Authorities say a student is dead after shooting 2 peers and then
himself at Colorado high school
[September 11, 2025]
By COLLEEN SLEVIN and MATTHEW BROWN
DENVER (AP) — A student shot two of his peers Wednesday at a suburban
Denver high school before shooting himself and later dying, authorities
said.
The handgun shooting was reported around 12:30 p.m. at Evergreen High
School in Evergreen, Colorado, about 30 miles west of Denver in the
Rocky Mountain foothills.
Shots were fired both inside and outside the school building, and law
enforcement officers who responded found the shooter within five minutes
of arriving, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Jacki Kelley
said.
None of the law enforcement officers who responded to the shooting fired
any shots, Kelley said.
More than 100 police officers from the surrounding 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.
The teens were originally listed in critical condition, St. Anthony
Hospital CEO Kevin Cullinan said. Their ages were not released.
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.
After the shooting, parents gathered outside a nearby elementary school
waiting to reunite with their children.
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Law enforcement and emergency personnel respond to a shooting at
Evergreen High School in Evergreen, Colo., on Wednesday, Sept. 10,
2025. (Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post via AP)
Wendy Nueman said her 15-year-old daughter, a sophomore at Evergreen
High 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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Brown reported from Billings, Montana.
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