Willis Winters Park, formerly Randall Park — situated near and utilized by Woodrow Wilson High and J.L. Long Middle schools — has been the scene of a “string of unfortunate incidents,” neighbors say. Parents fear for their children’s safety and want to find solutions.
On Feb. 1, Dallas Police seized at least two firearms and broke up a brewing rumble at the park.
And, yesterday, Thursday Feb. 10, another event drew eight-plus police cars and an ambulance to the same site.
While Willis Winters Park, formerly Randall Park, is City-owned property, Dallas Park Board member and park neighbor Rudy Karimi points out that the space is unique in that it essentially is an extension of the school, and that practice areas are like school classrooms.
“I understand that it’s not the ISD property, but there’s a lot of school activity happening there,” he says. “So when I’m told our resource officers don’t go across the street, that’s a big gap to me.”
Karimi thinks there is an opportunity now for all of the entities involved — the City of Dallas, police, the school district and the community — to come together and make some changes before things escalate.
Some parents are at wits’ end, fearing the violence at this location will continue until something tragic happens.
Mom Bonnie Villa, for one, is scared. You can hear it in her shaky voice. Her children have had brushes with danger in the past, she says. They were in a car that the White Rock Shooter fired into last year, she says, perhaps in effort to rationilize her concern. But there’s no blaming her for being worked up about the Feb. 1 incident, yesterday’s scene or other occurrences at the field.
Dramatic photos taken by independent photographer Avi Adelman on the scene Feb. 1 show police taking what appears to be both a modified AR-15 and a handgun into evidence and detaining at least two high-school aged people. (Police relayed later that the pictured arrests, while happening the same afternoon, were unrelated to the firearms). Those images would rattle anyone (with permission from Adelman).
That day, officers broke up a skirmish and participants bolted, possibly discarding weapons as they did so. It does not appear arrests were made in connection to the guns.
Police reported only, as awe reported at the time, that they “found and retrieved two weapons.”
Villa calls the man who alerted police to the fight (someone visiting his wife at Juliette Fowler, she says) “a hero,” because she believes the weapons would have been used if the rumble had not been interrupted.
Villa has children at Long and Woodrow. During three years at Woodrow, Villa’s oldest daughter has been on the softball team, which practices regularly at that park. They had practice the day, right around the time, the guns were photographed, Villa says.
“The softball girls are always there. DISD athletics — students and coaches use that same park all the time,” she says, which, in her opinion, means the district should take more action to prevent problems at the park.
“The issue is, for one, a lot of parents are upset the school did not go on lockdown when this happened,” Villa says. “It was during school hours. Who makes that final call for the school? Is that the principal?”
A district spokesperson Robyn Harris says that school was out by the time administrators learned what was happening, on both occasions.
She says schools can still go into lockdown after hours, but that in the Feb. 1 case, by the time police determined what was happening, the situation did not warrant that type of action.
While police found a weapon, she says, guns were not being brandished in the air; there was not an active shootout happening.
If a case involving active shooting occurred at the park, there are various processes and a number of ways a lockdown could be initiated — “it would be Dallas Police or Dallas ISD police communicating that you need to go into lockdown,” she says.
Villa says the softball coach got word of what was happening that day and moved practice to the gym. But while the softball girls were safe and locked down, “what about my other kids,” she says.
When Villa spotted the slew of emergency vehicles at the park again yesterday, she says, she was “pissed off.”
“What’s it going to take?” she wrote on a Facebook post that included photos of an ambulance driving away “with lights on.”
Karimi says his phone “started blowing up” while was working from home yesterday. He went out and saw the emergency vehicles at the park, which was unusual and concerning. He says Dallas ISD police responded very quickly to whatever was happening, which is something to be thankful for,” he says.
A J.L. Long administrator sent a note to parents Thursday evening explaining that “an altercation involving students and parents at Willis Winters Park” occurred and that one arrest of an adult, unrelated, ensued.
Karimi says there has been “perhaps a lack of transparency” on the part of DPD and DISD when it comes to addressing the recent “string of unfortunate incidents,” the most significant being the previously mentioned.
“There’s a lot of urgency to this. You just need to get the right folks at the table — I know the PTA president and other school representatives might be meeting with police, City [representatives] and community members as soon as next week — and discuss some of the obvious solutions. And some of the not so obvious solutions.”
That could mean more police, but not too many, as well as getting to deeper issues, he says, like why are students choosing to be truant? What are root causes? What can be done to change that?
“I am going to do my best as Park Board member to be transparent and give people what they need to know from our park staff,” he says.
He mentions security cameras and other measures that the Park Department has undertaken and that they plan to add more.
On behalf of the school district, Harris says she would love to have more collaboration to make that area more secure. She sees a potential solution in “a community-led effort to really work with city officials, campus administration and law enforcement — from not only the school side, but also the the City side — because they could lend more help in personnel.”
Karimi says there’s a chance to work together to halt the brewing problem before parents like Villa see any of their nightmares come to fruition.
“We have an opportunity here to do more in a very short amount of time — while it is at the forefront of everyone’s minds — than in the years past combined, he says. It is a really good time for us to come together and showcase what can we do as a community.”
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About the Author: Christina Hughes Babb
