Photo by: James Zanoni
Twelve of Twenty-Four
Authors Note: Names have been changed or reduced to a last name to protect identity of minors involved in the story.
On Friday, May 11th in the early morning before Highland High School in Palmdale was officially in session, fourteen-year-old former student Andrew Figueroa, led his friends E. Davis and J. Stanley into the boys' bathroom. The bathroom overlooked the student lunch pavilion and the main student entrance—which were scheduled to receive an influx of about 2,400 students in the next 10-15 minutes. Figueroa led the two boys into the bathroom’s big stall. There he revealed to them a cloth guitar case. Without unzipping the case he clutched it with both his hands. He stared at the two boys gravely in the eyes. He grimly said, “You have three seconds to run.” A Mayday
Then the first shot was fired.
Davis and Stanley dropped their backpacks and fled the bathroom in a confused panic pushing past people and dodging tables. As they ran, Davis heard what sounded like a large firecracker explode in the restroom. Figueroa had blasted a warning shot into a bathroom wall. The bullet had shattered the walls tile lining, perforated the concrete layer beneath, and fractured the wooden beam at the wall's core.
Davis risked a glance back only to see Figueroa emerge from the restroom, and cock the rifle. Davis, having lost track of Stanley heard someone yell behind him , “GUN!” Next, he heard the screams of his classmates.
Then the second shot was fired.
“I'm not sure why I ran,” says Davis. “I hadn’t seen the gun, and there was nothing physical that made me run, it was just the way Andrew said it, and the way he looked at me…. I was scared and I just knew what he had said was serious.”
***
Four hours earlier around 3:00 am Figueroa’s foster mother had reported that he had ran away from home. Figueroa had awoken and stolen his foster father’s rifle. That night Figueroa had walked to Highland high and hopped a 6ft high chain-link fence onto the school’s upper football field.
Then he waited.
Tyler Vahan, like the rest of his track mates routinely woke-up early on May 11th. The track boys are accustomed to early morning practice beneath dark skies and chilled mornings. That’s why Vahan was awake to receive Figueroa’s strange text messages at 5:30 am.
Vahan and Figueroa had become acquainted through the cross country and track season earlier this year.
“Andrew is a great guy, he’d bring snacks to share with the guys. He is an all-around caring person,” remembers Vahan. “But he had a lot going on at home, I guess too much. He talked with me about some of it.”
The two forged a friendship throughout track invitationals and Skype conversations.
Figueroa is the oldest child of three. He has a younger sister age 2 and a younger brother age 10. As a child, he lost his mother to cancer, and at fourteen years old Andrew’s life faced uncertainty again when his foster father developed a terminal illness. Figueroa’s foster mother relied heavily on him to help take care of his siblings.
“It was one thing after another,” says Vahan. “After his dad got really bad, Andrew’s grades dropped, he dropped the track team, and was put on academic probation.”
Then at his foster mother's request, he withdrew from the school altogether and enrolled in an opportunity for learning charter school.
“One day he was just gone” remembers Vahan. Still, the two remained in contact.
A week before May 11th Figueroa called Vahan.
“He said dude, I really need to talk with you, please,” recalls Vahan.
Later that night Figueroa confessed feeling really down on account of his dad’s visit to the doctor where he received difficult news and was told he had limited time to live. Vahan listened helplessly to Figueroa’s words through broken sobs.
“I feel like I was a bad son to my dad,” Vahan remembers Figueroa saying. “There were times before he’d asked me to help him with things, and I didn’t, and I should have. All he wanted was for me to pick up my grades, and I couldn’t even do that for him.”
Vahan encouraged Figueroa to have faith and to talk with his mom, but he had said she was busy with other things.
On the morning of the school shooting, Vahan received a chain of brief text messages from Figueroa. His texts inquired what time school started and what time Vahan expected to arrive.
“I told him everything he wanted to know, and that I arrived pretty late in the morning almost nearing the bell.”
Figueroa had told Vahan he had gotten a visitors' pass and planned to see the boys on the track team before school, at lunch, and maybe after school. Excited to meet with Figueroa, Vahan asked how long he planned to be on campus after school, but Figueroa ignored his questions and began a new conversation.
“I'm going to be moving cities soon, I'm only coming for morning and lunch, and I have a surprise for you.”
***
At 6:00 am on the morning of the shooting, as the school’s security guards opened the deadbolt student entry doors, clouds fogged the sky, and a mild chill ensued.
A few early students trickled into the school roamed the empty pavilion. Figueroa walked among them with the guitar case strapped to his back.
Around 6:30 am, sitting 100 feet in front of the boys' bathroom near the entrance of the school library Almarez a fellow track teammate spotted Figueroa and ran up to greet him.
