In Maryland, 17-year-old Austin Rollins shot two other students at Great Mills High School on Tuesday morning before a school resource officer engaged him and stopped the threat, authorities said. The incident began in a school hallway at 7:55 a.m., just before classes started. Authorities say Austin Wyatt Rollins, armed with a handgun, shot a female and a male student. The shooter had a prior relationship with the female student that had recently ended, St. Mary’s County Sheriff Tim Cameron said.
The gunman shot Jaelynn Willey, 16, in the hallway of the school and a bullet hit 14-year-old Desmond Barnes in the thigh. School resource officer Blaine Gaskill responded to the scene in less than a minute and fired a round at the shooter while the shooter simultaneously fired a round, Cameron said. Rollins was later pronounced dead at Charles Regional Medical Center while Gaskill was unharmed.
Jaelynn Willey was transported to the hospital in critical condition with life-threatening injuries. Desmond Barnes was treated in stable condition and later released. The Willey family held a press conference two days later, on March 22nd, announcing that they’d made the decision to take Jaelynn off of life support. Hours later, the sheriff’s office confirmed that she had died.
The quick response and actions of St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Deputy Blaine Gaskill, who had been assigned to the school last year, has been credited with preventing any more loss of life. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, residents and many media outlets have praised him for putting his life on the line and ending the situation quickly. Gaskill has yet to make a statement to the public.
Sheriff Cameron, is also among the many who have praised Gaskill, a six-year veteran with SWAT team training, for his actions. “He responded exactly as we train our personnel to respond,” “This is what we train for, this is what we prepare for, and this is what we pray that we never have to do. On this day, we realized our worst nightmare,” Cameron said. “The notion of ‘it can’t happen here’ is no longer a notion.”
The school was on lockdown for a brief time, and students were evacuated from Great Mills High School to a reunification center at a nearby high school, the school system said. Austin Wyatt Rollins was an honor student at Great Mills High School. Rollins was born in Tennessee and moved to Maryland with his family in 2004. According to police, the Glock handgun used in the shooting legally belonged to his father, Rocky Rollins.
Officer Gaskill’s actions stand in stark contrast to that of Parkland school safety officer Scot Peterson, who resigned amid reports that he went AWOL when the shooting started. Peterson took position outside the building and never entered the building even though gun fire could still be heard. In fact, what Gaskill did is extremely rare. According to an analysis of dozens of school shootings done by the Washington Post, Gaskill is only the second school resource officer to kill an active shooter since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.
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