DENVER (AP) — Three teens were wounded Wednesday after one of them opened fire with a handgun at a high school in the foothills of suburban Denver, authorities said.
The shooting was reported around 12:30 p.m. at Evergreen High School in Evergreen, about 30 miles west of Denver, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Jacki Kelley said.
It is not clear what led to the shooting or how the suspected shooter, believed to be a student at the school, was shot. None of the law enforcement officers who responded to the shooting fired any shots, Kelley said.
Shots were fired both inside and outside the school building, she said. Law enforcement officers who responded found the shooter within five minutes of arriving, she said.
All three teens taken to St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, Colorado, were shot, CEO Kevin Cullinan said.
The three were originally listed in critical condition. But by early evening, one teen was in stable condition with what Dr. Brian Blackwood, the hospital's trauma director, described as non-life threatening injuries. He declined to provide more details.
The high school with more than 900 students is largely surrounded by forest. It is about a mile from the center of Evergreen, which has a population of 9,300 people.
More than 100 police officers from around the Denver area rushed to the school to try to help, Kelley said. A 1999 school shooting at Jefferson County's Columbine High killed 14 people, including a woman who died earlier this year of complications from her injuries in the shooting.
In Evergreen, parents gathered outside nearby Bergen Meadow Elementary School waiting to reunite with their children.
Wendy Nueman said her 15-year-old daughter, a sophomore at the school, didn’t answer her phone right away after the shooting, The Denver Post reported. When her daughter finally called back, it was from a borrowed phone.
“She just said she was OK. She couldn’t hardly speak,” Nueman said, holding back tears. She gathered that her daughter ran from the school.
“It’s super scary,” she said. “We feel like we live in a little bubble here. Obviously, no one is immune.”
Eighteen students who fled from the shooting took shelter at a home just down the road, after an initial group of them pounded on the door asking for help, resident Don Cygan told Denver’s KUSA-TV. One student said he heard gunshots while in the school’s cafeteria and ran out of the school, Cygan said.
Cygan, a retired educator familiar with lockdown trainings to prepare for possible shootings, said he took down the names of all the students and the names of the parents who later arrived there to pick them up. His wife, a retired nurse, was able to calm the teens down and treat them for shock, he said.
“I hope they feel like they ran to the right house,” he said.
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Associated Press writer Matthew Brown contributed to this report from Billings, Montana.