‘I made a mistake’: Former Olathe East student convicted in school shooting speaks from jail

By Lara Moritz

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    OLATHE, Kansas (KMBC) — What began as a regular day for the nearly 2,000 students and staff at Olathe East High School ended in gunfire on March 4, 2022.

Senior Jaylon Elmore was found with a gun.

What happened after that altered the lives of multiple people: Assistant Principal Kaleb Stoppel, School Resource Officer Erik Clark, and Elmore were all wounded.

For the first time, Elmore is talking about why he brought a gun to school, and the incident that sent him first to the hospital, then to jail, and soon, to prison.

“I was kind of like staying with my friend, it just stayed in my book bag,” Elmore said in an interview on video from the Johnson County Jail.

Elmore said he had the gun because he wasn’t staying at his mom’s house.

“I had three different, four different book bags. It just stayed in one of my book bags,” he said. “That was the bag I always had my stuff in, going out on my own.”

When another student saw the weapon in Elmore’s bag, they alerted school officials.

Elmore was then called into Stoppel’s office.

It’s an interaction Stoppel will remember forever.

“‘I’m going to have to search you,'” Stoppel said that was part of the conversation he had with Elmore. “‘Can we go ahead and search your bag?’ That’s when he said no, and said, ‘I just want to go.'”

“There wasn’t anything dangerous going through my mind,” Elmore said from jail. “Just going home — wanting to get to the crib. I wasn’t thinking about — I mean I knew I was in trouble about everything, but, I was scared. I was more scared, for real.”

Stoppel told KMBC 9 News in a previous interview, “One of the last things I remember, before being on the ground, was him reaching down, pulling out the gun, and then I remember the pops. And then I remember more pops from the SRO.

“I don’t remember what I did next, but what I remember is being on the ground with him, and pushing my weight into him with my hand on the gun, trying to pry it away.”

All three were shot.

All three recovered.

“I wasn’t trying to kill nobody,” Elmore said. “How they made it seem is I was trying to shoot everybody in the room and leave, which was stupid, because you’ve got, like, 10 other people outside the office and everything. I wasn’t trying to kill nobody. I was just trying to go home.”

Home is a place Elmore won’t see for a very long time. He’s now serving a 20-year sentence.

We asked if he could do the day over again, what he’d do.

“I’d hand the bag over,” he said. “That’s what I’d do. I’d hand the bag over. I’ve got the mindset now to hand the bag over.”

Elmore thinks about what happened that day. He has a message to everyone at Olathe East.

“I’m still the same person that they knew,” he said. “Just a little wiser. I made a mistake. I would like to apologize to them and everything for putting them through that. I know that can be hard.”

One question Elmore didn’t answer: Why pull the trigger?

He said he is working on forgiving himself for what happened that day.

He plans on earning his GED while he’s incarcerated.

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