An armed man fleeing cops ran into a Brooklyn school full of kids last week, sources told The Post on Sunday.
The 21-year-old gunman tried taking cover inside IS 271 in Ocean Hill on Friday afternoon, sending the building into lockdown till he was quickly nabbed in the auditorium, according to a school source.
“He just came running into the building,’’ the source said. He “ran straight past the front desk” without uttering a word.
“He was being chased by plainclothes officers,” the source said. “They were right on him. He was arrested right away.”
The incident unfolded at the Herkimer Street middle- and high-school building shortly before 5 p.m., when about 70 kids who ranged from pre-K to eighth grade were inside as part of an after-school program, according to the source and a school incident report obtained by The Post.
It’s unclear what prompted the chase, but the gunman, identified by police as Naijee Calliste, had been wanted by the NYPD on a charge from July, when he allegedly assaulted the mother of his son, according to cops. He was nabbed in the school by three or four officers, the source said.
Calliste was charged with criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree, two counts of reckless endangerment and criminal trespass in the third degree, according to an NYPD spokeswoman.
The source told The Post that none of the children in the school at the time saw the gunman.
City Department of Education rep Nathaniel Styer told The Post in an e-mail Sunday, “Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our students, and the suspect was immediately apprehended.
“Schools provide safe places for students to learn every day and incidents are down 40 percent compared to 2019,” the rep wrote.
The harrowing chase came after a student was repeatedly stabbed in the stomach inside a Bronx school library Thursday.
It also comes after Greg Floyd, the head of the city’s school-safety-agents union, last month warned that City Hall’s newly implemented COVID-19 vaccine mandate for school employees had created a dearth of security workers — and thus a “danger to the students.”
Mona Davids of the New York City School Safety Coalition said Friday’s incident strengthened the case for adding more school safety agents and weakened the argument for Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to remove them from the NYPD’s purview — a move Democratic mayoral nominee Eric Adams recently vowed to block.
“A tragedy was averted,” Davids told The Post of Friday’s ordeal. “[But] this could have escalated.
“That’s why we need to hire more school safety agents to address the shortage.”
Hank Sheinkopf, a spokesman for the school-safety-agents union, added, “Violence is up our streets and in our schools, and the administration refuses to pay attention.”