THORNTON, Colo.—Colorado’s top law-enforcement officer says the response to this week’s shooting at suburban Denver school shows that training for teachers, students and police has paid off.
But Attorney General John Suthers said Thursday that officials can’t relax their guard.
Suthers spoke to a packed conference on school safety training two days after a gunman wounded two students at Deer Creek Middle School in Littleton. A teacher tackled the suspect, who was arrested.
Suthers said there have been more than 250 school-violence deaths nationwide, half of them shootings, since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, where two teenagers killed 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves.
He said there’s no way to stop a determined shooter, citing killings at Colorado’s Platte Canyon High School in 2006, at Virginia Tech in 2007 and at the University of Alabama this month.
As a result of anonymous tips to a phone bank set up after the Columbine massacre, authorities prevented 28 planned school attacks in Colorado, responded to over 400 threats of violence and 600 bullying calls, and took 200 weapons from schools or school buses, Suthers said.
Despite prompt law enforcement responses, he said, most of the incidents were stopped by means other than law enforcement intervention.
“It was up to school staff, like so many of you, to manage the crisis. This week’s incident at Deer Creek Middle School, and the heroism that was displayed by teachers and staff, underscores that fact,” Suthers said. “All emphasis on school training and safety over the past decade has paid off.”
Linda Kanan, director of the Colorado School Safety Resource Center, said educators and police will review the latest school attack and once again learn new lessons about why they occur and how to prevent them.
One troubling fact about the latest incident is the ease with which the suspect, 32-year-old Bruco Strong Eagle Eastwood, signed in at Deer Creek Middle School and got a school pass hours before the shooting Tuesday.
Sheriff’s department spokeswoman Jacki Kelley said Eastwood used the restroom and left the building without being asked to do so. She said he did not have a gun and there were no warning signs.
He later came back with a rifle and started shooting at students in the parking lot, authorities said.
Kelley said a school security officer was not at Deer Creek at the time because he was responsible for three schools and was investigating a property crime at another school at the time.
Kelley said the sheriff’s department has 10 school resource officers for 57 schools in unincorporated Jefferson County, with most of the focus on high schools and middle schools. She said local police and sheriff’s deputies are now working on a program to teach officers what to do when they are the only officer on the scene before backup arrives.
Even with additional training, there is no way to know when someone is going to snap, Kelley said.
“We can’t stop it, but we can minimize the damage,” she said.
