An eighth-grader shot and killed by police at his Texas middle school Wednesday was brandishing a pellet gun that looked like a firearm and had refused repeated orders to lower the weapon, police said.
Police received a report of a student at Cummings Middle School seen holding a gun, Orlando Rodriguez, Brownsville's interim police chief, said at a news conference. The carbon-dioxide powered pellet gun 15-year-old Jaime Gonzalez was holding looked like a handgun, he said.
Robert Valle, 13, was among the school's 750 students locked down in their classrooms during the confrontation. He said he heard police run down the hallway and yell "put the gun down," before several shots were fired.
"He had plenty of opportunities to lower the weapon ... and he didn't want to," Rodriguez said. Two officers fired three shots, striking Gonzalez at least twice, he said. Autopsy results are pending.
Before the confrontation with police, Gonzalez walked into a classroom and punched another boy in the nose, Rodriguez said. He said he doesn't know why Gonzalez was brandishing the weapon.
Before the report that the gun was a pellet gun, Gonzalez's godmother, Norma Leticia Navarro, told The Associated Press she couldn't imagine what led to the fatal confrontation.
"Jaime was not a bad kid, and I wish I could ask him why he did that, why did you put yourself in that position?" she said.
Still, she said she understood that police were doing their job, but she expressed frustration that a child was killed and wondered if something else could have been done.
"I'm not saying he was perfect or an angel, but he was a very giving person."
She said both of his parents work, and that his stepmother raised him from infancy and was very strict with him.
As word of the shooting spread quickly through the city on Texas' southern tip, where violence frequently spills over from Mexico's drug war, frantic parents rushed to reach their children.
The lockdown was lifted about two hours after the shooting, but students and employees were relocated while officers investigated, district spokeswoman Drue Brown said.
Brownsville is 280 miles south of San Antonio on the southern tip of Texas.
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