Manassas Park City teacher arrested after gun found in school parking lot

A loaded gun found in the parking lot of a Northern Virginia school. Tonight, a teacher under arrest accused of bringing the weapon to campus. So this incident actually forced the closure of four Manassas Park City schools today. Fox 5's Bob Barnard is there with the latest. An art teacher here at Manassas Park High School has been charged with possession of a firearm on school property. Her name is Veronica Gooch-Ray. She's from Loudoun County, Virginia. She's also been placed on leave by the school system here. Manassas Park police say a loaded handgun was discovered in a parking lot by a school employee around 6.30 this morning. It was on the ground between two school system vans in a parking lot here at the combined high school and middle school campus. The employee notified school officials who called police. Investigators say there was no threat made or found related to the loaded gun. Why the teacher allegedly brought it to school, we don't know. Manassas Park City Public Schools officials say the decision to close all four schools in the city was made out of an abundance of caution and to allow police to conduct their investigation. There's the high school and middle school here and then Manassas Park at Cougar Elementary School about two miles from here. We always like to err on the side of caution. We didn't know where this came from. We didn't know if there were any more. So at that point, we made a really quick decision to close schools for the day because we definitely would rather be safe and we want to understand what's going on, give the police department time to do their job while we keep our students as safe as possible. And today we decided that was at home. She said that was good that they closed the school because that's something that is bad and that thing hurt people and they can send people to the hospital. And if we have a threat at one of our schools, we consider that to be a threat to all of our schools. So until we knew what was going on and how widespread that was, we decided to just shut down all of our schools. In all, about 3,500 students were impacted by the decision to close the four public schools here in Manassas Park. We're told none of the elementary students had made it to school. Some high school and middle school students did have to be sent home on their buses. The school system would not say anything more about the arrest other than that the teacher has been placed on leave. All four schools here in Manassas Park are set to reopen tomorrow.