A 17-year-old walking into football practice at a Brooklyn school complex on Friday afternoon was allegedly carrying a loaded automatic pistol in his bookbag, and he fled the building after a struggle with a security agent who tried to stop him, according to police. The incident unfolded around 2:50 p.m. at the Frank J. Macchiarola Educational Complex in Sheepshead Bay, when the teen passed through a metal detector at the school.
According to PIX11, sources told the outlet the teen was allegedly carrying the gun as he arrived for football practice. A security agent held onto the loaded pistol after it was located in the teen's bookbag, but the teen struggled with the agent and tried to retrieve the bag before fleeing the school, sources told the station. Police said no one was injured during the encounter, and according to sources, the teen fled the school before he could be taken into custody.
A Campus Built From Four Merged Schools
The building at 3000 Avenue X was formerly known as Sheepshead Bay High School, which opened in 1959 and operated for 57 years before the New York City Panel for Educational Policy voted to phase it out, officially closing the school in June 2016 due to academic underperformance, per the same account cross-referenced by Wikipedia. The site was reborn as the Frank J. Macchiarola Educational Complex, which now houses four separate public high schools — Origins High School, Professional Pathways High School, New Visions Charter High School for the Humanities III, and New Visions Charter High School for Advanced Math and Science III — according to InsideSchools.
Because the four schools share one campus, their student-athletes pool together under Public Schools Athletic League rules to compete as a single varsity team, the Frank J. Macchiarola Sharks. Hoodline reported just days earlier, on September 1, that the campus had unveiled a new field for the Sharks — the same athletic program the 17-year-old was reportedly headed toward when he was stopped at the metal detector.
What the Charges Could Look Like
Because the teen is 17 and accused of possessing a loaded firearm, New York's Raise the Age law dictates that any case would begin in the Youth Part of the Supreme Court as an Adolescent Offender charge rather than automatically routing to Family Court, according to the New York State Unified Court System. Raise the Age created the Adolescent Offender classification specifically for 16- and 17-year-olds charged with felonies involving a firearm, and transfer out of that court requires specific legal exceptions or prosecutorial consent.
Under state law, possessing a loaded firearm is classified as Second-Degree Criminal Possession of a Weapon — a Class C violent felony — and is supplemented by a separate statute covering weapon possession specifically on school grounds, per the New York State Senate. New York designates school buildings as sensitive locations under its firearm statutes, adding weight to any charges tied to a gun found during a school security screening.
The Agents on the Front Line
The find also highlights the physical risk faced by the unarmed civilian staff who run these screenings every morning. NYPD's School Safety Division issued mandatory lightweight ballistic-resistant vests to its roughly 4,000 school safety agents following a pilot program, according to reporting from The Chief. Those agents are civilian NYPD employees represented by Teamsters Local 237, and they are often the first line of defense during struggle-and-recovery incidents like Friday's.
Citywide, weapon recoveries in city schools have been trending downward. NYPD school safety personnel confiscated 4,201 weapons and dangerous instruments during the 2024–2025 academic year through April 2025, including 15 firearms, according to Chalkbeat — down from nearly 4,800 items seized over the same period the previous year. The prior 2022–2023 school year saw 5,922 total weapons recovered, including 14 firearms, per News 12 Bronx, though the vast majority of confiscated items nationwide are blades and other non-firearm weapons rather than guns.
Part of a Broader Pattern in Brooklyn Schools
Roughly a third of all New York City public high school students pass through metal detectors each morning, and Brooklyn campuses have the second-highest daily scanning rate among the five boroughs at 42 percent, according to a WNYC analysis. Beyond permanent scanning sites, the NYPD also runs an unannounced mobile metal-detector program that can deploy temporarily to schools that don't have fixed screening in place.
Friday's incident follows a string of similar cases across the city this year. Hoodline previously reported on a Bushwick student found with a gun inside a Brooklyn high school in April, and a 16-year-old arrested with a loaded handgun at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens Village in February. Police have not said whether the teen from Friday's incident at the Macchiarola complex has been identified or located since fleeing the building.
