UPDATE: Father of man arrested with gun, ammo at N.J. school heard son was there to see girlfriend, or ex, and brother called police

Nine-year-old Minhal Waqar was in the garage, retrieving a step stool, when an SUV pulled into the elementary school parking lot that juts up against their home. A police car pulled in behind it. Then another.

“She went crazy,” her mother Hina Waqar, 32, recalled. She said her daughter exclaimed: “Cops are there, cops are there, cops are there!”

On Thursday afternoon, police in Westfield arrested a 46-year-old Delaware man in the Tamaques Elementary School parking lot. Authorities said Thomas J. Wilkie had a .45-caliber handgun, hollow-point bullets and more than 130 rounds of ammunition. Although the arrest occurred after classes had ended, some after-school activities were still underway, and Tamaques was placed on lockdown for more than an hour.

Wilkie was later charged with trespassing, possession of hollow-point bullets and unlawful possession of a weapon, according to the Union County Prosecutor’s Office.

NBC New York, citing a senior law enforcement source, reported Friday that Wilkie “targeted the school because of a relationship gone bad with a faculty member.”

NBC reported that Wilkie actually entered the school -- without a gun -- and called the woman, who was apparently not at the school at the time, but told him she would return. He then called his brother, who called police, NBC reported.

Less than 24-hours after the arrest, families walked through the leafy suburb as classes let out for the weekend while a police officer sitting guard near the school’s entrance warded off visitors.

Residents expressed unease about the arrest, but were positive about how the school and police department had handled it all.

Grace Hutchinson, a 17-year-old who once attended Tamaques, was driving home from her job at a frozen yogurt store around 4 p.m. on Thursday when she saw two cop cars race toward the school.

When she pulled up to her home nearby, she saw more flashing lights in the parking lot. The whole scene was relatively quiet, she and others said, as she watched faculty and staff gather outside. Hutchinson didn’t even remember any sirens, despite a growing cluster of more than a half-dozen police vehicles.

The cops drove right in front of Philip Ziegler, 42, who was organizing camping gear at his house across from Tamaques. Finding out later why the police had arrived made him uneasy, he said, because he has three kids at the school. But seeing Principal David Duelks at the scene talking to parents, he said, and the speed at which officers responded comforted him.

“It’s close to home, but your kids can’t live in a bubble,” he said. “You move on, and they go off to school today.”

Hina Waqar, the parent whose daughter witnessed part of the arrest, said she would talk with her fourth-grader after school Friday to see how she was feeling. Her daughter didn’t know about tragedies like the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, she said, and she didn’t plan to tell her.

But that horror felt far off. School officials had emailed the evening before to explain some of what had happened, she said, and that quick communication reassured her.

“It was handled so good that, living literally in the same parking lot, I wasn’t scared,” she said.

Blake Nelson can be reached at bnelson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @BCunninghamN.

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