BB gun used in assault
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The boy, whose name has not been released by authorities, is charged with three counts of delinquency to the act of aggravated assault. He is being held in juvenile detention and will be given a detention hearing in juvenile court this morning.
Lawmen responded to the incident in the Leesburg area around 4 p.m. Monday after first being told there had been a bus shooting.
?You can imagine what was going through everyone?s minds,? said Lt. Jody Cavanaugh, noting the first reaction was to think perhaps someone had brought a real gun onto a bus. ?But then, as we were responding, it came out there had been a second shooting of a separate bus.?
When officers arrived they found two buses with broken windows, with one bus aide saying she had been hit by flying glass caused when a shot hit the window. Both buses were empty of students when the incidents happened and no one on the buses suffered any significant injury.
Officers say the BB gun was a high-powered CO2 gun capable of inflicting serious injury.
?It could kill a person,? said Capt. Tommy Myers. ?Those guns shoot just like an automatic pistol. They?re powerful. They?re making these BB guns way too powerful for kids to have.?
Doug Byars was driving the first bus that was shot and he escaped injury. Carol Foreman was driving the second bus in which aide Shirley Pease was hurt by flying glass.
Parents were shaken by the incident.
?Thank God there were no kids on the bus,? said Debbie Steinmann, whose son rides the bus driven by Byars. ?The way things are in the world, this is scary. I heard the shots and I thought someone was out sighting their gun for deer season until I heard the sirens.?
An investigation revealed the boy, whose parents had left to run errands just before the incidents occurred, had intentionally shot at the buses because he was mad at his bus driver, who he maintains blamed him for something he did not do.
In response, the boy reportedly waited for his bus to come back through after dropping off other students and then he shot two rounds from his BB gun into the bus, breaking the windows and prompting the first call to lawmen. Just over a minute later, the second bus, a special education bus, which he mistakenly thought was his own bus coming back through, came down the road and he again opened fire, hitting the bus twice.
?What it basically boiled down to is that he was mad about something which had happened that day on the bus,? Cavanaugh said.
Parents were
During today?s hearing, Judge Larry Ross can opt to keep the boy in state custody pending a hearing or allow the youth to return home in parental custody pending a hearing.