CENTENNIAL, Colo., (Reuters) – A student armed with a shotgun and seeking to confront a teacher opened fire at a Colorado high school on Friday, wounding at least two classmates before apparently taking his own life, law enforcement officials said.
The student entered Arapahoe High School in a Denver suburb around midday brandishing the gun, and asked for the teacher by name before shooting two students, seriously wounding one of them, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said.
The teacher immediately fled the school and was not injured, Robinson said. The gunman’s body was later found in a classroom at the school.
“The shooter is dead as a result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds,” Robinson said.
The shooting in the Denver suburb of Centennial took place just eight miles from the scene of one of the deadliest school massacres in U.S. history at Columbine High School, where two students gunned down 13 classmates and staff before killing themselves in 1999.
Robinson said there was no sign the shooting was related to the anniversary, due on Saturday, of last year’s shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in which a gunman killed 20 children and six adults before killing himself.
Holly Schaefer, an 18-year-old senior at Arapahoe High School, said she was in mathematics class when she and fellow students heard a loud bang. That was followed shortly by another bang, and “then we knew definitely it was a gunshot.”
Schaefer said her teacher immediately initiated lockdown procedures, shutting the door to the classroom as students huddled in a corner of the room.
After about 30 minutes, Schaefer said, they heard police calling out on the other side of the door. Officers eventually cleared her classroom and as students were being escorted out of the building, she said she saw blood on the hallway floor.
