The fatal shooting of two Seattle high school students has reignited demands for the return of police officers to public school campuses, as grieving families and frustrated residents ask how many more children must be lost before district leaders abandon their ideological experiment with police-free schools.
Authorities on Monday identified the victims as 17-year-old Traveiah Houfmuse and Tyjon Stewart, both students at Rainier Beach High School, who were shot multiple times in a double homicide outside the campus on Friday. According to The Post Millennial, police have made no arrests and have not disclosed whether the attack was gang-related, leaving parents to grapple with both fear and anger as the investigation drags on.
The killings come amid a broader surge in youth violence citywide and follow the Seattle School Boards 52 vote against restoring police at Garfield High School, despite a year marked by shootings, weapons incidents, and mounting litigation over alleged safety failures. Seattle Public Schools dismantled its School Engagement Officer program in 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd riots, claiming that a uniformed police presence contributed to racial disparities in discipline, a move critics now say has left students exposed to escalating threats.
At Garfield, 17-year-old Amarr Murphy-Paine was killed in June 2024 while attempting to break up a fight outside the school, a tragedy his family argues was preventable. Their wrongful death lawsuit accuses the district of ignoring repeated safety warnings and failing to follow its own emergency protocols, underscoring what many see as a pattern of negligence driven by politics rather than public safety.
On the same day Murphy-Paine was killed, a student allegedly fired an airsoft gun at a teacher, while another fled campus after refusing a backpack search for a suspected weapon. Parents point to these incidents as evidence that unarmed staff and paper policies are no match for real-world violence, especially when administrators are reluctant to involve law enforcement.
The violence is not confined to one campus. A 17-year-old girl was shot at a Garfield bus stop, a student was shot inside Ingraham High School in 2023, and in 2021, Ingraham students were threatened with an AR-15, while during the pandemic a violent homeless encampment was allowed to operate on the grounds of Broadview-Thompson K-8 even after shootings as children returned to classrooms.
Yet despite this record, the school board has repeatedly refused to reinstate police officers, opting instead to expand the use of unarmed security guards and safety specialists trained in de-escalation. For many families, the question now is whether Seattles leaders will continue to prioritize progressive talking points over the basic duty to protect studentsor finally admit that real security sometimes requires a badge and a sidearm.
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