Parents and students rattled by elementary school lockdown

When Rebecca Roe received a text Tuesday that her children’s elementary school was on lockdown, the recent Florida school shooting flashed through her mind.

“It was very scary,” said the 37-year-old mother of two girls who attend Ahuimanu Elementary School. “With what’s been happening with the school shooting, I thought, ‘Really? In Hawaii?’”

Meanwhile, inside her fourth-grade classroom, 9-year-old Madeleine Roe remained calm on the outside, lying down under a table, but “on the inside I was screaming all over,” she said, and drew a picture of her emotions.

Ahuimanu Elementary School was placed on lockdown for about an hour while police pursued an auto theft suspect, spotted running through the area, police said. The school was locked down from 1:35 to 2:23 p.m., a Department of Education spokeswoman said.

Initially, when police stopped the suspect driving a stolen pickup truck, he and his passenger fled. Police, using a helicopter, found the 26-year-old driver hiding in a house on nearby Hui Iwa Street. He was arrested at 2:35 p.m. on suspicion of auto theft. The 23-year-old passenger was caught at 1:36 p.m. at Hui Iwa and Kahekili Highway and arrested on suspicion of unauthorized entry into a motor vehicle.

Madeleine Roe said when students were told they could not leave the classroom, “everybody had to use the bathroom. Some of them even peed in their pants.”

An educational assistant, who asked not to be identified, said she thought it was a practice drill, but when the principal made announcements over the public address system, she knew it was real.

She tried “to keep the kids calm,” but “inside I’m like, ‘What is going on?’” she said. “You can hear the police radio as they walked by the classrooms, and a helicopter.”

Her son, a sixth-grader, said, “I was a little bit scared, but one of my friends was crying. Some kids were allowed to text their parents, ‘We’re OK.’”

Some teachers used a smartphone app to text their students’ parents, the assistant said. But others, like the assistant, just got a call from the principal.

Rebecca Roe said the principal’s call came after it was all over, and was “a general, itemized voicemail of what happened.”

Roe got a text from one of her two daughters’ teachers.

Elaine Morita, who lives across the street from the school, said she didn’t know what was going on, but everything seemed organized as police positioned themselves and directed arriving parents to park outside as school was supposed to be letting out.

Parents face another dilemma: how to explain what happened to their children.

“Like the school shooting two or three weeks ago, what do I tell my child? I have a kindergartner,” Lisa Christensen, 29, said.

Star-Advertiser reporter Susan Essoyan contributed to this report.