Officials at Waukegan High School were conducting an internal investigation Tuesday into whether a 19-year-old student accused of trying to hire a classmate to kill his estranged wife, also a student at the high school, conspired to commit the act on school grounds, authorities said.
The student, Randolph Rosario, of the 3000 block of West 8th Street, Waukegan, was arrested Saturday night and charged with trying to pay a 17-year-old classmate $300 to kill his 18-year-old wife, according to Capt. Donald Johnson of the Waukegan Police Department.
Rosario is a special-education student at the high school, according to Al Rogers, director of safety and services at the school.
Distraught over the breakup of his marriage, Rosario wanted the classmate to kill his wife with a single gunshot in the head, then to kill him the same way, Johnson said.
School officials weren’t aware of Rosario’s arrest and the alleged involvement of another student until Tuesday morning, when they read news accounts of the incident, Rogers said.
He said that if it’s determined that the murder plot was hatched on campus, “the district administration will look to the school code for the appropriate punishment of the students.”
Rosario was under a suicide watch at the Lake County Jail on Tuesday, held on a $250,000 bond, according to Lt. John O’Connor, a corrections division manager with the sheriff’s office.