All three buildings on the Liverpool High School campus – Liverpool High School, the Liverpool High School Annex, and Morgan Road Elementary (currently housed at Wetzel Road Elementary) were placed on lockdown for less than an hour Thursday morning after receiving a “verbal threat.”
The threat, according to Onondaga County Sheriff’s Detective Jon Seeber, came after the district learned that a Pennsylvania man wanted in connection with a fatal shooting had connections to Liverpool students. David Edick, 27, of Pittsburgh, was charged by Allegheny County police with criminal homicide and burglary for allegedly breaking into the apartment of his ex-wife and shooting Ryan Beal, her live-in boyfriend, Aug. 31. Police were unable to find Edick and originally thought he might have come to the Syracuse area, where he has family, including some with children in the LCSD.
The district was alerted to the situation Thursday, Sept. 12, and notified parents and community members through a Key Communicator message at 9:19 a.m. that Liverpool High School, the annex and MRE, all located on Wetzel Road, were on lockdown, meaning that the schools’ doors were locked from the outside and no one was allowed into or out of the buildings. A Key Communicator message was sent out notifying the community that the lockdown was lifted at 9:48 a.m.; Seeber said the sheriff’s office had been informed by the U.S. Marshals’ Office that Edick had been apprehended in Pennsylvania.
LCSD Superintendent Mark Potter said that most students were unaware that anything out of the ordinary was happening during the lockdown. He said this situation followed a fairly typical procedure for the district.
“A lockdown typically entails the securing of a facility by determining the essence of the threat,” Potter said. “We don’t allow public entry into the facility, except students attending the school building; we identify the best location for placement of the security and administrators based on the threat; we communicate with law enforcement regarding their support and placement on our grounds.”
If students have to move from building to building — for example, if a ninth-grader is going from the annex to the main building — they are kept in the building where they were when the lockdown is initiated.
Otherwise, students are rarely affected.
“Students, depending on the level of the threat, may still rotate through their class schedules,” Potter said. “We want to lock out the public from entering the buildings, but maintain the academic integrity.”
