Terror inside and outside Santa Rosa High School struck hours before graduation

They stood bunched along Mendocino Avenue, exchanging updates, rumors and reassurances. Congregating solemnly in front of Yogurt Farms and McDonald’s and Dutch Bros. Coffee, across the street from Santa Rosa High School, parents of the locked-down students occupied a kind of purgatory between dread and relief.

The freshman who’d allegedly brought a gun to school on graduation day was no longer on campus, they’d been informed. But he hadn’t been located, either.

“She’s in the gym, and she’s OK,” said Esin Zamora, whose words belied her tense expression around noon Friday. She spoke of her daughter, Izel, a senior, who’d forwarded a text from another student whose parent was an emergency medical technician. The message from that parent was that the students were safe.

Earlier that morning the seniors had been out on the high school’s athletic field, an hour into graduation practice, when Principal Kimberly Clissold suddenly sprinted back toward her office, Izel Zamora said. “None of us knew what was going on.” Minutes later, the seniors were told to leave the field and head for the gym.

Back on Mendocino Avenue, Zamora’s husband, Paul Teso, sought to reassure her. “If something had happened, they would have blocked this road off,” said Teso, a sergeant in the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office who was out of uniform, on his day off.

Ten yards away, a woman was on the phone with her daughter, who also was in the gym sheltered with fellow seniors and teachers. That student was telling her mother that she was hearing that the 15-year-old boy believed to have a gun was still in school, being held in a room.

That proved false, but added to an atmosphere of low-grade fear and confusion, both inside and outside the school.

City police arrested the suspect a mile from the high school about 4 p.m. News that the weapon in question was a BB gun did nothing to dispel the fear and anxiety felt by students, parents and faculty.

“We were terrified,” said Frannie Pomeroy, a sophomore who was in the high school’s math building, on the west side of campus. Once the lockdown was declared, students were required to get on the floor. From that vantage, Pomeroy said, she and her classmates looking out a window could see “the top of a gun.” Although this was the barrel of a rifle carried by police, the students didn’t know that. “Everyone was freaked out,” she said.

The fear factor was highest for students whose teachers forbade them to use their phones. Twenty minutes after the lockdown had been lifted about 1:20 p.m., freshman Makenna Kingsbury shared a long, silent embrace with her mother, Katie, on the front steps of the school.

Kingsbury had been taking an algebra final exam when the lockdown order came down. Her teacher turned the classroom lights off, she said, “and we continued taking the test.”

Soon after, word came down that “it was a real emergency,” the freshman recalled, “so we got down on the floor. And they wouldn’t let us get on our phones.” When Kingsbury asked her teacher if she could text her mother, to assure her she was OK, the teacher told her “it’s best that we stay off our phones. So we just laid there for like, three hours.”

Disconnected from the outside world, “I didn’t know if the situation was serious or not,” Kingsbury said. “Then we were told there were helicopters flying around, and we might be there for five hours.”

The smartphone of a teenager is often a source of irritation and exasperation to parents, particularly during family meals. On this, the last day of school, those phones were godsends. Students who had them, and were permitted to use them, were able to reassure their distressed parents.

Lisa Baiocchi’s son, a Panther freshman - she preferred not to give his name - “was in immediate contact,” she said. “He texted prolifically, assuring us he was OK. He worked really hard to make sure we were calm.”

Those soothing words flowed both ways. From her post across Mendocino Avenue from the second-?floor classroom where her twin daughters, Ariana and Sophia Badrei were locked down, Natalie Fairbrook texted her love, along with helpful suggestions:

“Are you doing your deep breathing? Do you have your essential oils?”

“They were like, ‘Don’t worry, Mom, we’re doing fine,’” said Fairbrook, a yoga instructor.

When the announcement finally went over the high school’s public-address system that the lockdown was lifted, it was loud enough for Fairbrook, her husband and ex-husband to hear it from across the street. They joined a happy migration of parents at the south edge of the high school’s campus, where they found the twins.

“We all met up, hugged it out and said our I-love-yous,” recalled Fairbrook over the phone, three hours later. By then, she said, the events at the high school seemed “sort of surreal.” She shared, with many parents, a profound sense of relief. “This could have been much, much worse.”

Her daughters, for their part, were in a slightly less reflective place. After embracing their parents, said Fairbrook, “they were headed for the river to hang out with friends.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Ausmurph88