MESQUITE, Texas — Nine days ago, assistant principal Nija Higgins faced down a student with a gun. She thought it might be her last day alive.
“You hear about this in other communities or other schools,” she said in an interview, speaking publicly for the first time about what happened on Feb. 19 at the Pioneer Technology and Arts Academy in Mesquite. “Never in a million years did I think this would ever happen.”
The 16-year-old student suffered a leg injury after he reached for the gun and police opened fire. Police have not said if he was injured by a gunshot or shrapnel. Because he’s a juvenile, authorities have not released his name.
Police officers fired 19 times, leaving her office riddled with bullet holes.
“I am a woman of faith,” said Higgins, who has 25 years of experience in education. “I truly believe that God was with us.”
She recalls that the school day had started normally enough. Then she got a text from a teacher. The teacher needed help with a student.
“When I got there, the student was there,” Higgins said. “He appeared to be, you know, just not himself.”
No other kids were in the classroom at that moment.
“He says, ‘Miss Higgins, are you going to call the police for me?” she said. “And so he said, ‘I'm getting ready to kill someone.’ I paused and I said, ‘Well let’s go talk about it.”
Trying to protect the student and keep him calm, she asked the student if he would go with her to her office, which wasn’t far away. He said no initially, but then agreed to do so. She didn’t know at that point that he had a gun.
“I just wanted him out of that classroom,” Higgins said.
Meanwhile, the teacher diverted the students who had been about to return to that classroom in the opposite direction.
“He walked with me and I walked in first. He was behind me,” she said
Both of them sat down.
Higgins says she calmly asked him, “Are you okay? What’s going on?”
“Then he goes on to say, “Well did you call the police for me because I’m really going to shoot someone,” Higgins said during the interview. “And so before I could even process what he was saying, the principal heard him when she opened my door, and she asked him abruptly, she said, ‘Do you have a gun?’
The principal grabbed his backpack and asked if it was in there.
“He said, ‘No.’ That’s when he pulled it out. It was on him,” she said.
Mesquite police later released a photo showing the handgun and five bullets that were inside it. Higgins said their goal was to keep the situation as calm as possible.
“I didn’t want him to see a reaction at all,” she said, “and so we just kept saying, ‘Let’s not do this.’”
The principal, standing in the doorway, asked the student if he’d let Higgins out of the office.
“There was only one way in and one way out and I had to pass him and he said, ‘Yes, I'll let her out,’” Higgins said.
Released from the office, Higgins set things in motion. She called 911 and ordered that the building be locked down. She said the principal had already cleared nearby classrooms.
Higgins stayed on the phone with the 911 operator until police arrived.
“I'm the assistant principal and a student just pulled a gun. I need someone here now,” she told the 911 operator, according to a recording released Tuesday by police.
“Ok, does he still have the gun?” the operator asked. “Yes, he does,” she told the operator.
“What is he doing right now?” the operator asked.
“He's just standing. He won't put the gun down,” Higgins said.
Higgins said during the interview that the student put the gun to his head. The principal, still standing in that doorway, begged him to put it down.
“You trust me,” the principal can be heard saying on the 911 call.
She said she and the principal were determined that he was not going to leave that office and they were willing to put their lives on the line to prevent it.
On the bodycam video, the principal calmly tells police that the student has put the gun down between his legs. She tells the student, “Be still. Don’t move and I need you to trust me. Do you understand?”
For four and a half minutes, police talked to the student.
“What has upset you today? Maybe we can talk about it,” an officer asked, according to bodycam video.
An officer told him not to reach for the gun.
In the video released by police, the student can be seen reaching down for the gun.
“And then I heard when a cop say, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't go for the gun.’” She said. “And he went for it and I heard it was a war zone.”
But in that chaos, she’d lost sight of the principal.
“I just thought she had been shot,” Higgins said.
What she didn’t know at that moment was that police moved the principal away from the office.
“Then my heart broke because I thought he had died in my office,” she said. “I didn’t hear him anymore. And I just sat there. I was numb.”
Finally, police told the student to put his hands up. She was relieved that he was alive.
“He just needed some help,” she said of the student. “That’s somebody’s baby and we have to remember that.”
After those critical moments passed, she now had to help reunify parents with their children. She is relieved that every student went home safely with their parents.
Over the summer, the school invited Mesquite police to do an active shooter drill on the campus. The police and fire departments also did a walk-through of the camps.
Since the incident, the district has beefed up security measures at the campus, including adding metal detectors.
She says it’s a lesson that we never know when someone’s struggling. She said she’d like to see more mental health professionals in schools and more counseling offered to struggling students.
“We’ve got to be good to each other,” Higgins said.