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Dallas ISD arrested a 15-year-old boy who used a BB gun to threaten and scare students outside a south Dallas middle school.
It was altered to look like a real gun and sent students at Billy Earl Dade Middle School running for cover.
The students, the teacher and the suspect are all OK.
The incident happened Tuesday afternoon as students were leaving for the day.
The suspect, who is not a student at the school, walked up, waved the toy gun pointed it at kids outside, saying, “Wassup now?”
It turned out it was a BB gun, but it looked very real to the students, teacher, and later, police.
“The intent on this weapon was to give it the appearance that it was real,” said Chief Craig Miller with the Dallas ISD Police Department. “In fact, that's what the people who saw it felt.”
An administrator heard five or six shots and could have sworn she saw flashes coming from the muzzle.
Children ran for cover as police raced over.
“It looks very real in the way that it’s fired,” said Miller. “In fact, some witnesses who were there yesterday thought it did move, that they did see movement from the barrel.”
But when the first officer arrived, the 15-year-old had already tossed the BB gun into a shrub.
The officer drew his own weapon, ordered the teen to the ground and arrested him.
Chief Craig Miller knows that the outcome could have been very different.
“If he had been there just a few seconds earlier, he would have been put in that situation where he could have possibly had to use deadly force and we would be talking about a different situation,” said Miller.
Pastor Omar Jahwar, who mentors young students in south Dallas, hopes that along with any punishment handed out, someone follows up with the 15-year-old about his actions that put a lot of other people and himself in danger.
“Rehabilitation is needed, ‘cause he's going to be a 22-year-old, a 21-year-old, and you'll have to say, ‘Did you get this? Did you get what happened?’” said Jahwar.
Dallas ISD police took the teenage suspect to a juvenile detention center.
He faces a terroristic threat charge.
It’s unclear why the suspect brought the BB gun to school.
On Wednesday, letters went home with all the students, reporting what happened.
FOX 4 is told the suspect was expected to go to an alternative school in the district but hadn't reported to school for the first day of class, which would have been Monday.
So, FOX 4 isn’t certain if he's counted as a DISD student at the moment.