A 25-year-old man is dead after a friend accidentally shot him as they were unloading their weapons at an unsupervised shooting range on U.S. Forest Service land in El Paso County.
Otis Freison of Aurora was among a group of friends who went to the range on Rampart Range Road on Saturday, said El Paso County Sheriff Lt. Lari Sevene.
“Someone didn’t clear their weapon properly,” she said. “As a general rule, everyone is on the line parallel to each other and their firearms are pointed down range, but this is a public range so there is no oversight,” Sevene said.
Freison was shot in the chest.
The range in the Pike National Forest is a U.S Forest Service facility near the Garden of the Gods.
A National Rifle Association-sponsored shooting range adviser inspected the trash-strewn site in April 2007, according to a decision memo on the Forest Service website.
The adviser “recommended that supervision on site was needed immediately,” the memo said.
A Forest Service dispatcher referred a reporter calling for comment to the Sheriff’s Department.
Freison’s father, Otis Freison, said the range should be closed.
“I thought this was a supervised club and now I am finding out that this place is a garbage dump, basically,” Freison said. “If you don’t have supervision in a place like that it is dangerous. It absolutely should be shut down.”
A 2006 article in The Colorado Springs Gazette newspaper described the range as trash-strewn and chaotic.
“Thousands of paper targets blanket scrub oak trees, pines and both sides of the roadway. Mixed in are the ubiquitous beer cans and bottles, fast-food sacks and cups that are dumped during busy weekends,” the article said.
“Appliances such as refrigerators, water heaters and computer monitors are routinely dumped at the range, soon to be pockmarked by a frenzy of bullets,” the article said. “A chicken-wire fence built to catch the trash has been torn down, ‘fragged’ by shooters who hung targets on it.”
Freison was a “good kid,” who had a gun but wasn’t an avid shooter, his father said.
“I’m still trying to figure out what he was doing down there,” his father said.
Freison installed neon signs for a living but lost his job because of the recession, his father said.
A number of people were at the range when the accident happened around 12:28 p.m. Freison’s friends started life-saving efforts and medical personnel who arrived shortly worked unsuccessfully to revive him.
The El Paso County District Attorney’s Office will review this incident to determine if charges should be filed.
Tom McGhee: 303-954-1671 or tmcghee@denverpost.com
