Eric Parsons / Star staff Loretta Mitchell looks for her niece, E.O. Green School eighth-grader Stormy Span, who was in a classroom next to the room where the shooting occurred Tuesday.

Video: Shooting at middle school

Students, parents reunited after shooting
   Slowly, students are released to their parents after a student was shot by another student at E.O. Green middle school in Oxnard.
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School shooting at E.O. Green
   Parents wait for kids to be released from Oxnard's E.O. Green middle school after a student was arrested for shooting another student in a classroom.
Watch now »

SLIDE SHOW

Photos from the scene. More will be added through the day.
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Lisa Span raced through Oxnard streets Tuesday, thinking she would soon see her daughter.

She was escorted under yellow police tape. But E.O. Green School was on "lockdown," so Span was funneled with hundreds of other parents onto an athletic field to wait for their children.

The only news circulating was that there had been a shooting — from the radio, a call from a relative, or a text message from a student. The frustration was palpable, and no one knew what to do.

"I ran out of work. I left my cell phone at the office," Span said. "Where are we supposed to go?"

Span stood in front of a chain-link fence, borrowing a cell phone to call her daughter, Stormy, who was in a classroom next to the room where the shooting occurred.

Beyond the athletic fields, dozens of uniformed police officers guarded the campus as four news helicopters hovered — a soundtrack to the morning's crisis.

Police say a 15-year-old boy was shot by a classmate in a computer lab during a first-period English class Tuesday — the first time a student has shot another student at a Ventura County school in recent memory.

By noon, several TV and radio news organizations were mistakenly reporting that the eighth-grade victim had died in the hospital, adding to the worry among parents, who were told to line up along the fence.

Julie Sotzin was standing in line for 45 minutes and wasn't sure when she would see her son, Jimmy.

"We kept getting conflicting reports of what happened," the Port Hueneme woman said.

The shooting occurred about 8:30 a.m. Officials began releasing the students one-by-one to parents about 10:30 a.m., but the process stretched well into the afternoon.

Some parents begged to get to the front of the line, their confused faces looking through the fence to the school's playground, where the children eventually appeared.

City and school officials told the parents that if they were waiting in the line, their children were safe. The mother of the single victim had already been notified, and about 25 other students who witnessed the shooting were safe but needed to be questioned, police and school officials said.

The process to get their children was slow, parents said. They had to show identification and then enter the school grounds through a gate on a far corner. Then they had to hold up a white slip that was the ticket to getting their child, then wait in another line.

It wasn't until about 2 p.m. that the hundreds of remaining parents were allowed to come onto campus all at once. They ran back onto the athletic field to greet their children.

Not knowing what Stormy was going through was "nerve-wracking" for Span. Three hours later, she finally saw her.

"She was an emotional wreck," Span said later. "She knew the two boys and never would have thought they would do something like this."

Stormy told her mom she thought the gunshots were fireworks at first.

Neighbor Frank Ramos has lived on West Yucca Street just north of the South C Street school for more than 40 years. "Nothing like this has ever happened here before," said Ramos as he stood outside and looked at all the police cars parked around the school. "This is truly a sad day."

Parent Edward Castillo dropped his twin daughters off at the school at 7 a.m. Shortly before 10 a.m., while driving on Highway 101 in the San Fernando Valley, he got a call about the shooting from a business associate.

"My heart dropped," Castillo said. "I went flush. I thought the worst."

— Star staff writers Charles Levin and John Scheibe contributed to this report.