Parkrose High School Student Disarming

Overview

Parkrose High School Student Disarming refers to the event in which 18 year-old student Angel Granados-Diaz walked into a classroom with a shotgun intending to kill himself but was stopped by High School coach Keanon Lowe who quickly disarmed Granados-Diaz and held him in a prolonged hug. The incident took place in May 2019 at Parkrose High School in Oregon but was not widely covered by news media until October 2019 when security footage of Lowe disarming the student was released and went viral.

Background

On May 17th, 2019, Fox 12 Oregon^[1] confirmed on Twitter that "Parkrose High School football coach and former Oregon Ducks football player Keanon Lowe tackled the suspect with a gun on campus today." New spread on Twitter of a gunman that was prevented from injuring anyone on the Parkrose campus (shown below). The Fox 12 tweet gained over 1,100 likes and 380 retweets in five months.

Notable Developments

On May 18th, 2019, 27 year-old High School coach Keanon Lowe^[2] tweeted, "When I signed up to be a Security Guard, Football and Track & Field Coach for Parkrose High School, I did so to guide and coach young people whose shoes I had once been in. I had no idea, that I would one day have to put my life on the line like I did yesterday for my students." (shown below). The tweet garnered over 26,800 likes and 3,700 retweets in five months.

On May 31th, 2019, Oregon's local community members came together and honor Keanon Lowe. The Oregonian uploaded a video of the gathering to YouTube which received over 1,500 views in five months (shown below).

On October 10th, Granados-Diaz was confirm during trial to have intended to hurt only himself and was sentence to three years probation and immediate mental health treatment for "one count of unlawful possession of a firearm in a public building and one count of unlawful possession of a loaded firearm in public."^[3] On October 18th, Reporter Tilkin posted a video "of Coach Keanon Lowe disarming Parkrose High School gunman Angel Granados-Diaz" to Twitter (shown below). The video gained over 5.1 million views. 17,500 retweets and 55,600 likes in three days.

The next day, The Parkrose^[4] superintendent posted a letter regarding the video to Twitter (shown below). Superintendent Michael Lopes Serrao apologized to families, students and staff at Parkrose that the security footage was released and claimed that they did not give permission to KOIN to release the footage as they feel that it goes against the Family Education and Rights Privacy Act (shown below). The tweet accumulated over 1,000 likes and 180 retweets in two days. On October 20th, The New York Times^[5] published an article covering the event.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References