NEW YORK _ A 15 year-old student died and a 16-year-old was critically injured after a stabbing attack Wednesday by another teenager inside a classroom at a Bronx public school that did not have metal detectors, officials said.
The attack by an 18-year-old wielding a switchblade took place around 10:45 a.m. before as many 20 students in a history class and sparked a rush of panicked parents to the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation in the West Farms section of the Bronx, police said.
The 15-year-old was stabbed once in the chest and died at St. Barnabas Hospital shortly before noon, while the 16-year-old victim, also stabbed in the chest, was listed in critical but stable condition, NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce told reporters at a news briefing at the 48th Precinct.
Boyce said the 18-year-old student was taken into custody without incident at the school and was being questioned. The student had made statements, but Boyce declined to reveal the contents, citing the early phase of the police investigation. The names of the victim and the suspect were not released.
"We believe this argument, this thing, has been going on for two weeks into the school year and escalated today after some back and forth within the classroom," Boyce said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who was at the news conference with NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill and schools Chancellor Carmen Farina, said this was the first time in "many, many years" that a student had been lost from a crime committed inside a public school. He didn't give specific information.
NYPD Deputy Chief Joanne Jaffe, who runs the community affairs bureau, revealed that the school, which contains a high school, intermediate school and grade school on different floors of the same building, was deemed a facility that didn't need metal detectors. She did not explain how that determination had been made.
Boyce said that had metal detectors been in service, there was "no question" the knife, which had a 3-inch blade, would have been detected.
De Blasio said metal detectors would be in service at the school on Thursday, when classes resume. Farina said grief counselors and guidance counselors will be made available to all students and staff.
Parents who heard about the stabbing rushed to the school to find out whether their own children were safe, said Dejohn Jones, 41, a parent association president at a nearby school who came to console students at the crime scene. "I don't even know what to say to these kids," she said.
