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Hundreds of teens danced around a pavilion at a Greenbelt park last Friday afternoon, celebrating the end of high school with the annual “senior skip day.” The students from several high schools — who had converged at the park after hours of hopping around the county — sang along to music, and some waved water guns in their hands from an earlier playful fight.

Screaming students ran from the pavilion and jumped over a chain-link fence. A student filming the events called out to his friend while panting and fleeing for his life, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, bro. Man, they shooting …”

Though senior skip day is unsanctioned by most schools, students nationwide partake in the tradition as a final send-off with friends before graduation. But the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/19/shooting-dc-maryland-police/" target="_blank">Greenbelt shooting</a> that left five teens — ages 16 to 18 — wounded has Prince George’s County officials and community members grappling with how to handle future skip day events and questioning whether communication and coordination among law enforcement agencies and schools could have been heightened in advance.

The shooting also again raised concerns over youth crime in Prince George’s, where the county council <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/04/23/national-harbor-youth-curfew-fines/" target=_blank>is moving forward with emergency legislation</a> that would allow for targeted youth curfews after hordes of teens descended on National Harbor the same weekend as the Greenbelt shooting. On Thursday, Prince George’s County Executive Angela D. Alsobrooks (D) announced an executive order to reinstate the youth curfew at National Harbor that goes into effect Friday at 5 p.m., ahead of the council vote.

“This is the most exciting time of the year for our kids, who are preparing for graduation, the seniors who want to enjoy each other, the final days of being in their senior year, disrupted by violence,” Alsobrooks said after the Greenbelt shooting. “We have to get these guns off the streets.”

Since the shooting, a trailer camera has been placed in front of Schrom Hills Park, and park rangers will be stationed at the park weekday afternoons, supplemented by police patrols, Greenbelt Police Chief Richard Bowers said. While city park rangers regularly patrol, there were no security cameras at the park at the time of the shooting, Bowers said at a news conference.

“We’ll have a heavy presence within the facility …  until when school lets out, so we’ll make sure that we don’t have a repeat of this incident at the facility,” Bowers said.

Police have not announced any arrests, but Bowers said at a Greenbelt City Council meeting after the shooting that detectives are pursuing “a variety of leads” and have worked up to 20 -hours a day. No possible motive has been released. As of Friday two of the five male teens wounded remained hospitalized, according to Greenbelt police.

Students didn’t start the day in Greenbelt that Friday. A social media post circulating that morning told teens to meet up for senior skip day at Pope’s Creek Park in a residential community at 11 a.m., Bowie police Lt. Robert Stevenson said.

At 10:42 a.m., Bowie police received their first disorderly conduct call of a large gathering of teens around Pope’s Creek Park with water guns and airsoft guns and playing loud music, Stevenson said. More than 200 teens were gathered.

“It was completely congested,” Stevenson said. “The traffic was kind of gridlock in there … so if you were a resident that lived in the neighborhood, you basically were kind of blocked out of your own neighborhood.”

It took about two hours to get the group fully dispersed, Stevenson said. There were no issues, other than managing the large amount of traffic, he said. Then, around 12:45 p.m., an officer advised that the teens were headed to Jericho Park in Bowie, about five miles away.

Once again, Bowie police dispersed about 200 teens, this time with the help of Prince George’s County police.

Stevenson said officials know skip day happens every year and they try to plan ahead with park rangers. But authorities aren’t told exactly when events are going to happen, making it difficult to track crowds.

“The crazy thing about these gatherings is it’s happening in real time, they’re getting updated through whatever apps that they’re using,” Stevenson said. “Everyone’s getting that information, same time, real time, and so they’re not just mobilizing from Bowie. … It was just a mass influx of kids everywhere.”

By about 2:30 p.m., the teens arrived in nearby Greenbelt, but this time there appeared to be 500 to 600 students at Schrom Hills Park on Hanover Parkway, according to Greenbelt police.

“This park is not big, so that’s a lot of kids jammed into this particular space,” Bowers said at a news conference. Park rangers had patrolled the park around 1:30 p.m., and it had been empty, he said.

The call came in as disorderly conduct, loud noise and parking complaints, according to Bowers.

A responding Greenbelt police officer requested assistance, drawing police from Greenbelt, Berwyn Heights, Maryland state and Prince George’s County. They tried to control the traffic and crowd, Bowers said.

Bowers told the city council that at the time of the initial police response, the crowd was large but “generally behaving.”

“The decision was made at the time that we would monitor that crowd, there’d be no possible way we could remove them all from the park, given the number of officers and the number of people involved,” Bowers said.

As the officers on scene were concluding a briefing, they started walking toward the crowd and heard gunshots, Bowers said. Ten shots were fired in total.

Bowers said the officers had been on the scene for about 10-15 minutes before the shooting occurred. As the gunshots were fired, the teens began to flee to Hanover Parkway, and police believe the shooter “left with them,” Bowers said.

Video footage from the day shows scores of teens running from the area. Some piled into cars but were stuck in the parking lot for several minutes because of the number of drivers trying to flee the park and the simultaneous rush of emergency personnel arriving.

“Was that a real gun?” a student yelled in disbelief.

“Dog, that could have been us,” a friend of his later remarks, as they watched students get transported to the hospital. Bowers said there was such heavy congestion that the fire department couldn’t get into the facility for more than 20 minutes, and the medical care provided by officers was “potentially lifesaving.”

Jonathan Briggs, a school board member whose district includes Greenbelt, said he found out about the shooting via a text from another school board member who happened to be in Eleanor Roosevelt High while it was on lockdown. Briggs said the injured students were from Bowie High School, Largo High School and Dr. Henry A. Wise Jr. High School in Upper Marlboro.

The Prince George’s County school system, Maryland’s second largest district, said in a statement that senior skip day events are unsanctioned.

“The safety and well-being of students remains our priority, and counseling and mental health support services are available to students and staff,” Prince George’s County Public Schools said in a statement. “Additional security and crisis team staff are on location at impacted schools this week.”

At the city council meeting after the shooting, Bowers fielded questions from council members as to whether better coordination among agencies could have happened as high-schoolers traversed the county for hours before the shooting.

He said the department will work to better coordinate with school resource officers to be more proactive, and has already begun discussions with municipal police agencies about the future. But it is challenging because students are making plans on social media and a location isn’t provided “until just before the event,” Bowers said.

“The county police deal with it, all the municipal agencies deal with it. And so making sure that we’re all a little bit more prepared next year … kind of roundtabling that early February, March, before we get to this point,” Bowers said.

Lateshia Beachum contributed to this report.

First Place, Best College Feature Writing, Ohio Society of Professional Journalists

Ohio State University, BA in journalism

Jasmine Hilton is a reporter covering crime and courts on the Metro desk at The Washington Post.

University of Kansas, BS in journalism

Nicole Asbury is a local reporter for The Washington Post covering education and K-12 schools in Maryland.

Nicole Asbury

Greenbelt senior skip day shooting continues concerns over youth violence

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