Surrounded by officials, Sheriff Tony Spurlock of Douglas County identified the suspects in the shooting at STEM School Highlands Ranch, which killed an 18-year-old senior who was just three days from graduation Tuesday and injured eight other students. Earlier, he said, officers had mistakenly identified the juvenile as a young man.
The suspects carried two handguns and at least one of them was restrained by a school security officer by the time law enforcement arrived, the sheriff said. During the attack, he added, there was at least one encounter between a student and a suspect.
“We are going to hear about very heroic things that have taken place,” he said.
While details of the shooting remained sparse, the sheriff said the attackers got “deep inside the school,” and one parent said Tuesday that students had tried to stop the attack.
Brad Bialy said his oldest son, Brendan, a senior, told him that he was in class when gunfire erupted. Bialy said his son told him that two students entered the classroom and one pulled a gun out of a guitar case.
He said his son and two friends tried to tackle the gunman, but one of the boys was shot in the chest. Other students tried to stanch the bleeding by putting pressure on his chest, Bialy said.
The sheriff’s office identified one of the suspects, the adult male, as Devon Erickson, 18. He was to have his first court hearing Wednesday afternoon, said District Attorney George Brauchler. He added that he would consider trying the juvenile suspect as an adult. Brauchler, a Republican, is well known in the state for his support of the death penalty and led the prosecution of the man convicted of killing 12 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012.
On Tuesday evening, police tape was strung up outside the prim brick suburban home where neighbors said Erickson’s family has lived since the late 1990s. A next-door neighbor who declined to be named described him as a quiet young man who sometimes deflected eye contact and played several musical instruments.
Spurlock said that neither suspect had been on law enforcement’s radar before the shooting and that the motive was unknown.
The shooting at the Highlands Ranch charter school is the latest at an educational institution, a phenomenon that has rattled communities nationwide as young people continue to face mortal danger in places long considered safe havens. One week earlier, a man with a pistol shot six people on the last day of spring classes at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, killing two.
Highlands Ranch students who were not injured were taken to Northridge Recreation Center in Highlands Ranch, where hundreds of anxious parents gathered to look for their children Tuesday afternoon.
“I heard a gunshot,” said Makai Dixon, 8, a second-grader who had been training for this moment, with active shooter drills and lockdowns, since he was in kindergarten. “I’d never heard it before.”
Makai’s parents said they joined thousands of others in rushing to the school as news blazed through the suburban community.
“We’re more messed up than they are,” Makai’s mother, Rocio, said as they walked to their car.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.