Teachers, students, and police milled quietly around Central High School and Providence Career and Technical Academy Thursday morning, the day after a shooting claimed the life of a student outside the two schools.
Providence Police identified the victim Thursday as 15-year-old William Parsons, a sophomore at Central High School. A make-shift memorial with candles was set up on the high school sign near the place where Parsons was shot.
On social media, Parsons’ Facebook page now lists many comments with variations of “rest in peace.” On Wednesday afternoon, a young woman who said she was a student referred to Parsons as “a good kid.”
At a press conference Thursday morning, Police Chief Hugh Clements explained what police believe happened in the moments before the shooting Wednesday afternoon, shortly before 2 p.m. He described an argument that broke out between young men.
“Two young men are walking together, one of them pulls out a firearm, introduces the firearm into this disturbance,” Clements said. “Fires once, strikes a 15 year-old student from Central and flees the scene.”
Clements said Parsons, who died of his injuries, is believed to have been an innocent bystander calling the incident, “tragic in every sense of the term, a truly innocent young man has his life taken from him.”
The scene of the shooting is located just blocks away from the city’s public safety complex. Clements said about 50 officers were on the scene within minutes.
A short time later, roughly a mile away from the schools, another Providence student was injured by gunfire. Police said they believe the wound was a self-inflicted gunshot, after a firearm went off accidentally.
The 16-year-old student, who was shot in the leg, is now a suspect in the earlier shooting, authorities said. They plan to bring charges as soon as he is released from the hospital.
Providence police emphasized that the suspect, whose name has not been released, is a student at a city public school, but they said he did not attend Central High School, or the Providence Career and Technical Academy. The suspect was also not a student at a third school less than a block away, Classical High School, according to the police.
Gerry Coyne, the deputy attorney general, said his office plans to charge the teenager with murder.
“I would expect there will be other charges based upon the investigation,” said Coyne.
The suspect will first be charged as a juvenile, but Coyne said it was “almost a certainty” that the Attorney General’s Office would petition for a waiver to prosecute him as an adult.
