LITTLETON, Colo.—The gunman who wounded two middle school students in a city still haunted by the Columbine massacre was allowed to enter and leave the building hours before he opened fire in the parking lot, investigators said Wednesday.
A math teacher who tackled the 32-year-old gunman and stopped the rampage Tuesday was hailed as a hero, and officials said the quick response was further proof that the city learned the lessons of Columbine in quickly responding to the shootings.
But there was growing evidence the school missed a chance to head off the attack.
Investigators said unemployed ranch hand Bruco Strong Eagle Eastwood walked through the doors of the Deer Creek Middle School earlier in the day, indicated he was a former student and chatted with teachers, apparently without drawing much suspicion.
Authorities said they do not know what motivated him to leave the building and open fire in the parking lot with a bolt-action hunting rifle, nor do they know the nature of his conversations with school staff.
But Eastwood’s father, War Eagle Eastwood, said that his son, who lived with him, would talk to imaginary friends. In the past month, the older man said, the talking turned to yelling, and his son was becoming more forgetful and complained that the refrigerator and eating certain foods, such as macaroni and cheese, were too loud.
“He has problems, but I never thought he’d go to the extent to hurt somebody,” he said outside his home near Hudson, 24 miles outside Denver. “You can say you’re sorry, but you can’t replace the fear and hurt he’s put in innocent people. He’s put a hole inside of me.”
Sheriff’s department spokeswoman Jacki Kelley said Eastwood left the building without being asked to do so. She said a school security officer was not at Deer Creek at the time. The officer also has duties at another school, but it hasn’t been determined where he was when the shootings happened, Kelley said.
Asked about the possible security lapse, Jefferson County schools Superintendent Cindy Stevenson said only that there is a sign-in sheet that requires visitors to state their name and the purpose of their visit. She said school officials did not have access to the sheet for Tuesday because the school was closed as a crime scene.
Eastwood was jailed on $1 million on suspicion of attempted murder.
Residents were stunned by the thought of a gunman opening fire at a school less than three miles from Columbine High, where two teenagers murdered 12 students and a teacher in the nation’s deadliest high school shooting. Parents rushed to the middle school, many unnerved by the sight of youngsters running for lives just like on that fateful day in 1999.
“We thought all of that was behind us,” resident Betty Makr said.
David Benke, a 57-year-old teacher and father of two, said he heard one shot and saw the gunman squeeze off a second round before he sprang into action and tackled the man. Another teacher also helped subdue the gunman.
Benke, who is 6-foot-5 and has been taking some martial arts training lately, said he told the gunman: “Look, bud, I’m 6-5. … You’re not going anywhere, so let’s kind of relax till the sheriff’s people get here.”
Schools in Littleton have gone through extensive emergency drills since the Columbine tragedy, and Benke said he always thought about what he would do if a school shooting broke out. “I said, ‘I hope that I’m capable of doing something about it,'” he recalled.
At a news conference, Benke became choked up when he said it bothered him that he didn’t stop the gunman before he shot the second student.
One of the wounded students, Reagan Webber, was treated at a hospital and released. The mother of the other victim, Matt Thieu, said he was “doing well” at a hospital.
Benke said that he was simply doing his job and that it was a team effort by the school’s staff. But a Facebook page called “Dr. David Benke is a Hero!!!!” quickly grew to more than 21,000 members, and his actions were discussed on the floor of the Legislature.
“Sometimes that’s just what we need. We need someone to be a hero for us,” said state Sen. Mike Kopp of Littleton, who lives in Benke’s neighborhood.
Authorities praised the response as evidence of how ready area schools are to respond to shootings after Columbine, but they also acknowledged that emergency manual don’t ever call for teachers to pounce on gunmen.
Stevenson said Deer Creek’s security plans involve a single button in a secretary’s office that automatically locks down the school in the event of a shooting. If something happens inside, teachers are to lock doors, get students out of hallways, keep them quiet so as not to tip off any gunmen and stay out of the line of sight, she said. All of that was done Tuesday, Stevenson said.
What Benke did “is pretty amazing,” said Kelley. “We don’t train people to do that.”
“Everybody acted, nobody froze,” she added.
Eastwood has an arrest record in Colorado dating back to 1996 for menacing, assault, domestic violence and driving under the influence. Those who know him described him as bizarre man.
Carla Wrisk, a cashier at the Barn Store gas station-convenience store in Hudson, described Bruco Eastwood as a “weird, very strange guy. He talks to himself a lot.”
Wrisk said Eastwood would come to buy cigarettes with change but was often 20 or 30 cents short. He would grab a newspaper, look at the sports page and mumble to himself, she said: “Just a very odd, strange guy,” she said. “I’m not surprised.”
In 2005, Eastwood participated in a NASA-funded study in which he spent 10 days in a hospital bed so scientists could study muscle wasting, an affliction experienced by astronauts during long flights, according to a story in the Rocky Mountain News at the time.
He told the newspaper that he had a lifelong dream of being an astronaut and described his occupation to the newspaper as horse trainer working at his father’s ranch. He pocketed $2,200 from the study and was able to spend a week and a half watching DVDs and playing video games in bed.
