A student was shot inside Wootton High School on Feb. 9, which led to the school being placed on lockdown for several hours. The wounded student was hospitalized and underwent significant surgeries. The suspect, another student, was placed in police custody.
According to authorities, the shooting took place after an altercation between the shooter and the victim in a hallway of the school. The suspect, recently identified as 16-year-old Kayhlil White-Villatoro, faces several charges of assault, weapon possession and attempted murder and will be tried as an adult. Recent reports have also emerged that the shooter aimed the gun at a female 15-year-old student earlier in the day, but that the student was not injured.
According to the Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD), police officers were dispatched to the school at approximately 2:15 p.m. after receiving a report of the shooting. At roughly 2:16, a school administrator announced over the school’s intercom that students were to shelter in place. Soon after, police officers and a SWAT team surrounded the school.
Junior Manu Poggio was sitting in a classroom across the building from where the shooting took place when the lockdown was announced. As Poggio and her classmates took shelter, still unaware of what was happening, they could hear heavily-armed SWAT officers enter the building and begin combing the hallway outside for potential threats.
“We hid behind our desks, and we heard cops come in from like 2:20 until 2:45, non-stop,” Poggio said. “That’s all we could hear. We were all just sitting in the back of our classroom panicking, texting our parents.”
Because no specific information was given over the school’s intercom system, students did not discover that there had been a shooting until they saw reports of it on social media and through local news sources.
“My friend had been able to take her Mac out and she saw through there [because] it had been reported on Instagram,” junior Alexandra Rabin said. “A lot of us were watching the live stream on Fox 5 News.”
After the search was completed at approximately 4:30 p.m., law enforcement officers began dismissing students for reunification one classroom at a time. Poggio was dismissed quickly due to her classroom’s location on the second floor, while Rabin and many other students on the first floor of the building were not dismissed until as late as 6 p.m.
“A SWAT officer comes in with a huge gun and he tells everyone to leave our backpacks where they are, don’t touch anything, just take your [sic] phones, wallets and walk in a single file line,” Poggio said. “In other classrooms, the cops would come in pointing their guns at students…When we got to the hallway it was like a movie scene. There were 45 cops at least with humongous guns.”
After being dismissed from the lockdown, most students boarded buses to Robert Frost Middle School to be reunified with their parents, a process which also took several hours and was impeded by heavy traffic in the area.
The day after the incident, MCPS officials made the decision to keep Wootton open for a non-instructional day. Mental health resources were made available for students and all absences were excused. Many, including Rabin, went to the school in the morning to pick up belongings they had left behind after the lockdown. Although security was reportedly increased at Wootton after the shooting, the school operated on a normal schedule for the rest of the week.
In response to the shooting, MCPS superintendent Thomas W. Taylor released a statement to the Wootton community expressing sympathy for the victim and all affected students and gratitude for the county’s staff, as well reassurances surrounding school security. “Though no safety or security measure is 100% effective, there is a strong and growing body of research that concludes that the safest schools are those where students feel connected to adults they can trust and where everyone understands that safety is a shared responsibility,” Taylor wrote. “We cannot eliminate all risk; however, we can reduce risk and build environments where students trust adults enough to speak up early.”
This article was originally published as a developing story. It was last updated on Feb. 18, 2026 at 1:27 PM.
