A teen carrying a large knife walked into a crowded quad at a Los Angeles school in Westchester Tuesday, punched another boy in the face, and then ran off as students screamed and scattered. The confrontation triggered a shelter-in-place order at Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets, a campus that sits at 7400 W. Manchester Ave. and shares its grounds with WISH Academy High School under a state-mandated co-location arrangement.
Cell phone footage reviewed by KTLA showed the teen boy carrying the large knife as he walked into the packed quad before the altercation broke out. Student Kaylin Lewis told the outlet the knife was big, and another student, Kaylani Bates, said the students involved may have been tied to rival gangs, though that account was attributed only to student report rather than confirmed by officials. The boy who was hit suffered a minor cut and was treated by the campus nurse, and a Los Angeles Unified School District spokesperson said no one was seriously injured.
According to the district, the altercation involved a student from Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets, a student from the co-located charter school, and several unauthorized individuals who had entered the campus. It remains unclear whether the students involved knew each other beforehand. After the punch landed, the attacked boy and a group of students chased the suspect, who ran away from the confrontation. The Los Angeles School Police Department ultimately took one student into custody.
Parents Say the Warning Came Too Late
School officials initiated the shelter-in-place order as LASPD officers responded to the campus, but parents say the district’s communication fell far short. One parent, speaking anonymously, called the school’s response unacceptable and told KTLA that a child was locked alone in a hallway during the lockdown. Parents did not receive an email from school officials about the incident until roughly an hour after police had already arrived on campus.
The delay stands in contrast to LAUSD’s own emergency procedures, which call for shelter-in-place orders to clear students from hallways into locked classrooms immediately once a threat is identified, according to the LAUSD Parent-Student Handbook. A district spokesperson said there is no ongoing threat to the campus and that students and staff are safe, even as school officials disputed the severity of the attack described by parents and witnesses. Instruction has since resumed as normal, and LASPD said it will provide additional patrols around the campus going forward.
How Weapons Still Reach a Locked-Down Campus
Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets, formerly known as Westchester High School, operates under Proposition 39, the state law requiring public districts to share underused facilities with independent charter schools — which is how WISH Academy came to occupy the same shared quads, hallways, and common areas, according to an LAUSD facilities bond update. That shared, open-air layout is part of why unauthorized individuals could reach the quad in the first place.
The campus also no longer has officers stationed inside its gates. LAUSD ended its 26-year practice of daily random metal-detector wanding in secondary schools by 2020, following a 2019 board vote that civil rights advocates argued the searches criminalized students without making them safer, as reported by CBS Los Angeles. A year later, the district cut the Los Angeles School Police Department’s budget by 35 percent, or $25 million, pulling permanently stationed officers off high school campuses in favor of roving patrols, per reporting from the LA Times. Those changes help explain why officers had to respond to Tuesday’s confrontation from outside the quad rather than intervene from within it.
A District-Wide Pattern of Weapons Incidents
Westchester’s campus normally runs on a Positive Behavior & Intervention Support model paired with restorative justice practices emphasizing non-punitive conflict resolution, per the school’s own materials. But the incident lands amid a broader surge in campus weapons cases across LAUSD: the district logged 1,197 weapons-related incidents during the 2022–2023 school year, part of a 45 percent rise in reported weapons, threats, and physical aggression on campuses between 2017 and 2023, according to prior Hoodline reporting on a separate Santee High gun lockdown earlier this year.
Whether the knife brought onto the WESM quad triggers California’s mandatory suspension and expulsion-referral rules remains an open question. Under Education Code Section 48915, brandishing a knife at another student on school grounds requires immediate suspension and a mandatory expulsion recommendation, while simple possession of a knife with no legitimate school use can also trigger a quasi-mandatory referral. Separately, state law under Penal Code Section 626.10 treats bringing a blade over 2.5 inches, a locking folding knife, or a dirk or dagger onto K-12 grounds as a wobbler offense that can be charged as either a misdemeanor or a felony. LAUSD has said only that it takes student safety incidents extremely seriously; authorities have released no further details about the circumstances surrounding the confrontation or the identity of the student taken into custody.
