to be about a dozen students leaving the school. and now more. these students do not have their arms raised. but they are coming out in large numbers. what do you make of this? this is a typical evacuation. when these things are done by the tactical teams, they they do in a system what we call live and locate and evacuate, eliminate the threat. they are trying to get everybody away. they locate, they isolate, they eliminate the threat, and they evacuate. so let me tell you what we are getting here. broward county sheriff tweeted shooter is still at large. shooter is still at large. they do not have somebody either neutralized or in custody. as of now. but they are letting students out. and i want to ask jim for your interpretation but i want to give everybody more news and for those of you joining us, this is parkland, florida. north of coral springs florida. west southwest of boca. it is in broward county.
many parents are outside of the park because they are concerned and want to be but they are seeing that is the staging area. they are going to do you have a sibling? do you go to the school. i used to. i just graduated. they are taking the kids from douglas that are there and driving them to betty charlene park. in buses. and they re doing it right now. and have you been able to communicate with people inside of the school. i ve been talking with my friends and one of my friends said their friend is dead. i m waiting for my other friends to respond that they are okay. that is terrible. and what else do you know? what scene right now they are sailing it as a white male and maroon shirt. we know that. what are they saying inside of the school. just a lot of blood. a lot of blood. and what do you know? one of my friends s mom was over there and explaining they heard banging outside of the freshman building and then they locked the door and then that was it. it was
happening? um, it s sad. it s sad that these tragedies happen in our country. well, mayor, the interesting thing, i m hoping that most of the kids are safe because i was at the school two weeks ago to give a speech and when i was there, there was a drill for this kind of thing. so thank goodness they do practice this. yes. and many of the students have been in touch with their parents, we have many, many parents out here. siblings out here are communicating via text. that is good. so they know their child is safe. that is good news. that is good to hear. we know that governor has been following this and tweeted out and so has the congresswoman from this area. debbie wasserman schultz and the president is aware of this. has the congress woman reached out to you or the government? i have been very busy with the residents here and the
mayor of parkland. are you with us? yes, i am. could you give us the latest you ve been made aware of. i m right here at the corner of homeberg and coral springs drive. this is still a very active situation. we have first responders from all over the area here. last i heard they are still working on securing the building. and so, mayor, of course you are my mayor so it is good to talk to you but not under these circumstances. what do we know about injuries? because we did see one, maybe two people leaving the school on stretchers. yes. well, as you can imagine, our first responders are extremely busy doing their jobs now. so we have received very little first-hand information and we ve tried to stay back and allow them to do their job. maybe, do we know how many kids are still inside of the building? no. but it is it s probably quite an amount because they went on immediate lockdown. right.
could retrieve your children. but again, we ve got some kids hiding in closets, calling out to their parents. we had the one poor dad in texas who his son, when he heard the gunshots, he said he ran, jumped over the fence and got away. but didn t go too far because he knew his sister was still in the school. but couldn t go back to try and get her out. the father is in texas, the daughter and he talked but then the line dropped. so it is a very tense situation for parents. as a parents, i cannot imagine this. we did speak with a parent saying she was communicating via text with her daughter in lockdown in a classroom and at one point the text stopped and she kept texting her daughter and she was not responding. we re hoping that she wasn t able to respond because she was on her way out of the building. we ve seen tweets from students who were under chairs and under desks in the classroom. scary situation. you have hundreds of parents there wondering where their kids are and if they a