In his letter addressed to the school community, Superintendent Tim Throne announced Saturday that Oxford Community Schools was requesting a third-party investigation of the shooting.
Mr Throne also provided details on "the school's version of events" in the letter, highlighting shooting suspect Ethan Crumbley's movements leading up to and during the shooting.
Tuesday morning, after a teacher alerted school counsellors and the dean of students about concerning drawings and written statements made by the suspect, he was "immediately removed from the classroom" and taken to a guidance counsellor's office, Mr Throne said in the letter.
A day earlier, the student was discovered viewing images of ammunition on his cell phone during class and said it was for his family's shooting hobby, the letter said.
The suspect told a school counsellor the drawing was for a video game he was designing, Mr Throne said.
Guidance counsellors monitored the student in their office as they unsuccessfully tried to reach his parents for an hour and a half, the letter said.
After the parents were contacted and arrived, counsellors asked questions about the student's capacity for harm, and the family's answers "led counsellors to again conclude he did not intend on committing either self-harm or harm to others," the letter said.
School counsellors told the parents they had 48 hours to seek counselling for their son, otherwise the school would have to contact Child Protective Services, the letter reads.
When asked to take their child home for the rest of the day, Mr Throne said the student's parents "flatly refused," leaving their son behind to "return to work."
Because he had no prior disciplinary actions on his record, school counsellors decided to allow him to return to his class rather than send him to what they thought would be an empty home, Mr Throne said, adding the decision was not shared with the principal or assistant principal.
The suspect starting firing his gun "during passing time between classes when hundreds of students were in the hallway transitioning from one classroom to the other" later that morning, Mr Throne said, and it's unclear to him if the gun was in the student's backpack.
"Before the shooter was able to walk a short distance to enter the main hallway, students and staff had already entered classrooms, locked doors, erected makeshift barricades and locked down or fled according to their training," Mr Throne said.
"The suspect was not able to gain access to a single classroom."
An initial review of videos of the shooting showed "staff and students' response to the shooter was efficient, exemplary and definitely prevented further deaths and injuries," the superintendent said.
06 Dec 2021, 8:30 pm
