A 15-year-old student was taken into custody after being found with a firearm at a Bronx high school Tuesday morning, and just a few hours later, a 17-year-old was taken into custody following a similar report at a Brooklyn school. The NYPD says the two incidents happened at separate campuses on opposite ends of the city, within the same day.
Police responded to Eximius College Preparatory Academy on Fulton Avenue in the Bronx around 11:15 a.m. Tuesday after a 911 caller reported a student with a firearm inside the building, according to News12 Bronx. Officers found the 15-year-old student with a firearm and took the teen into custody, with police recovering the weapon at the scene. The school, located in the Claremont section of the Bronx, shares its building with another public high school, the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics, according to InsideSchools.
Roughly three hours later, at around 2:07 p.m., police responded to a separate report of a student with a firearm at Brooklyn High School for Law and Technology, per the same News12 report. A 17-year-old student was taken into custody in connection with that incident. The Brooklyn school, which serves grades 9 through 12 in School District 16, sits in central Brooklyn, per InsideSchools. The two incidents occurred at separate schools.
What Comes Next Legally for the Two Teens
Under New York Penal Law § 265.01-a, knowingly possessing a firearm, rifle, or shotgun on school grounds is a Class E felony, carrying penalties of up to four years in prison or up to five years of probation, according to the Law Office of Cory Garcia. The statute is designed specifically to elevate weapon possession on educational property beyond ordinary gun charges as a deterrent to campus gun violence.
School weapon searches in New York City public middle and high schools are governed by Chancellor's Regulation A-432, which allows NYPD school safety agents to conduct metal detector searches and unannounced random scanning, but requires a school principal or designated administrator to be present throughout the process, according to the NYCLU. The regulation is meant to balance campus security measures with student rights.
A Citywide Pattern Behind the Headlines
The same-day incidents land against a backdrop of heavy gun recovery activity across the five boroughs. NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch reported in June that police had removed more than 2,000 illegal firearms from city streets so far this year, with roughly a quarter of those seizures happening in the Bronx, according to figures published by NYC.gov.
Citywide, major felony crime in and around public schools fell 17% during the first four months of the current fiscal year compared with the same period a year earlier, even as felonious assaults rose 23%, according to the city's Preliminary Mayor's Management Report cited by NYC.gov. Those numbers come as the school safety apparatus itself has been stretched thin: the number of uniformed NYPD school safety agents stationed at city schools dropped roughly 28% over five years, from about 5,000 to 3,600, as of March 2025, according to Chalkbeat.
The city's unannounced mobile school scanning program also hit a snag last year, when Chalkbeat reported that a complete breakdown of the NYPD School Safety Division's mobile X-ray and metal detection equipment forced the Education Department to issue an emergency $385,000 contract for replacement machines. Separately, federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York charged the former commanding officer of the NYPD School Safety Division in February with bribery offenses, alleging the ex-chief accepted cash, luxury travel and fine dining in exchange for steering municipal safety technology contracts, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
It would not be the first time a cluster of student gun incidents pushed the city to expand screening. In October 2021, officials expanded unannounced metal detector scanning to 30 additional public schools after five guns were discovered in schools within a 24-hour period, according to Gov1.
