Anyone missing an empty rifle case? Because one was found just before noon Thursday in Dana Point. In the Dana Hills High School parking lot, prompting a four-hour campus lockdown, frantic texts between students and their parents and, reportedly, the conversion of classroom sinks into urinals because kids were forbidden to leave class to use restrooms.
]
A room-to-room search of the campus at 3333 Golden Lantern St. produced no weapon or gunman, and the lockdown was lifted just before 4 p.m., according to Lt. Jeff Hallock, the Orange County Sheriff's spokesman.
Must've been quite a scene, man: as a SWAT team and guard dogs combed through the campus, frightened students huddled in their classrooms, no doubt spooked by highly publicized school shootings recently. The bit about the makeshift pisseries was related to a KCAL/Channel 9 reporter.
While it all came to an end with a mystery wrapped in an enigmatic empty rifle case, I did notice that as this was going down in Dana Point, 60 miles away in the San Diego County community of Clairemont John Muir Elementary School was on a lockdown due to a man being seen by pupils pointing a rifle at a playground. A shirtless fellow was taken into custody.
You don't suppose …?
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.