The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that they have two suspects in the shooting at STEM Highlands Ranch School on Tuesday, May 7 in custody and there is not a third suspect. Both are students at the school, identified as 18-year-old Devon Erickson, and an unidentified teenage girl. Neither had a record with police.
One student, an unidentifed 18-year-old male, has died and eight others were injured during the shooting, which began around 2 p.m., near the close of the school day. Seven of the injured were taken to Skyridge Medical Center, and Littleton Adventist Hospital, where three remain in intensive care. (Both are level three trauma centers.) An eighth student was treated at Children’s Hospital and released.
Law enforcement was on the scene within two minutes of being notified of an active shooter situation at the school, located at 8773 S. Ridgeline Blvd. in Highlands Ranch. The charter school is a kindergarten through 12th grade school with 1,800 students and the area where the shooting occurred held more than 600 students. Students in the classroom where the student was killed say that the 18-year-old who was killed lunged at the shooters along with some of his classmates, giving other students in the room time to escape.
This is the fourth, major school shooting in Colorado since the 1999 Columbine High school shooting. Since Columbine, Colorado has experienced shootings at Platte Canyon High School, and Arapahoe High school, as well as the Aurora Theater shooting. It comes just a few weeks after a Florida woman fixated on recreating the Columbine shootings, flew to Denver, bought a gun in Littleton, and terrorized metro-area schools. It shut down 58 school districts while law enforcement sought to capture the woman.
If anything has been learned since the Columbine shooting shocked the nation, it is that a law enforcement decision to wait to enter a school when a shooting has occurred does not help the outcome.
Contrary to the 1999 Columbine school shooting where police staged outside the school building for hours, police arriving quickly from multiple jurisdictions did not wait to enter the school. They immediately entered and engaged the shooters. Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock says that decision probably kept the incident from becoming even worse than it was.
While metro Denver and the country now handles the aftermath of another school shooting, the question of easy access to guns simmers in the background.
BREAKING News: Reports of shots fired at STEM school in Highlands Ranch
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