DENVER — A student at Denver’s East High School shot two administrators Wednesday morning — leaving one critically injured — while the teen was being searched for weapons, police officials said.
Denver police identified the suspect — who was still at large hours after the shooting — as 17-year-old Austin Lyle, who was last seen wearing a green hoodie and is believed to be associated with a 2005 Red Volvo XC90 with Colorado license plate BSCW10.
Denver police Chief Ron Thomas said the shooting occurred during a “security search” of Lyle based on past behavior — “a regular protocol with this student” — that detected a gun. The student fired shots around 9:50 a.m. “and was able to get out of the school.”
Lyle is required to be searched when he arrives at school every morning as part of a pre-existing safety plan, but administrators had never before found a gun on him, police and school officials said. He is now wanted for attempted homicide, and police said they took the unusual step of publicly identifying a juvenile “due to the public safety concern.”
“We don’t have any sense of where he is. We know where he lives,” Thomas said at a morning news briefing, lamenting “a very troubling situation” at East High School.
One victim was in critical condition undergoing surgery, he said. The other was in serious but stable condition.
Administrators placed East on lockdown after the shooting, and students later were let out during a controlled release.
A Denver Public Schools spokeswoman initially said the shooting occurred near the campus, but Thomas confirmed it happened inside the building and away from students “in the office area.”
Wednesday’s shooting occurred less than six weeks after a 16-year-old East student was shot in his car outside the school; he died two weeks later.
Classes at East were canceled for the remainder of the week, DPS Superintendent Alex Marrero said during a news briefing.
Once school resumes, Marrero said, “We will have two armed officers here at East until the end of the school year. We’re looking forward to expanding that conversation to see how we can reestablish a relationship” with Denver police.
Denver’s elected school board voted in 2020 to remove the Denver Police Department’s resource officers from schools following the national reckoning over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. School board members argued that having police in schools was detrimental to students of color and contributed to the “school-to-prison pipeline.”
On Wednesday, Mayor Michael Hancock went to the school and appealed for information helping to locate an “armed and dangerous” student suspect.
“We know who the suspect is. We will find him. We will hold him accountable,” Hancock said.
The mayor also addressed the fears of parents for their children.
“We feel for them ... There should never be a concern of parents that they are safe in the building,” he said.
Gov. Jared Polis addressed the shooting while speaking at a news conference about new legislation at the Capitol.
“I know all of Colorado joins me in wishing them a speedy recovery,” Polis said of the two victims. “Today, we are all East High Angels.”
Senior Eliza Romero was in the school nurse’s office, where she goes each morning to eat breakfast, when she heard four bangs come from the room next door.
At first, she wasn’t sure whether they were gunshots. The 18-year-old had been wearing headphones and the noise was so much quieter than the bangs she heard last month when 16-year-old Luis Garcia was shot and fatally injured outside the school.
Romero looked to another student who was also in the room to see whether they also heard the noise. That student had a panicked look on their face. They’d both heard gunshots.
“Right as we had that realization, I saw people flooding out of the dean’s office,” Romero said. “I saw people screaming.”
A security officer sprinted into the nurse’s office and locked the door. Romero and the other student ran into a bathroom connected to the office and hid in a stall.
From their hiding spots, the students could hear screaming, police sirens and noise from walkie-talkies, Romero said.
“We were both just in there panicking, trying to help each other out,” she said.
After about 30 minutes, police officers came into the nurse’s office yelling, asking if anyone was in the room. They escorted the two students to the auditorium, where they stayed briefly, before being moved to a classroom, Romero said.
“Hearing it happen and hearing the screaming was so horrible,” she added. “I haven’t really processed it at this point but it was so horrible.”
Anae Hernandez, 15, said she was outside the school and walked up to see an ambulance and one of the wounded faculty members on a stretcher. Someone told her there had been a shooting. She ran to a nearby 7-Eleven convenience store to hide.
“It’s scary,” she said. “It keeps us from our learning time.”
“I feel like it’s something that everybody has to worry about here a lot,” she said. “Because this is not like something that just happens once in a while. This is a recurring theme and it’s not something that should be going on.”
Jeannie Hernandez, who is grandmother to Anae and has another granddaughter in East High, said she hates that her kids are constantly afraid, but she wants them to keep attending school. She says they will talk about it tonight, the same as they did after the last shooting lockdown.
“Last time, I just hugged them and hugged them and told them how sorry I was,” she said.
Ke’Vaughn Casias, 15, said he didn’t hear the shooting, but a fellow student showed him a video of a school dean being carried out on a stretcher.
Casias said the shootings at the school make him want to be more aware of his surroundings. “I feel East could do a much better job,” he said about campus safety.
“I’m sad, frustrated, upset, alarmed,” said Julie Siekmeier, a parent of an East High School senior. “Although the kids are almost numb to it.”
East junior Anna Boyle and her friends had just arrived at school after a Starbucks run on Wednesday morning. As they pulled up, they saw five police cars on campus, some parked on the grass — and an ambulance. They could hear sirens all around them.
Confused about what was going on, 17-year-old Boyle texted her friends inside the school, asking whether they were in lockdown. They weren’t taking the lockdown seriously yet, but soon would be, she said.
“We’re like OK, this always happens,” Boyle said. “We’ve definitely seen it. It’s nothing new ... It was just unsettling to see it again.”
Boyle saw officers sprint into the building. Then stretchers came out, carrying two people, passing by the “E” structure in front of the school. Someone had at one time painted a white “L” on the red structure to honor Garcia, the soccer player who died after being shot near the school last month.
“We can’t fit more letters on the ‘E,'” Boyle said.
“Obviously the deans are doing their part, but not really the city or the (school) district or anything,” Boyle said of officials’ response to gun violence.
Boyle said she does not feel safe at school anymore. “I don’t think anyone does.”
“You’re just always on edge,” she said. “It just makes you a little shaky sometimes.”
In recent weeks, students at East have spoken out about no longer feeling safe on campus after their classmate was fatally shot about a month ago.
Garcia, a junior, was sitting in his car near East when he was shot Feb. 13. The 16-year-old died more than two weeks later, on March 1, from his injuries.
Since then, students have called on Denver Public Schools to respond more aggressively to the threat of violence. Earlier this month, they also walked out of their classrooms and to the Colorado State Capitol to advocate for gun legislation and safer schools.
Students have said that after the February shooting, they experienced multiple lockdowns and other alerts. A weapon was found on campus the day after students returned to class.
East also has received false reports of threats twice since the school year began in the fall.
Denver teens have increasingly become both perpetrators and victims of gun violence over the last five years.
In 2022, five juveniles were arrested in connection to homicides and 11 others were arrested in connection to non-fatal shootings. Twelve juveniles were killed in homicides last year and 42 were injured in non-fatal shootings.
Gun possession by a minor has become the most common charge in Denver’s juvenile pre-trial services in recent years.
The Denver district attorney’s office has filed an increasing number of charges of juvenile in possession of a handgun. In 2022, the office filed 115 cases — up 47% from the 78 cases filed in 2017 and up 150% from the 46 filed in 2016.
Experts have said that teens often arm themselves out of fear for their safety.
Ben Roy, father to a senior, said this year has been “relentless” for East students.
“It feels like every other week there’s been a perimeter lockdown,” he said outside the police line on Wednesday. “It’s just constant.”
“I think what scares them, for my son, is how little he reacts now,” Roy said. “He’s grown numb to it and at other times anxious. I hate this is the world we’ve made for them.”
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