The mom of the 7-year-old who brought a loaded handgun into a Far Rockaway school on Thursday, prompting a school lockdown, allegedly admitted to cops that she put the gun in the backpack. Deborah Farley, 53, has been charged with criminal possession of a weapon, endangering the welfare of a child, drug possession and several other weapons-related charges. It's still unclear why she put the .22 caliber handgun, ammunition and a flare gun in her son's Batman backpack, but prosecutors said she had purchased the unlicensed gun last summer because she was fearful of the loiterers hanging near her home’s stairwell. “Why she did it, I don’t know,” Farley’s son, 21-year-old Michael, told the Post.
Still, Farley's husband Walter Orozco, 56, denied that either he or his wife owned a gun. “We’ve been living together for 11 years. We never had a gun,” Orozco told the Times. He also maintains that their 7-year-old son Tyler is bullied at school. “They called him sissy and white boy. He didn’t want to go to school. He fakes like he’s coughing when he gets up in the morning.” He added, “We always complained, but the school didn’t do anything.” Previously, Orozco has insinuated that the weapons may have belonged to Michael, who he claimed was in a gang.
According to police, Farley admitted that she had put the weapons in the backpack Wednesday night, then forgotten to take it out. Tyler allegedly didn't know the gun was there when he made his way to class at Wave Preparatory Elementary School; once Farley realized what had happened, she signed him out on the pretext that he had a dental appointment. When she didn't immediately see the gun, there was a lot of confusion.
“Thinking his mother was referring to the flare gun he had already given to another youngster in the school and not realizing himself that there was a handgun still in the bottom of his backpack,” the boy said he gave it to a friend, said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department. “With that, the mother told the principal, who alerted school safety officers, implemented a lockdown and located the other boy in one of the school’s second-floor classrooms, where the unloaded Orion flare gun was found in his backpack.”
After cops found seven small bags of marijuana and more ammunition in their home, Tyler and his 9-year-old sister were been placed into ACS. Farley's lawyer defended her in court: “She has continuously been coerced by drug dealers and gang-bangers and she wanted to protect her family, not endanger them or the community,” said attorney, John A. Scarpa, who requested that she be put on suicide watch because she was “extremely depressed.”
