Texas authorities arrested a father after his four-year-old son allegedly brought a loaded gun to a Texas school on Wednesday, authorities said.
Students were placed in lockdown at John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Corpus Christi around 9:00 a.m., after school administrators learned a student had a loaded weapon, according to police.
An off-duty officer on campus removed the loaded gun and secured it, police said. Other officers soon arrived on scene to investigate the incident and determined the handgun belonged to the parents of the child.
“While we do not believe that students and staff were in any kind of imminent danger, as a precaution the campus had increased police presence and maintained a higher level of security at the school until the Corpus Christi Police Department gave us an ‘all clear’ at 10:30 a.m.,” West Oso Independent School District Superintendent Conrado Garcia said in a letter to parents, according to CNN. (RELATED: Student Pulls Gun At School, Gets Disarmed By Resource Officer)Police announced Wednesday that they had arrested 30-year-old Paul Torres, who was charged with making a firearm accessible to children and with abandoning or endangering a child. CNN did not provide Torres’ name but did report that the man police arrested is the father of the child who brought the gun to school.
Corpus Christi police recommended in a news release that all guns be kept “unloaded, trigger locked, and in a locked gun safe, or pistol box with the ammunition locked away separately.”