Jesse Ayala quoted in the Wisconsin State Journal

Girl Charged In School Attack
Wisconsin State Journal

A 17-year-old girl was charged Wednesday with shooting a 14-year-old girl with plastic pellets on the front walk outside Memorial High School.

Despite the attack, parents, students and school officials said they aren't worried about safety at the school.

Cassandra Graffee of Madison stood outside Memorial's front entrance at 4:10 p.m. Tuesday and sent another youth inside to get the 14-year-old out of school, police spokesman Mike Hanson said. Apparently, she was angry with the girl for spreading rumors about her, he said.

When the girl came outside, she and Graffee, who had been told to stay off school property, struggled with each other for a few moments, pulling hair and shoving each other, Hanson said.

The younger girl went inside after separating from Graffee, Hanson said. Shortly afterward, she left school and was again allegedly confronted by Graffee, who then pulled out a pellet gun and shot the girl about 20 times in the head, chest and neck area.

When Graffee ran out of the plastic pellets, a 12-year-old boy with her shot four times at the victim using his own pellet gun, Hanson said.

A school official who saw several youths running toward Tree Lane across Gammon Road directed police to the group. Police found a container of Soft Air 6-mm plastic pellets, which matched the spent pellets found near the incident.

The victim told police that she knew the guns weren't real and the plastic pellets didn't hurt much.

She wasn't treated for any injuries, Hanson said.

Police didn't find the pellet guns used in the incident.

Graffee was taken to the Dane County Jail. She was charged with three misdemeanors: disorderly conduct, disorderly conduct while armed and battery.

Graffee was released from custody on a signature bond and was ordered not to be on Memorial High School property, not to have a dangerous weapon and to stay away from the victim.

She has been suspended from school and may face expulsion pending an investigation, Madison School District spokesman Ken Syke said. He would not confirm if Graffee was a student at Memorial in keeping with the district's confidentiality rules.

The 12-year-old was turned over to his mother, Hanson said.

School District security head Ted Balistreri said there's no way to prevent such incidents at the school, even in the event Graffee had had a real gun.

"The only way you would prevent that from happening is to post someone at every door and have kids enter through doors with a metal detector," he said. "You address that by talking to students about bringing weapons to school and making sure they tell adults when they hear of kids bringing weapons to school."

Metal detectors aren't practical, he said.

"You're talking about more than 2,000 people all coming to a building at the same time," Balistreri said. "It would take three hours to get through security."

Surveillance cameras are in schools, including Memorial, he said. But there isn't a camera at the front door, largely because they have been placed in areas that are more difficult to supervise.

They do tell students where the cameras are, Balistreri said, primarily as a way to keep inappropriate behaviors from happening in the first place.

Sandy Meuer, the mother of a Memorial High School junior, said she is very confident that the administration has security under control, and Tuesday's incident has not made her worry at all about her son's safety.

"It does not concern me because normally fights are between certain groups of kids," Meuer said. "Those are not the kids my son hangs out with."

Senior class President Jesse Ayala said students are taking the incident seriously, but violence is not part of the school experience for the vast majority of them. Many people, he said, hadn't heard about the shooting until it was reported on the news.

"Walking down the hall at Memorial, I don't see anyone fighting or shooting people or anything like that," Ayala said. "Whenever I hear that on the news, it's like, 'Whoa, that happened here?' "

Madison School Board student liaison Connor Gants, a Memorial High School senior, said he thinks most of his classmates feel as safe as ever.

"My sense is people generally feel that if they treat each other well, which almost everyone at Memorial does, no one's going to give them any trouble," Gants said.