The most horrifying 911 calls the sheriff’s office received in the minutes after the fatal shooting at Arapahoe High School are the ones you can barely hear.
Hiding in locked classrooms and crouched behind a corner in a hallway in December 2013, a handful of people called 911. In frantic, faint whispers they pleaded with operators for help.
“We heard gunshots.”
“The doors are unlocked.”
“Is help on the way?”
Audio recordings of the 911 calls and dispatch communications — obtained Monday by The Denver Post through open records requests — capture the chaos, panic and confusion in the hours that followed the shooting that lasted just 80 seconds. Parents, grandparents and friends called begging for information about students — many of whom had sent text messages from dark classrooms.
“In one sentence, what’s going on?” one father asked.
Breathless students who had sprinted out of the school’s library called in after they reached safety and asked for help. They also offered information about the shooter.
“I’m pretty sure I know who it is,” one student told the operator. “I believe it was a boy named Karl Pierson.”
Several students recognized Pierson, 18, when he on Dec. 13, 2013, killed fellow senior Claire Davis and tried to kill his debate coach before turning the gun on himself.
The Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office released the recordings on Monday, three months after the department released its about the shooting.
The sheriff’s office and the Arapahoe County district attorney’s office found on the part of administrators at Arapahoe or Littleton public schools. But their report, released on Oct. 10, showed that administrators as they learned of escalating concerns about Pierson, who threatened to kill his debate coach three months before the fatal shooting.
On the day of the shooting, Pierson’s mother, Barbara, was visiting her mother in Minnesota. Barbara Pierson called 911 after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives called her to serve a search warrant for her Douglas County home.
Authorities in Minnesota contacted the communications center in Arapahoe County.
“She thinks her son was the shooter,” the operator said.
In the minutes after the shooting, one 911 operator answered six calls in two minutes from people who had fled. At one point she started answering calls with, “Is this in reference to the shooting?”
But as the calls slowed and authorities slowly started clearing the building — starting in the library where Pierson’s body was found, moving to the locker room and eventually the hallway with Pierson’s locker — dispatchers began directing the more than 20 agencies on scene. Dispatchers and authorities worked to streamline the process of evacuating students from the building.
Parents waited for hours to reunite with their children as authorities struggled to decide when and how to evacuate students from the school. According to the recordings, authorities worked for hours checking every closet, office and classroom in the building.
The doors of rooms that were cleared were marked with an X inside a circle.
Jordan Steffen: 303-954-1794, jsteffen@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jsteffendp
