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CAUTION: Cops are on alert at Wave Preparatory Elementary School yesterday after Deborah Farley (top right) allegedly dropped off her 7-year-old with a gun in his bag, which the boy’s dad, Walter Orozco (bottom right), denies. (
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A Queens mom was arrested for sending her 7-year-old son to school with a .22-caliber semiautomatic firearm, a flare gun and ammo — all stashed in his purple Batman backpack, authorities said yesterday.
Deborah Farley, 53, confessed to cops that she had been walking in her neighborhood carrying the illegal weapons in son Tyler’s book bag for protection and forgot to remove them before he went to class Thursday, law-enforcement sources said.
Farley had purchased the gun last summer because she was fearful of the loiterers hanging by her home’s stairwell, prosecutors said.
“Why she did it, I don’t know,” said Farley’s older son, Michael, 21.
Farley told cops that she’d dropped Tyler off at Wave Preparatory Elementary School at 7:50 a.m., then soon realized her horrible mistake.
She rushed back to her son’s school in Far Rockaway and signed him out, claiming he had a dental appointment, authorities said.
She searched the backpack but didn’t immediately see the gun and asked her son whether he had seen it, authorities added.
Thinking his mother was referring to the flare gun, the boy said he gave it to a friend, sources said.
Farley told the principal, who alerted school-safety officers. The school went on lockdown, and school cops found the other boy in a second-floor classroom.
The unloaded, orange and black Orion flare gun was in that boy’s book bag.
The .22-caliber gun and ammo — 10 bullets in a magazine clip and 14 more in a plastic bag — were soon found still in Tyler’s backpack.
Farley allegedly admitted to the principal that, out of fear of going to jail, she had concocted a tale that one of her older sons had put the gun in the youngster’s bag.
But Tyler’s father denied that the family even owns weapons.
“I don’t know how that gun got into my son’s book bag,” said Walter Orozco. He said the gun may belong to one of his older sons, who’s “in a gang.”
He also defended his wife, saying “she’s a good mom.”
Cops later found seven bags of marijuana in the family home, as well as four rounds of .22-caliber ammunition stashed in a cardboard box, prosecutors said.
At her arraignment last night, Farley was held on $35,000 bail and ordered to stay away from Tyler, pending a family court order for “supervised visitation.”
He and his 10-year-old sister are in city custody.
“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 Farley’s attorney, John A. Scarpa, who requested that his client be put on suicide watch because she was “extremely depressed.”
Farley has a 1988 conviction for grand larceny in Nassau County.
Additional reporting by Christina Carrega