Bailey – Not a single desk in the English class was upright.
Littering the room were fragments from a wooden door blown off its hinges when the SWAT team entered.
A hole – big enough for a man to fit through – had been blasted into one of the classroom walls.
A protective shield, pocked with a quarter-size indentation where the gunman fired a shot at a Jefferson County sheriff’s SWAT officer, was left behind.
These were the remnants of 53-year-old Duane R. Morrison’s terror spree in Platte Canyon High School.
For reasons still unknown to authorities Thursday, Morrison walked into the school Wednesday morning, held six girls hostage and sexually assaulted an unknown number of them over a four-hour period and killed 16-year-old Emily Keyes before dying in a barrage of gunfire.
“It was a pretty solemn place,” said Lance Clem, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Safety.
On Thursday, officials tried to piece together the chain of events while Keyes’ teary schoolmates, friends and the community were left to ask “Why?”
After learning of the hostage situation – but unaware that his daughter was involved – John Michael Keyes joined about 20 other anxious parents outside the school Wednesday afternoon, awaiting news.
“We were all numb with fear. We would have braved anything for any one of those kids at that moment, without a doubt,” said Robert Turkington, whose son, Sean, is a senior at the high school and was particularly close to Emily.
Her father had bought Emily and her twin brother, Casey, cellphones for their 16th birthdays and, with the help of some technologically savvy parents, sent her a text message Wednesday: “How R U?”
Still in captivity, she responded a few moments later, at 1:52 p.m.: “I love u guys.”
It was her last message.
Emily, a junior, was killed when she tried to escape the gunman in the final exchange. Morrison had shot her in the back of the head.
Later, her father and the rest of the parents learned the news.
“As we were standing around, it was like saying, ‘You’re it. John Michael, it’s your kid,”‘ Turkington recounted. “To see someone fall apart like that was just devastating.”
Flags at half-staff and flowers
Gov. Bill Owens met with students, faculty and law-enforcement officers Thursday. He laid flowers at the base of a flagpole outside the school, where the American and Colorado flags flew at half-staff.
“The tragedy of Columbine taught law enforcement and actually educators a lot in terms of how to avoid future tragedies,” he said. “In a couple of significant ways, Columbine may have helped Platte Canyon avoid even a worse tragedy. … Perhaps we’ve learned some lessons from Columbine, and perhaps those children didn’t entirely die in vain.”
Park County Sheriff Fred Wegener said a school resource officer – whose position is paid for with a grant created after Columbine – was on duty Wednesday but had been called to the nearby sheriff’s office substation on another case.
Throughout the day Thursday, hundreds of visitors drifted inside Platte Canyon Community Church, where grief counselors and friends had congregated.
Louis Gonzalez, a friend of the Keyeses’, made an announcement in the parking lot that Emily would have wanted her friends to “practice random acts of kindness.”
“Remember her smile, her joy of life, and remember how sweet and ferocious she could be,” he said.
Members of the Keyes family have declined to discuss the shooting with the media, but the community has drawn close to them, supporting them from the time they arrived at St. Anthony Central Hospital, where she had been airlifted in an effort to save her life.
“The kids have all grown up together,” said Chip Fair, whose daughter was close to Emily and frequently had her over for sleepovers. “We’re all like family.”
Unusual to see a stranger
Wegener said Thursday that no motive has been established, although a high school boy said Morrison talked to him Wednesday morning and “asked about the identity of a list of female students.”
“Agents are following up on that with the student. We’re right back into that ‘Why?’ and the mystery surrounding that, and hopefully, we’ll get some answers there,” Wegener said.
Roman Tucker said he left the school about 10:45 a.m. to participate in a work program and said he saw Morrison sitting in a Jeep Wrangler in the school parking lot, staring straight ahead and appearing to be drinking.
The 17-year-old senior thought it was unusual to see a stranger there but didn’t anticipate the phone call 45 minutes later that there had been a shooting at his school.
“I couldn’t work anymore,” he said. “It just really freaked me.”
Morrison appeared to have been living out of his Jeep, Wegener said. Investigators found prescription medication and a key to a Denver hotel room in the vehicle. Investigators also found an assault weapon at a campsite a mile north of the high school. They believe Morrison may have been living beside the South Platte River.
Morrison carried a semiautomatic pistol and a revolver into the school with him. Investigators did not disclose Thursday what he had inside a camouflage backpack.
Freshmen Jesse Kirby and D.J. Brown said they exchanged words with Morrison in the second-floor hallway.
“I was a little suspicious”
Brown said he was wary because the stranger snarled a curse word, but he seemed pleasant enough to Kirby.
“I was a little suspicious. It’s not every day you see a guy, like, with gray hair,” Kirby said. “I said, ‘Hi. What’s up?’ He asked what class I was going to. … Four minutes later, that’s when we heard the big bang.”
Morrison had entered the classroom and told the teacher to line the students up against the wall, said Chelsea Wilson, 16, a junior who was in the college-preparatory English class.
She said Morrison turned the lights off and then, starting with the boys, dismissed students one at a time.
No one said a word to him. “We were too scared to argue,” she said.
Early on, Wilson said, Morrison held a gun to her neck and told her to leave. She said she thinks it was because she is 5 feet, 8 inches tall and “big boned.”
The only one crying at that point, she said, was the teacher, who was asked to leave.
Wilson said she heard a gunshot as she was walking out.
Wilson said classmates have told her that Morrison later started asking students for their last names.
A Colorado Bureau of Investigation team was expected to finish processing the crime scene inside the high school by Thursday evening. A hotline set up to receive information about Morrison was inundated Thursday.
Wegener said he made the decision to send the SWAT team in after the fourth hostage was released at 3:25 p.m.
“He was hurting my girls,” Wegener said.
Wegener knew that the girls had been “molested or groped” based on information he received from the other hostages as they exited.
Shortly after the fourth hostage was released, Morrison warned that “something would happen at 4 o’clock,” Wegener said.
A few minutes later, Wegener decided that a “tactical objective had to be met.”
He said he worried that Morrison indeed had a bomb in his backpack, as the gunman had indicated.
Clem said the SWAT team used explosives to blow a hole in one of the classroom walls to reveal Morrison, but a sharpshooter couldn’t get a clear shot. Wegener said Morrison shot at an officer holding the shield and then fired at Emily Keyes as she ran away, striking her in the head from close range.
“SWAT fired after he shot Emily and shot himself because it sounds like, as he goes down, he’s still a threat, so they shot at him,” Wegener said.
The fifth hostage was able to get behind a shield and escape, Wegener said.
Wegener said he had not met Thursday with the Keyes family, but he planned to do so.
“One of the things that’s kind of unfair is, I did say I second-guessed myself. But understand when I say that, when I look at the situation, did I do everything I could to assure the safety of these individuals? Yes, I did. Am I going to regret for the rest of my life that Emily died? You bet you I am. What would you do in my position?”
Staff writer Allison Sherry contributed to this report.
Memorial fund
Donations can be made to the Emily Maureen Ellen Keyes “I love u guys” Memorial Fund at Citywide Banks (citywidebanks.com)
Memorial service
11 a.m. Saturday, National Farmers Union Education Center, 618 County Road 68, Bailey.
Anyone wishing to send flowers to the service may do so to that location; call them at 303-838-5215.
Flowers and other items are also being accepted at the Deer Creek Realty building, 4 River Drive, Bailey.
This story has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, it incorrectly reported the name of Emily Keyes’ twin brother. His name is Casey Keyes.
