Colorado high school gunman shot two students before killing himself
A student carried a shotgun into his
Colorado high school on Friday,
asked for a teacher by name and
then shot two students before killing
himself, law enforcement officers
said.
One student, a teenage girl, was
transported in serious condition to
hospital, from the scene at Arapahoe
High School, south of Denver. A
second student suffered a minor
gunshot wound and was expected to
be released from hospital later on
Friday.
“The shooter is dead as a result
of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, so
there are no immediate threats at this
time,” Arahapoe county sheriff
Grayson Robinson said, outside the
school. “Unfortunately we have one
student who was injured.”
The shooter was later named by
authorities as Karl Halverson
Pierson.
In a news conference on Friday
afternoon, Colorado governor John
Hickenlooper condemned "this all-
too-familiar sequence, where you
have gunshots, and parents racing to
the school and this unspeakable
horror in a place of learning".
The high school is about 15
minutes from Columbine High School,
the site of a 1999 shooting in which
two gunmen killed 12 pupils, a
teacher and themselves . The incident
took place a day before the one-year
anniversary of a shooting incident at
Sandy Hook elementary school in
Newtown, Connecticut , in which 20
children, six staff, the shooter and his
mother died.
Police described a chilling
sequence of events at Arapahoe after
the shooter, who police said they had
identified but whose name they did
not release, entered the school by a
West entrance.
"The student that was armed with
a shotgun as he entered the west side
of Arapahoe, immediately asked for
the location of this specific teacher,
and asked for that teacher by name,"
Robinson said. "The student that
entered the high school was armed
with a shotgun. He made no effort to
hide it or conceal it.
"Word got around immediately
that he was looking for the teacher."
When he heard he was the target,
the teacher left the school, the sheriff
said. "He took himself away from the
school, with an effort to try to take
the shooter with him," Robinson said.
The student in serious condition
was probably not targeted by the
shooter, the sheriff said. "The student
was simply in the area with the
shooter, and was shot at the time the
shooter came through the school," he
said.
Police entered the school shortly
after initial reports of shots fired
were made at 12.33pm local time.
Dozens of law enforcement vehicles
converged outside the school shortly
after the first reports.
Robinson said officers had found
the shooter’s body in a classroom
“quite a ways into the school”, within
20 minutes of the report of the
shooting.
Arapahoe High School is part of
the Littleton school district, in the
Denver suburb of Centennial. It has
approximately 2,100 students.
"Those [active shooter] protocols,
unfortunately, have had to be used
far, far, far too many times in the
state of Colorado, and across the
United States,” Robinson said.
