School shooting at Evergreen High in Colorado
A student opened fire in the cafeteria during lunch at a mountain town high school located 30 miles outside of downtown Denver.
During lunch at Evergreen High yesterday, a student opened fire with a handgun in the cafeteria during the 158th shooting at a k-12 school so far in 2025.
Instead of locking down, hundreds of students immediately fled from the school and ran to nearby houses looking for help. The teen continued shooting as students fled, firing shots both inside and outside of the school. Two students were critically wounded and the teenage shooter fatally shot himself.
Rather than using the term “school shooting”, we really need to say “violent public suicide” but I’m not sure how to shift all of society to that mentality when there are so many deeply ingrained rituals, myths, and stories centered around school shootings.
Police arrived at the school approximately two minutes after the shooting started and found the body of the teenage shooter about 5 minutes after the first 911 call. Both victims and the shooter were transported to St. Anthony's Hospital in Lakewood, CO which is a level 1 trauma center. One of the students wounded is in stable condition while the other remains critical.
The 16-year-old student was armed with a single revolver (.38) and a "large amount of ammo" that he reloaded multiple times as he fired both inside and outside of the school at students fleeing. That’s a very disturbing detail because it means that a teenage kid started shooting at his classmates and after the first 6 shots, he had enough manual dexterity to properly unload and reload a revolver at least 3 times.
Even highly trained police officers have an immediate stress response and subsequent adrenaline dump during a shooting. Multiple studies of officers under the acute stress of a shooting show memory loss, paralysis, dissociation, visual distortions, and either hyper/slow motion. In one famous example, an officer thought someone was throwing soda cans at him, but they were actually rounds being ejected from his partner's gun (Artwohl, 2002).
What is going on in the brain of a 16-year-old (a skinny white kid with pimples) to be able to think and move smoothly enough to reload a revolver while shooting at his classmates?
Top Performing School
Evergreen High is one of the top 500 performing schools in the United States with a 98% graduation rate (#1 in the state of Colorado). The school has about 1,000 students and is located in an affluent area with gated communities of large homes perched on the mountain sides. The students are 88% white and only 2% are on the reduced price lunch program.
Evergreen High is exactly the “it could never happen here” type of community. But it does happen here. Last year at Mariemont High in Ohio (top 150 in the country), a 14-year-old student plotted a mass shooting that he was going to commit with an adult who lived in another state and was going to supply the guns. Their plan was to start with a school shooting and then kidnap/rape female students after they fled.
On the Denver area map, you can see Columbine (37 victims), Highlands Ranch (9 victims), Lakewood (7 victims), and Aurora (82 victims)...all locations of other mass shootings.
Evergreen High is about 30 minutes from STEM Highland Ranch where two students committed a planned attack in 2019, killing one classmate and wounding 6 others. During the attack, 2 bystander students were accidentally shot by an armed security guard at the school who was firing at a plain clothes police officer who he believed was the assailant (his shots missed striking the students).
Shootings Outside of the Classroom
The lockdown drill is designed for times when students are inside their classrooms, but many planned attacks at schools don’t happen inside classrooms or during class periods. Even if students were in their classrooms, most school shootings are committed by current and former students who know the emergency plan and procedures at their school.
Looking back at the 2019 STEM Highland Ranch school shooting, the two students who committed the attack snuck weapons into the school inside an instrument case. When one of them walked into the classroom they were targeting, he removed a metal magnet on the door frame to lock the classroom door behind him. They knew the school’s emergency plan and exploited the flaws in it to their advantage.
Earlier this year at Antioch High in Nashville, TN, a 17-year-old male student fatally shot a female student and then fatally shot himself with a handgun inside the cafeteria during lunch. He wrote online that he planned to kill at least 10 students. The shooting was over in 17 seconds from the first to the last shot (when he killed himself before police arrived).
Rapid Evacuation
The fact that students in the cafeteria were able to run from the shooter aligns with a much needed paradigm shift for schools to plan for evacuation instead of lockdowns during a school shooting.
While fortresses fail due to their rigid and predictable design, an open campus provides flexibility, adaptability, and creativity. If an assailant wants to target a specific student or group, a fortified campus enables an ambush at the front door during the predictable arrival and dismissal times.
This was the scenario when two students were murdered when they exited their school during lunch in January. Or when a security guard and student where shot when the door of a “secure” school building was opened at dismissal.
Instead of the fortress design with a ‘single point of entry’, an open campus can have abundant green space that eliminates chokepoints and predictable patterns when students enter and exit the buildings. Evergreen High is an example of this with an L-shaped cluster of buildings that open directly into fields, parks, and the neighborhood without fences or other barriers.
An open design also means that students can congregate in many areas which creates less predictable patterns and fewer opportunities for an ambush. If an armed person walks onto the campus, there are many different options for students to get away (read more: Using data to design safer schools).
Listen or Watch: How To Stop A School Shooter
David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.