"Kids shouldn't be losing their lives": Students react to fatal stabbing at Harding High School
ST. PAUL, Minn. -- About two miles away from Harding High School, community members gathered Friday evening inside the Indigenous Roots Cultural Arts Center to come together, grieve together and try to process the deadly stabbing of a 15-year-old student.
"I don't even want to go to my school anymore because of how unsafe that I feel. It was really, really scary knowing that something like that happened inside of my school with me in there," said Jasper Hernandez, a 14-year-old freshman. "Usually, when there's gun violence at our school, there's maybe four police cars but that's the most there's ever been. And it's sickening to know something like this happened. We've never had police have to come into our school and put crime scene tape in our hallways. That's never had to happen before and that happened right outside the hallway where I was in."
Police say they responded to the high school shortly after 11:45 a.m. to find staff members providing medical aid to the victim, who was transported to Regions Hospital, where he died. No other victims or suspects have been identified.
St. Paul police said they've apprehended a suspect, a 16-year-old boy who is also a student at the high school.
Students told us that when the school initially went on lockdown, it wasn't much of a concern.
"There's kind of a lot of things that happen like this so I wasn't too scared. I was kinda just keeping calm cause it's kinda a normal occurrence at our school," said Madison Hand, a 16-year-old junior at Harding. "I say every month we have about two lockdowns or hold-in places. Whether it's a fight, a gun incident or whatever it may be. It happens quite frequently so it's kinda just the norm at Harding."
"It's scary knowing that every single day, there's somebody with a weapon inside my school and to know I have hiding places basically in every single classroom in case something like that happens… that's not something any kid should have to think," Hernandez said. "They just let students walk freely without doing anything about it, even though they're bringing weapons to our school every single day. It's just a matter of whether they use them or not."
One of the community members speaking with students was Yusef Davis, a Restorative Practice Coordinator at Como Senior High School. Davis said he recognized the name of the victim from his work but declined to share it with us.
"Some of the same people in our hallways who are sad about this young man's death are the same kids who are like fighting three days ago. And so it's like… if we want the madness to stop, you gotta look within. And you have to self-reflect and think about your actions and how you carry yourself and the way you are impacting the community," Davis said. "You have to remain optimistic about situations and how do we learn from this and what are our takeaways. And how do we grow? And move forward?"
Students say moving forward, they'd like to see more security measures at their school.
"It makes me upset because our schools are supposed to be a safe place for kids to learn. Kids shouldn't have to be losing their lives in school places and parents shouldn't have to be concerned about losing their little boy to a stabbing incident at school," said Chaske Henry, a 17-year-old junior at Hastings. "I think implementing SRO officers and metal detectors back in the school is something that would make me feel safe."
"I believe there needs to be SRO officers and metal detectors because this all could have been stopped and prevented, to be real, if we had those metal detectors put in place because a knife would trigger a metal detector," Hand said. "We don't know how many guns or how many weapons are floating throughout our school throughout the day. We just get the ones that are reported but there's still many more that are going unreported. I'm walking into that school every day knowing there's a chance that my life and other people's lives could be on the line…and there was a student today who ultimately lost their life because of these actions."
While students hope some changes are made, they say past incidents with weapons in their school has them skeptical.
"I'm really hopeful for something to change but with the past patterns that the school system has kept, I don't think anything will change," Henry said.
"I hope it does but truthfully, I feel like people are going to move on from this in a week or so. Except for the students at Harding because we know that stuff that like this is going to happen," Hernandez said. "And people say, 'oh it's too little, too late." It's not late. We still have time to fix things before somebody else dies."