Two schools and city offices in Stratton were temporarily in lockdown while the town Marshall and county deputies searched for an armed suspect , officials say.
“Our town is swarming with police right now,” Stratton City Clerk Paulette Thompson said this afternoon. “We’ve locked our door at the town hall.”
The two schools in town, Stratton Elementary School and Stratton High School, were in lockdown while authorities searched for a man wearing an orange ski mask and baggy black pants, Thompson said.
“I’ve heard he was in a house and pulled a gun on someone,” she said. “Everybody is pretty high strung.”
Everyone in Stratton, which is nearly 150 miles East of Denver, received a reverse 911 warning residents, city workers and school employees about an armed man who ran out of a house, Thompson said.
A woman had escaped out the front door of the same home, Thompson said. The tiny agricultural town has about 650 residents, she said.
It was unclear why the man was running but Marshall Dan Cooper warned that he was dangerous, she said.
School officials did not let children walk home or ride buses after school, said Rhonda Crouse, assistant city clerk. Parents had to pick their children up at school and they had to show their identification, Crouse said.
Cooper called reinforcements from the Kit Carson County Sheriff’s Department and the Colorado State Patrol, Thompson said. Authorities were still searching for the suspect late in the afternoon.
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-820-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
