A 17-year-old has been charged with manslaughter in the shooting death of a teenage girl at an Alabama high school on Wednesday, the district attorney’s office announced.
Michael Jerome Barber is charged as an adult in the death of 17-year-old Courtlin Arrington, Jefferson County District Attorney Mike Anderton said in a news release Friday. Barber also faces a charge of “being a certain person forbidden to possess a pistol” for having the firearm on school grounds.
It was not immediately clear on Friday afternoon if Barber was represented by an attorney.
Arrington was an aspiring nurse and a senior attending Huffman High School in Birmingham when two gunshots rang out around dismissal time on Wednesday afternoon, killing her and injuring another 17-year-old male student, the district attorney’s statement said.
Investigators with the Birmingham Police Department spoke with “many of the students in the school, in the classroom where the shooting took place and collected evidence from the scene,” the release said. “Based on the evidence as presented to us, warrants were issued for the person responsible for this horrific tragedy.”
“Our hearts go out to the family of Ms. Arrington, all of her friends, and those whose lives would have been changed through her nursing dreams had this event not occurred,” the statement said. “This is a parent’s worst nightmare.”
Birmingham police Chief Orlando Wilson said earlier this week that police considered the shooting accidental, though he did not elaborate.
The school was placed on a brief lockdown when the shots were fired on Wednesday afternoon, and police responded to the scene. The school has metal detectors, and school resource officers were on site at the time of the shooting, according to Birmingham City Schools Superintendent Lisa Herring.
Wednesday’s school shooting in Birmingham was the 14th in the US in 2018.
