Reports of Gun-Toting Man/Men Send Two Portland Schools into Lockdown

• Portland Public Schools
• Grant High School

Two NE Portland schools went into brief lockdown this afternoon, when an area business reported seeing two young men with guns walking toward Grant High School.

Portland police, in a fresh news release, say officers responding to the area couldn’t locate the suspects and have no idea if the guns they were carrying are real. Portland Public Schools spokeswoman Christine Miles, meanwhile, offered a different account, saying there was a report of a single young man walking toward Grant with what appeared to be a gun, and that it was determined to be an Airsoft product—a brand of novelty gun that shoots plastic or metallic pellets and frequently look like assault rifles.

Beginning at around 12:40 pm, Miles says, all the doors were locked at both Grant and Beverly Cleary School‘s Hollyrood Campus for about 10 minutes, before administrators decided there was no threat. The lockdown was prompted by a call to Grant’s principal from a local business owner, Miles says.

The police bureau’s account is different. From the news release:

Neither suspect was located, no reports of any actual threats and no determination if the guns were real.

The suspects were described as white males in their late teens or early-20s, 5’8″ tall, and medium builds. One was described as having brown hair, wearing a white t-shirt and blue jeans. The other was described as wearing a dark jacket and blue jeans. One of the suspects was described as carrying a green military bag around his chest in addition to the semi-automatic rifle.

All schools resumed normal operation after police checked the neighborhood.

Any report of rifle-toting gunmen near a school is likely to draw concern, clearly, given last week’s massacre at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg. We’re trying to figure out where the discrepancies come from.

Update, 3:42 pm: Police haven’t called back but Miles just did. She says reports from Grant’s principal suggested one man with a gun, but that a police officer called her with another report.

“He said, ‘In early reports we were looking at an aerosol gun, now we firmly believe it was no gun whatever.” Miles says, noting schools are staying on “heightened alert.”