DENVER (AP) — Three teens were critically wounded Wednesday in a shooting at a high school in the foothills of suburban Denver, including the suspected shooter, 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 up 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 is believed to have fired any shots, Kelley said.
The shooting happened on school grounds, but it wasn't immediately known whether it was inside the school building, she said. Investigators don't believe there is any further threat to the community, she said.
All three teens taken to St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, Colorado, were shot, CEO Kevin Cullinan said. 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.
Over 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.
Parents of Evergreen High School students were told to go to an elementary school to reunite with their children.
“This is the scariest thing you could ever think that could happen, and these parents were really frightened and so were the kids,” Kelley said.
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.