Authorities Defend Lock-Down Order at Belmont High

The police captain who ordered a lock-down at Belmont High School said Tuesday he had responded to witness reports that the suspects in the shooting of a campus police officer had tried to hide among the students.

Capt. Michel Moore said the lock-down of nearly 3,000 students Monday became a daylong ordeal after police telephoned all 150 classrooms and 35 did not answer. Officers had to check each of those rooms, he said, and “that takes time.”

The gunmen escaped and remained at large Tuesday. Police interviewed more witnesses to the shooting of campus officer Conrad Bonilla, but reported no progress. Bonilla, who wore a bulletproof vest, suffered minor injuries.

Moore said that in giving orders that students be kept in classrooms and not permitted to go to restrooms or the cafeteria for nearly six hours, he had two priorities: the students’ safety and apprehension of the gunmen.

“We weren’t going to act in a halfhearted sense,” Moore said. “We can’t fashion our response to the temperament of an 11th- or 12th-grade student. We had causes to act as we did.”

At a press briefing an hour after the shooting, Moore had said he believed that the shooters had not headed into the school and that SWAT teams with dogs would search the neighborhood but not the campus. Soon after that, however, a witness told officers of seeing the men walk into the school.

That dictated the lengthy lock-down, Moore said, because police feared that the suspects “had secreted themselves among the students.”

Moore never publicly announced the campus search because, he said, he feared that the suspects might be watching television and that the information could further endanger students.

Belmont is “a very large campus, and we had to do a systematic search,” Moore said. But “when we declared it safe, we believed it was safe. . . . We could have no tolerance for any other possibility.”

The captain said he is proud of the police handling of the situation. “I’ve had no complaints,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of accolades.”

Some of those came from school board President Caprice Young. “I think the No. 1 thing is the safety of the students,” she said. “If it had been one of my children on that campus, I would have wanted to know that the school authorities did absolutely everything to keep my children safe, and I believe that’s what they did in this case.”

School board member Jose Huizar said he believed that the school principal and police “did a great job under the circumstances.”

“But there were glitches,” he said. “One of them was communications within the school, the 35 classrooms that did not respond to calls. We have to review everything. We have to have a higher incidence of response.”

Also, he said, some parents complained to him about not being able to pick up their children during the emergency. “But a lock-down is very different from other emergency situations, like an earthquake,” he said.

Referring to students who had suggested that the lock-down was excessive, school board member Genethia Hudley Hayes said, “Sometimes, when you’re a young person, you don’t have the capacity to use judgment that says, ‘These are grown-ups and they’re trying to keep me safe.’ ”

And board member Julie Korenstein said that although she had not determined whether the lock-down was justified, “If the police really thought [the suspects] were within the perimeter, there was an absolute danger to the students.”