Marron radioed now-retired School Resource Officer Jess Gilman, who caught the boy, who was carrying a large knife, fleeing onto Fairview Road, Marron said.
In the week since the deadly Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., some school board trustees have singled out Mesa as an example of vigilance in Newport-Mesa Unified.
Principal Phil D'Agostino has worked at multiple schools in the district but praises his security colleagues at Mesa as the most professional he's seen.
"The surveillance systems are one tool in a huge toolbox of things," said D'Agostino, who gets a weekly security briefing from the three-person crew.
The masters of that toolbox are Marron and Richard Gomez, who have almost three decades of combined experience securing Mesa.
The two talk a lot about "intel." They investigate complaints after the fact and try to preempt any incidents by asking kids about what makes them uncomfortable on or around campus.
"You have to learn to dig without being intrusive," Gomez said, calling kids his No. 1 resource.
"Every school I think has to assess where their weaknesses are," he said. "I don't know what it is for every school. All I can do is try to assess what our weaknesses are and shore those up, and that's what we've done. That's what I think means that you can say, 'We're as safe as I think we could possibly be.'"
Right now, Newport-Mesa staff is doing assessment that on a districtwide level. The man at the head of that review, Supt. Fred Navarro, was Mesa's principal when its relatively high-tech security program began.
The school community pieced together enough money for the first handful of cameras in 2002.
Immediately, they saw a drop in graffiti, other vandalism and gang activity, according to Gomez and Navarro.
