7 Things To Know: Maryland School Shooting Cop Blaine Gaskill

GREAT MILLS, MD — The school resource officer at Great Mills High School is credited with potentially saving lives when he fired upon a student who shot two teens Tuesday morning in the hallway of the southern Maryland high school. Deputy First Class Blaine Gaskill is credited with stopping the threat of the active shooter, a 17-year-old student who died after he injured two of his peers, leaving one in critical condition.

Here are seven things to know about Gaskill:

Gaskill is a school resource officer. Known as SROs for short, these officers are assigned at each of the three high schools in St. Mary's County. In addition to being law enforcement officers, SROs in St. Mary's County act as mentors and teachers. They are certified through the National Association of School Resource Officers and DARE. Gaskill is a six-year veteran of the St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office and was assigned to Great Mills High School in August 2017, according to The Washington Post.

He responded in less than a minute. Shots rang out in the hallway just before classes started at Great Mills High School, around 7:55 a.m. on Tuesday, March 20. Gaskill "was alerted and immediately responded and engaged the shooter," St. Mary's County Sheriff Timothy Cameron said.

Gaskill fired at the shooter, but it's unclear if that was the fatal bullet. Gaskill "fired at the shooter and what has been described to me as almost simultaneously, the shooter fired," the sheriff said. Since the teen and officer fired their weapons at the same time, it was unclear whether shooting suspect Austin Rollins, 17, was killed by the officer's gunfire or by his own, according to the sheriff. Surveillance footage from the school was being reviewed. "In the hours to come and the days to come, through detailed investigation, we will be able to determine if our school resource officer's round struck the shooter," Cameron said.

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The officer is a "tough guy" credited with saving lives. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who said he had been briefed by the sheriff, told the media that Gaskill seemed to be a "very capable school resources officer" who was also a SWAT team member. "This is a tough guy who apparently closed in very quickly and took the right kind of action," Hogan said, "and I think while it’s still tragic, he may have saved other people’s lives.”

Gaskill was not injured. "The school resource officer is uninjured and was not struck by any firearm projectile," Cameron said.

He had encountered a person holding a gun before. In July 2016 Gaskill arrested a man who pointed a gun at him when the officer was responding to a domestic disturbance in Great Mills, according to Southern Maryland News. Gaskill could be heard on body camera footage ordering the suspect to drop his weapon; the man dropped the gun and pleaded guilty in February 2017 to the charges of first-degree assault and using a firearm to commit a felony. During the encounter in Great Mills High School on Tuesday morning, junior Isiah Tichenor told The Baltimore Sun that as he closed the door to his computer literacy class, he came face to face with Rollins, who had a gun pointed at his own head, before the SRO turned the corner and could be heard saying: "Put the gun down. We know you don't want to hurt anyone else."

Gaskill may have made history. According to The Washington Post, if his bullet hit the teen, Gaskill may be the second SRO in the nation to stop an active shooter, the first since Columbine in 1999. Gaskill happens to serve in a southern Maryland county which has also made law enforcement history. St. Mary's County claims to have been home to the first sheriff in the country, where Sheriff James Baldridge was appointed in 1637. To this day, its website is firstsheriff.com.

Photo courtesy of St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office.