KENOSHA — The 16-year-old accused of smuggling a gun into Indian Trail High School made his first court appearance Thursday.
No pleas were made. Instead, a second court date for a waiver petition hearing was scheduled for Jan. 6. The waiver filed is to petition the teen to get tried in adult court.
The judge ruled the teen will stay in custody until the next court date.
Since the situation unfolded at the Kenosha High School, TMJ4 has been trying to get more clarity on what took place.
Despite multiple requests for transparency from Kenosha Unified School District, TMJ4 has not heard back.
On Thursday, TMJ4's Mariam Mackar sat down with a lieutenant from the Kenosha Police Department to discuss protocols for school resource officers (SROs) to find out if different tools — like a metal detecting wand— would have caught the student earlier.
"For us, as soon as this happened and we were made aware of it, an internal investigation started and that's kind of standard protocol," Lieutenant Joshua Hecker with KPD said.
Watch: Teen in court after bringing gun to school, Kenosha PD talks SRO policy
That internal investigation is regarding whether or not the officers who searched a student this week, and missed a hidden gun, violated policies.
The student was hand-searched once the tip about a weapon was brought to the SRO's attention.
"Do you have any idea if a wand or metal detector was used in this instance?" Mackar asked.
"There was not a metal detecting device used," Hecker answered.
The Lieutenant said SROs are not given metal detecting wands by the department, though some schools use them for large crowd events like dances and games.
He told Mackar that searching students with detectors is not standard operating procedure within KPD.
"Should that be used in future searches of this nature?" Mackar asked the Lieutenant.
"I don't want to speculate on that," Hecker said. "Wands, just like any technology, have their issues. They're not a fail-safe. Belt buckles, buttons on shirts, and other things will cause those wands to go off. Is it another tool that we can use? Possibly. It's not something that we use currently."
Mackar asked security expert, Christopher Ederesinghe who owns Volden Investigations LLC, for his thoughts on the question:
Would a wand have found the gun in this case?
"A metal gun, unless it's using certain alloys, is always going to be found with a metal detector —presuming the metal detector is used properly," Ederesinghe said.
He agrees with Hecker that a detector is not foolproof, but in cases like this where the gun was hidden in a sensitive area, Ederesinghe says it could have made a difference.
"No tool we use is 100 percent, but a magnetometer is a fantastic tool to search someone without actually touching them."
Lieutenant Hecker said their department is constantly updating training and looking over protocols to be as efficient and effective as possible— something they will do in this case once their internal investigation is over.
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