“Andrew! How are you, dude?! Are you visiting? Will you be here a while?”
Without waiting for Figueroa to respond Almarez embraced him and slowly but genuinely told him, “We missed you, dude.”
“I’ve missed you guys so much,” Figueroa said timidly.
Almarez invited Figueroa to hang out after school, and maybe go for a fun run.
“Yeah, that would be nice,” Figueroa said weakly.
Before Almarez was able to continue Figueroa told him he’d catch up with him later, and that there was something he had to do. He headed to the bathroom to stow away the rifle and wait.
At 6:50 am Stanley, Davis, and Rodriguez, all three close friends of Figueroa and the latter two track-mates, arrived at school.
Davis accompanied Stanley to chain up his bike. Rodriquez took his bike and continued right on into the school. Davis usually arrives late, but that day, Figueroa asked Stanley and him to arrive early.
Nearing 7:00 am Rodriguez was talking with a group of friends near the library when he saw Davis follow Figueroa into the boy’s bathroom, so he curiously walked over just in time to hear, “You have three seconds to run,” and see the boys flee from the restroom.
Rodriguez mounted his bicycle. Rodriguez sped out maneuvering around students and security. He barely made his way out of the pavilion having yelled, “RUN!” towards students as he passed them. Then he heard an ear-splitting BOOM!
The first gunshot.
High on adrenaline, Rodriguez exited the school and made his way onto the student parking lot. He evaded cars and ignored honks.
He yelled, “Go! He’s shooting!” As he navigated past cars.
As Rodriguez cleared the large student parking lot and rode onto the main street, he heard the second gunshot and the screams of students behind him. Focused on finding safety Rodriguez was nearly hit my incoming traffic on the main street.
“I didn’t know why I ran, I just felt it in my gut, like Elijah was running and something was telling me to run. So I trusted it, I can’t explain it, it’s like nothing I ever felt before. I can’t even remember leaving school or peddling out of the parking lot. I was making my way across the street to the neighborhoods.”
Rodriguez lifted his mountain bike and threw it over a six-foot-high brick wall into somebody’s back yard, then helped other student’s who had run across the street over the wall and into safety. From the top of the wall, he saw Davis sprinting into another neighborhood.
“Elijah was running so fast I’m pretty sure he set a new personal track record.”
The streets surrounding Highland High were chaos. Traffic was heavy, but still, somehow people speeded away. Vehicles dropping off students were turning around. Parents who had just dropped off their children returned in a frenzy to pick them up, hoping they weren’t too late. Everyone was careful not to hit the children running onto the streets towards the surrounding neighborhoods.
The community was coming together to help each other. Students and parents fleeing the scene slowed to warn other students not to come to school, to turn around. Neighborhood residents Angelica and Jose Alvarez walked around the neighborhood warning children to turn around and go home. Jose knocked on neighbors’ doors warning children who had not yet left to stay home.
“I saw a small chubby boy headed to the neighboring elementary school,” recalls Angelica. “He was happy-go-lucky and totally unaware of what was happening. He was maybe age seven. I ran up to him and sternly told him, “Turn around go home, there is a dangerous man at school. Tell your parents there’s no school today."
His eyes grew wide, while he looked up at me, then he gripped his backpack straps and did a wobble run back around the corner.”
The sound of multiple gunshots woke Jason Hernandez a senior on the Varsity Track team, who did not have a morning class and was at home across the street from the school. Hernandez ran out of his home in boxers and witnessed a swarm of students pouring out of the high school in all directions and into his neighborhood.
Without hesitation, Hernandez directed 45 students, all strangers, into his home. He ran upstairs, threw on clothes, a pair of shoes, and crossed the street into the high school, with the intent to rescue as many students as he could. He was able to retrieve five more.
Around 7:00 am 9-1-1 had received multiple calls from within Highland high school. But the police had not yet arrived.
From the surrounding neighborhoods, more gunshots coming from within the school could be heard.
Emily Sallia, a graduating senior had been sitting at a pavilion table six-feet away from the restroom when Figueroa had emerged with the rifle in hand. She had seen the tip of the rifle and her eyes had widened in fear. She felt her stomach drop. She left behind her things and ran out of the pavilion and deeper into the school towards the back way exit.
“I… I just can't remember when I got up to run. Like, how your instinct is to freeze in disbelief but somehow your body runs,” Sallia remembers. She trembles as she recalls the scene.
“I couldn’t run away fast enough. I felt my heart freeze and felt my life was over. This is where I would die.” She holds her hands to keep them from quivering and begins to cry. “A teacher waited for students right outside the pavilion and guided us out. For all she knew she was sacrificing herself for us.”
The rifle was not a semi-automatic so Figueroa could only fire one shot at a time.
