CENTENNIAL — Less than a year after the December shooting at Arapahoe High School, students there say they feel safe and are ready to put the tragedy in the past.
“There are still thoughts that race in your mind sometimes in some places of the school, but the community has been so great,” Arapahoe junior Elizabeth Lynch said Friday afternoon as the sheriff’s report on the shooting was released. “The healing process has set in. I feel safe at my school. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
Part of the 37-page questioned how school administrators reacted to various warning signs before the Dec. 13, 2013, 17-year-old student Claire Davis.
The report found no criminal wrongdoing but raised concerns about how the warning signs were handled. A threat assessment that evaluated the shooter, Karl Pierson, months before the incident found that he was not a threat.
Joe Redmond, a close friend of Pierson’s who graduated from Arapahoe High School in the spring and now attends Princeton University, called the report an “important step for the community.” He said he hopes it opens the door to more dialogue.
“Having been very close to Karl before the shooting happened, I know that no one knew it was going to happen,” he said. “What Karl did was a result of his own thought process and his own actions. No one should be defending what he did.”
Many current students said Friday they don’t have the same need to know more and are comfortable with the changes that have been made at the school.
“Now it’s a really, really safe place to be,” sophomore Gabbie Sehrag said. “There’s new security measures. It just feels really, really safe.”
At Friday’s news conference, Arapahoe County Sheriff David Walcher said that one of the changes that came after the shooting is his office has added a new school resource officer at Arapahoe High, with some funding assistance from Littleton Public Schools.
Skyler Staloch, another sophomore at the school, thinks people are overreacting to the incident and said he feels safe.
“I think it got blown up because it happened in white suburbia,” Staloch said. “It’s in the past now.”
Staff writer Jesse Paul contributed to this report.
