Jan 19, 2006 4:32 PM
One minute Freddie Rodriguez was in his classroom writing “parallel circuit analysis” on the board and the next minute he was running down the hallway with a 357 Magnum, chasing the masked gunman who tossed it. Oct. 20 had started out as a normal day at Aviation HS until the only girl in Rodriguez’s 9th-grade electrical class “walked in real calm and said, ‘There are two people outside with guns ripping off a student.’
“I walked out of the class, locked the door behind me to protect the students, went over to the stairwell, and saw a guy with his hood pulled up and a black bandanna tied around his face standing on the stairs below, struggling with whomever he was trying to rip off.
“I didn’t see any gun at that point,” he said. But as Rodriguez moved closer, another perpetrator came into view on his right, wearing the same kind of disguise, holding a gun to a student’s temple. Then, Rodriguez “just reacted.
“I was protecting my home and my children,” said Rodriguez, who’s been teaching at the Long Island City school for 25 years. “I went into another mode; I can’t even explain. I said, ‘Yo, what are you doing?’ to get the guy’s attention. He hadn’t seen me yet and now he looked at me. We locked eyes for a second. It felt like a lot longer than a second.” Then the gunman bolted down the stairs.
At that moment Mike Ramirez, who teaches aviation mechanics, had finished working on a colleague’s hard drive and was walking out of the classroom when Rodriguez called out, “Mike! Get that guy! They have guns!”
Ramirez said, “I saw two students really struggling, fighting, so I burst through the doors and looked at the situation and saw that the kid on the bottom had what appeared to be a gun in a bag.”
Rodriguez, meanwhile, was running down the stairs to chase the gunman, but Ramirez thought he was getting security personnel and had no idea there was another perpetrator on the loose. Ramirez pulled the two guys apart, ordered them to freeze, stood between them, and began sorting out who was the victim and who was the mugger. What had seemed like a gun inside the bag turned out to be a soft-drink bottle.
But there was a very real gun in the hands of the kid running through the halls on the first floor, Rodriguez in pursuit. The gunman opened a locker and tossed the weapon inside.
“Security ! Gun, gun, gun!” Rodriguez yelled.
“As I was running past the lockers I opened one, thank God I opened the right one, and picked up the gun and continued to run after the guy,” he said. “I ran into the lobby, asking if anyone saw the kid, and there he was, right behind the security guy, acting innocent, his hood down and the bandanna that had been around his face was down around his neck. We grabbed him.
“It turned out that the gun — I knew that it was a real gun as soon as I saw it — was empty, but we found bullets in the kid’s backpack,” Rodriguez said.
It also turned out that both muggers were students at Aviation, which made the incident even more upsetting for Rodriguez and Ramirez, who jointly won the Audrey Chasen Award for bravery at the UFT’s Teacher Union Day on Nov. 6.
“I’m amazed that anyone would do that here,” said Ramirez, who has been teaching at Aviation for 15 years and graduated from the school in 1972. “It wasn’t until I was going home, I was on the bus, that I figured I must be dumb. But I just reacted; I wasn’t thinking about me, I was more worried about the kids.
“But the real hero was the girl who told us what was going on. She could’ve kept quiet like everyone else did in the hallway, and she chose not to.”
Rodriguez is “hoping for the best for the two students. It could be a broken household, drugs at home, peer pressure like wanting to be a gang member, you never know. They’re going to an SOS school for a year and I hope it’s a wake-up call and that they get their life together.
“As for me? This school is my home. And I still see that gun to the kid’s head.”