Inside the lockdown at Timberview High — a timeline of the shooting and the aftermath
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Mansfield Timberview High School shooting
Four people were injured in a shooting at Mansfield Timberview High School in Arlington. Police arrested the shooter, a student at the school.
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On Wednesday, a shooting at a North Texas high school thrust Mansfield ISD onto the national news. Throughout the day, members of the community faced a situation they’ve trained for countless times, but still were never really prepared to face.
Based on Star-Telegram interviews, court documents and social media, this is an account of the lockdown and evacuation at Timberview High School.
School day begins
First period went by normally at Timberview High School, a two-story, 416,000-square-foot campus with about 1,900 students.
At about 8:55 a.m., student Dylan Jones talked with Timothy Simpkins during passing period. Jones, 16, said he and Simpkins are not exactly friends, but they “were cool.”
Dylan and a group of students were considering skipping the second period and grabbing burgers at MOOYAH, a restaurant about seven minutes from the school. But Simpkins said no, and they ended up not skipping. Simpkins did not seem angry or upset when they were talking, Jones said.
“We were gonna get burgers,” Dylan said. “If he had said yes to the burgers, this wouldn’t have happened.”
The shooting
Second period began at 9 a.m. Simpkins was inside his class in the English department, according to an arrest warrant affidavit from Arlington police. As the period began, another student, a 15-year-old identified by his family as Zacchaeus Selby, walked into the classroom and started to fight with Simpkins, witnesses said.
Video of the fight shows Simpkins, wearing a light-colored sweatshirt, bent over as the other student hits him repeatedly. The two topple into a black bookshelf, scattering papers and large, white letters spelling the word “READ” to the classroom floor. Students can be heard yelling in the background for help.
Teachers and coaches rushed into the classroom to break up the fight, the arrest warrant said. Two of the teachers were Calvin Pettitt and Pariesa Altman, both English teachers.
As staff tried to contain the fight, the 15-year-old student “ultimately gave up and stopped being combative,” the arrest warrant said. As the 15-year-old was being restrained, Simpkins walked to an orange backpack. Simpkins pulled out a handgun, according to the arrest warrant, pointed it at the other student and fired.
Selby fell to the ground with multiple gunshot wounds. His family said he was shot four times. Multiple shots were heard across the school; the exact number witnesses told police they heard varied from three to eight shots. Pettitt was shot and Altman was injured in a fall during the commotion, according to police. A third student was grazed by a bullet.
Inside other classrooms
Meanwhile, classes nearby heard the sounds of fighting and screaming.
Mario Gonzalez, a senior, was in the classroom below where the shooting happened. He and his classmates heard fumbling around above them and thought there must be a fight. Suddenly, he heard six shots ring out. The class could hear screaming and people running around above them. Video from one classroom shows people jumping to their feet and yelling at the bangs echo through the room. About a minute later, an warning sounded over the school’s intercom — the school was on lockdown.
Catherine Esquivel heard fighting from her classroom. Her teacher opened the door to take a look in the hallway, and that’s when they heard the gunshots. Her teacher shut the door quickly and locked it.
“She didn’t tell us what to do — we knew exactly what to do from the drills we have always done,” 16-year-old Catherine said. “And she put tables in front of the door and we hid.”
Jaylene Maldonado, a sophomore at Timberview, was a hallway away from the room where the gunfire broke out.
“Our class could feel the vibration of the shots fired and it was really loud, so it was really scary,” Jaylene said.
In Kaleb Coss’ classroom in the English department hallway, the class reacted as soon as they heard gunshots. They ran into the corner and hid, he said, just like they have practiced in drills. They could see shadows moving around in the hallway.
They heard crying and screaming from other rooms, but the students in Kaleb’s room kept quiet.
“People were crying in our class, too,” he said. “Just very quietly.”
Students started to text their parents about what was going on.
“Hey bro if anything happen I love you,” Mario texted his brother. “We got a school shooter.”
Catherine texted her mom to tell her there was an active shooter, and that she loved her. She told her to tell her siblings she loved them, too. She started to pray.
“It was just the scariest moment of my life,” Catherine said. “I was praying to myself, Lord, keep me safe and keep other people safe.”
At 9:15 a.m., the police were dispatched to the school.
Students and teachers barricaded the doors. At 9:25 a.m., teacher Dale Topham posted a photo on Facebook of chairs and desks stacked on top of one another in front of his classroom door.
Students texted one another and circulated a video of the fight that preceded the shooting. Rumors were rampant as students waited for whatever came next.