Mrs. Cardellio a long-time chemistry teacher felt the bullet graze the air right by her head as she was running out of the pavilion. It hit the cinderblock wall behind her.
Figueroa was firing mid-range into the air with no direction or targets in mind. His shooting was sloppy. The power of the gun was too strong for his small skinny body. Even with both hands, the kick of the gun jerked him back.
The bullets shattered a nearby second-story glass classroom window, punctured surrounding cement walls, and chipped a ceiling pillar before ricocheting off and striking 15-year old Robert Ruiz in the forearm as he ran through the pavilion towards the exit.
The strength of the bullet tore off a chunk of his forearm and resulted in an outpour of blood, and an open flesh wound exposing nerves and muscle.
Ruiz sobbed and panicked, he made his way out of the school and onto the main street where a woman picking up her daughter saw him hobbling and dripping blood and ushered him into her car.
“He shot me…,” Ruiz whimpered. Tears and blood covered his face and shirt. “Why did he shoot me? I don’t know why he shot me..”
The woman drove Robert to Palmdale Regional Medical Hospital three miles away.
M. Sonora an RN at Palmdale Regional Medical Hospital, and mother of a 14-year-old boy at Highland High School, worried over the safety of her son. She wanted to call her son, she wanted to leave work and go to him immediately but was grounded.
The hospital had been contacted by emergency services, notified of the local school shooting, and had issued a mandatory all hands on deck alert.
They were preparing for triage.
“Doctors who had just worked 24-hour shifts were called back in,” Sonora recounts. “Nurses and doctors with the day off, on leave, or on vacation were called back in, the hospital canceled all surgeries that had been scheduled that day. We were preparing for mass casualties. The surgery unit was prepping beds and rooms. Cots were being designated ahead of time, organized according to the degree of trauma. There were beds for wounds, stitches, surgeries, and the dead.”
Sonora agonized and wondered if her son would be a victim, and what degree of trauma he would be classified.
Almarez, who had embraced Figueroa earlier that morning directed students to take cover in the school’s library as the shooting ensued. The library is a crescent-shaped building across from the boys' bathroom with tall glass windows and wasn’t an ideal safe spot for students to seek refuge. Still, in desperation students piled in, turned off the lights and barricaded the doors and windows with chairs, desks, tables, and small sofas.
Students hid beneath desks, in dark corners, and between bookcases. They were holding each other, crying, and some were praying.
Senior, Jayceon Tyler who had heard the gunshots and immediately began searching for his younger freshman sister had not made it into the library before the barricade was built.
Now he stood on the outside end of the glass door. He pressed his sister between himself and the door and shielded her with his body, while banging and pleading with tears in his eyes and desperation in his voice, to let them in.
Students crawled out from under their hiding spots rushed towards the door and clawed at the barricade trying to deconstruct it as fast as they could. Jayceon and his sister were pulled into safety.
“People are texting and calling their parents, telling them they were safe right now, that they didn’t know where the school shooter was,” remembers Almarez. Most of the phone calls made at Highland high finished with, an “I love you,” and a “thank you for everything.”
Eight to ten shots had been fired within 10 minutes.
Figueroa had seen the library become flooded with students but he walked the other way towards the basketball courts on the west side of the school, back towards the upper field where he had first hopped the fence into Highland high.
Police arrived and began establishing a perimeter.
Figueroa had already slipped out of the high school through the back entrance and disappeared into the hills behind the school, where the track team practiced. There he ditched his weapon before calling his father to let him know he was making his way a half-mile east from the school towards the local Vons grocery store.
Charles Smith a real estate agent at Re-max real estate arrived at work next to Vons grocery store at 8:00 am and witnessed Figueroa’s arrest.
“It was calm, not a hostile situation at all. The LAPD officer looked like he was just talking to him, and then he just asked him to step inside the back of the cop car. The kid looked sad, and seemed compliant, he went in willingly.”
In the next ten minutes, three other police cars arrived. Their sirens wailed in harmony with the building wind.
“The cops that arrived were mostly just talking with one another,” Smith said. “The boy sat in the back of the cop car for nearly two hours, and they left like at 10 am.”
The sky had begun to turn a dark grey. Wind thrashed against windows and disgruntled trees. Authorities had given the all-clear near 10 am, and the school began releasing students to legal guardians. Mothers and fathers searched frantically for their children. Students embraced crying parents. Then it began to rain.
Highland high senior April Lopez raised her palms to the sky,
“It was wasn’t supposed to rain today,” she said. “We’re in pain, but Andrew must have been in pain too. He must have been so lonely, so frustrated. All he had left were his friends and his sport and they isolated him from that too. It’s like the universe is crying for him, for all of us.”
