The quick thinking of one Highland High senior and her mother may have helped the victim in last week’s school shooting keep her hand.
Erin Mieure and her mother arrived at the Palmdale campus around 7 a.m. Friday and immediately noticed something was wrong when they saw students running out of the front gates.
“All of a sudden, the victim actually came out with blood and he’s like, ‘He shot me. He shot me,’” Mieure said.
Mieure and her mother called 911 to report the shooting as they drove the unidentified 15-year-old victim to the hospital. The bleeding was so bad that Mieure was worried the teen might bleed out.
“There was a lot of blood in our Subaru,” Mieure’s father said.
At one point, Mieure’s mother gave the victim her jacket to wrap around the wound.
After they got the boy to the hospital, a doctor told Mieure’s father the victim likely would have lost his hand if they hadn’t arrived so quickly.
The victim was expected to make a full recovery, authorities said last week.
“We saw him on Saturday. He was moving his fingers,” Mieure’s father said.
The victim even apologized for bleeding in the family’s car, he said.
The suspect in the shooting, a 14-year-old former student, was taken into juvenile custody shortly after the shooting. He was held on suspicion of one count of attempted murder, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The weapon used – and SKS rifle – was found in a desert area west of the campus.
“We were very fortunate that the incident wasn’t much worse than it was,” Sheriff Jim McDonnell said Friday.
No motive for the gunfire has been released.
In the wake of the shooting, the school day started late Monday and grief counselors were on campus. The school was also planning to offer various activities for the students instead of their regular class schedule.
To Mieure, who had two sisters graduate from the school, the shooting was a shock.
“I didn’t think in a million years there would be a shooting at my school,” Mieure said. “You wouldn’t expect it at Highland.”