A day after the fatal shooting of a high school student, Ogden School District Superintendent Luke Rasmussen expressed sympathy with friends and family of the teen.
“I just, first and foremost, want to express my condolences to their family and to the student’s friends, how sorry we are that that happened,” he said Wednesday. The incident, he went on, will “really impact our students in our school. It’s going to impact our community.”
He also offered assurances that Ben Lomond High School, where the teen studied and the target of an unrelated hoax bomb threat last week, is a safe place.
“I really feel for the school right now. They’ve had that unfortunate run of events,” he said.
He noted that the 16-year-old victim in Tuesday’s shooting — whom he did not name, but family members identified as Mason Caballero — was with others at the time who apparently sought help at the high school. The shooting actually occurred off campus in an adjacent residential neighborhood around 5th Street and Gramercy Avenue.
“In the darkest hour that these students had probably ever lived through — a fight-or-flight response, a situation where they were involved in a shooting — the first place they came back to was school. They came back to their school for help and support,” Rasmussen said.
Tuesday’s shooting occurred about 2:45 p.m., 10 minutes after school had been let out for the day. Later in the afternoon, Ogden Police Capt. Tim Scott said authorities had no suspect in custody but were dedicating “every resource available” to the investigation. In a social media post on Wednesday, the Ogden Police Department reiterated a request Scott made on Tuesday for help from the public.
“The Ogden Police Department continues to actively investigate this case and is asking for the community’s assistance as the investigation moves forward,” reads the post. Anyone with information should reach out to Weber County dispatchers at 801-395-8221 or send an email to OPDInvestigations@ogdencity.gov.
Rasmussen, meantime, addressed the emotional toll of the shooting and the Oct. 2 bomb threat in his comments Wednesday. The bomb threat, he said, was called in by a 13-year-old boy from Washington state who had no link to the area or Ben Lomond High School. The threat “caused an evacuation; it caused stress on the school and the students,” he said.
The shooting, he went on, will “really impact our students in our school. It’s going to impact our community, our families.” Nevertheless, Ben Lomond High School is safe, though he put a call out for those in the district to lean on one another.
“We need to support each other through this. We’re going to work hard to support our students here and make sure that we can move on from this,” he said. Counselors and mental health experts will be available to help students and staff who need it.
Tuesday’s shooting led to the temporary closure by police of Gramercy Avenue from in front of Highland Junior High School south to 6th Street.