Waiting during lockdown
Hours ticked by as students waited inside their classrooms and multiple police departments secured the building. Officers quickly determined the suspected shooter had left the campus, Arlington police said.
Word spread among students that the active shooting had ended. In Kaleb’s classroom, after about an hour of waiting in the corner of the room, kids started to talk a little more normally as they waited to be evacuated.
The WiFi was shut off at the school by 11 a.m. Officers steadily went room to room checking on classrooms.
One video on Instagram shows a group of officers opening a classroom door with flashlights held out in front of them.
“Hands up, hands up,” an officer says in the video as police turn on the classroom lights. “Anybody injured? Anybody come in or out after shots were heard?”
Sean Larry said police came into his classroom with guns and flashlights about an hour after the lockdown started. The police talked to students and staff, but told them they could not leave yet.
Police steadily searched each student for weapons and led them out to waiting school buses. Each student’s ID was scanned. Some students were given pizza in Styrofoam to-go boxes.
As they got onto the buses, students were able to text their parents again, who were anxiously waiting about six miles away at the established reunification center.
Parents wait, pray
Sherry Fragale is an assistant principal at a school near Timberview. She first knew something was amiss when her campus school resource officer ran out of the building on Wednesday morning. She texted her son, Hayden Smith, and asked him if he was OK.
Kandy Schiele got a text from her son, a freshman at Timberview, around 9 a.m. while she was at work.
“He said, ‘Mom, I’m scared, I’m scared right now. I’m on lockdown,’” she said. “He said, ‘As soon as lockdown is over, please come get me and don’t make me go to school tomorrow.’”
Parents across the city left their jobs to pick up their students. Some, like Marcus Lomax, drove directly to the school to try and pick up his daughter. He had texted her at 9:41 a.m. when he heard about the shooting on the news but did not hear back. He was sent to the reunification center along with the other family members. He did not hear back from his daughter until 12:15 p.m.
“I was just praying that she wasn’t one of the ones who got shot,” he said.
Traffic was already backed up at the Mansfield ISD Center for the Performing Arts on Debbie Lane at 10 a.m. Police officers blocked off several lanes of traffic and waved cars through to the large parking lot. Staff and law enforcement officers directed people to the front of the building, where a line was forming on the steps. Parents and other family members were told to have their IDs at the ready to pick up their children.
Volunteers from nearby churches handed out water and snacks to the hundreds of people waiting in the heat. As the day went on, several people fainted and needed medical attention from medical crews.
The first students arrived at the center at about noon; some of the buses were held up by traffic on Highway 360. Relieved parents and family members met their kids behind the main entrance to the building and walked them to their cars in the parking lot.
Some students seemed shaken. Other teenagers talked animatedly with one another and their families, detailing what they had been through. Some families stopped to talk to reporters, who were mostly relegated to a patch of grass on the side of the parking lot.
In some classrooms, students waited for hours to be evacuated. In Kaleb’s classroom, students started to complain about having to go to the bathroom. Someone had brought in a bag of candy, and the students shared it among themselves.
Kaleb said someone pulled on the door handle to their classroom at one point — he believes it was the police. After about four hours, police came into his classroom to evacuate them. He was reunited with his mom, Ariana Coss, at the center at 3:40 p.m.
At about 5 p.m., the last of the students and family members left the parking lot.
Aftermath
When Dylan’s brother picked him up at the reunification center at about 1:30 p.m., he still could not believe that he had been talking with Simpkins just minutes before the shooting.
“I just can’t believe he would crash and burn like that,” Jones said. “He was cool before. I didn’t think he was going to do what he did. But he did.”
Dylan said Simpkins and Selby used to be friends with one another, but were not friends anymore. He did not know what they were fighting over.
Sean found out sometime during the day that the student who was shot and the shooter are two of his friends. He said the 15-year-old is “always good to me all the time” and is “always the life of the party, really fun to be around.”
On Wednesday, Sean said he was hoping to visit his friend in the hospital soon. As of Thursday, the 15-year-old was in critical condition, police said.
School was canceled for the rest of the week for Timberview and will resume Tuesday. The district set up counseling services in-person and virtually for students, staff and families Thursday “to help individuals begin to process what has happened.”
Some students were already thinking about how the shooting would impact them in the future.
While she stood in the parking lot with her mom Wednesday, Catherine said she hopes to share her experience “for people who have gone through this, and for people who are going to go through this.”
“I can be the person who says, ‘It’s going to be OK, you just have to be strong,’” she said.
Reporter Jessika Harkay contributed to this story.
This story was originally published October 7, 2021 at 6:13 PM.
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