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Lockdown Lifted After BB Gun Found At Upper East Side School

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) -- A lockdown was lifted Tuesday afternoon at an Upper East Side public school where a BB gun was found in a bathroom.

Life Sciences Secondary School was locked down around 11 a.m. for about two hours while police investigated the incident.

Police were questioning two male students, CBS 2's Hazel Sanchez reported.

Witnesses told the principal they saw a 17-year-old student loading a gun inside the school. Police searched the campus and found the BB gun and pellets inside a backpack belonging to the student, authorities said. The teen also had marijuana in his possession, investigators said.

He was charged with weapon possession, Sanchez reported. It was unclear what the involvement of the second student being interviewed was.

There were no reports of the gun being fired.

"It was terrifying," student Star Perez told Sanchez. "Everybody was crowding inside the lunchrooms and stuff like that, and the teachers were screaming at us, so we were all shocked.

"It's not good at all because you can hurt someone with even a BB gun," she added. "So for every kid, it's frightening."

"I was just hoping that it wasn't serious, that the person wasn't actually going to harm us -- because my teacher is pregnant," added student Janina Oliver.

Life Sciences serves about 725 students in grades 6 through 12.

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