A Catholic church in Douglas County is petitioning to make Kendrick Castillo, the student killed in the 2019 STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting, a saint.

The confirmed that it is reviewing a petition from in Highlands Ranch to open a cause for Castillo’s canonization, according to an announcement this week.

“Although I have just begun to review the information submitted, it seems clear that Kendrick was an exceptional young man,” Colorado Springs Bishop James Golka said in a statement. “As we study and discern how to approach the massive undertaking of promoting a canonization cause, I ask all the faithful to keep Kendrick’s family in their prayers.”

Father Gregory Bierbaum and Father Patrick DiLoreto of St. Mark Parish collected testimony and interviews about Castillo to determine whether his life was “one of heroic virtue” — an initial step in the canonization process, according to , published by the Archdiocese of Denver.

Representatives of the Archdiocese of Denver and the Diocese of Colorado Springs both declined interviews for this story.

If Golka approves the petition, he will then send it to the Vatican, where the Pope will decide whether the candidate lived a life of “heroic virtue.” If they did, then the Pope would give them the title of “venerable.” Next, a miracle must be granted via prayers made to the person after their death, which the church sees as proof they are in heaven,

A second confirmed miracle is often needed for a person to achieve sainthood.

It can take several years for a person to be sainted, according to The Denver Catholic.

In 2016, the Denver Archdiocese began seeking sainthood for Julia Greeley, a formerly enslaved person. Her remains were exhumed from a grave in suburban Denver cemetery and placed at an altar at the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception — one of the steps in the sainthood process.

The petition for Greeley was accepted by the Vatican, but is still being considered, according to The Denver Catholic.

Castillo, 18, was shot when he rushed one of the shooters in his classroom. Students have said his actions that day allowed his peers to take cover under their desks and escape.

Castillo was hailed a hero after the shooting and during his memorial service, Douglas County sheriff’s deputies led the procession to the church — an honor typically reserved for fallen officers.

“…Kendrick Castillo gave his life to stop a school shooting at STEM Highlands Ranch, thereby saving the lives of his classmates,” DiLoreto of St. Mark Parish said regarding the church’s petition. “He was a devote (sic) Catholic and wanted to introduce others around him to the Catholic faith and into (a) relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Castillo’s parents, John and Maria, could not be reached for comment Thursday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

The family of Luis Garcia, the student fatally shot outside of East High School last year, sued Denver Public Schools and the district’s Board of Education this week, accusing officials of failing to take “reasonable steps” to protect kids from harm by removing armed police from the building.

The lawsuit also alleges to know the identity of the person who shot the 16-year-old, even though the Denver Police Department has not arrested anyone in connection with the killing. As of Tuesday, the investigation into the shooting remains ongoing, police said.

The teen, identified in the lawsuit as Jose Luis Garcia-Bobadilla, was shot while sitting in his car outside of the city’s largest high school on Feb. 13, 2023. He died more than two weeks later on March 1. Garcia’s death preceded another high-profile shooting at East only weeks later, when a student wounded two deans inside the school.

“Luis got shot for no reason,” said Matthew Barringer, an attorney representing the teenager’s family, adding, “(The district) utterly failed that duty of trying to keep people safe.”

The family’s lawsuit was filed Monday in Denver District Court under the state’s , which was adopted after a fatal shooting at Arapahoe High School in 2013. The suit names more than 20 former and current DPS leaders and school board members, including Superintendent Alex Marrero. It was filed by the teenager’s family, including his parents Santos Garcia Mata and Criselda Bobadilla Sandoval.

DPS spokesman Scott Pribble declined to comment for this story, citing ongoing litigation.

Following the shooting, Denver police said they were investigating a 17-year-old for illegal possession of a handgun and a 16-year-old for auto theft and felony eluding. But neither teen was arrested on charges specifically related to Luis’s death, and, on Tuesday, neither the Denver Police Department nor the Denver District Attorney’s Office would confirm whether they were ever charged with anything.

The lawsuit alleges that on the day Luis was shot, a juvenile identified only by the initials A.A. stole a Kia Sportage, picked up another juvenile and went “joy-riding” around the city.

A.A. — who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, along with his mother, B.B. — was in the car on East 17th Avenue near a stoplight at City Park Esplanade, next to the school, when he ran the red light and drove toward Luis “at a high rate of speed,” firing on the East High junior, the lawsuit alleges.

Witnesses heard four or five gunshots, according to the lawsuit.

More than a year after the shooting, Luis’s family hasn’t received answers or accountability for the teenager’s death, Barringer said, stressing that there still haven’t been any charges filed in the case.

“It’s been utterly lacking in those regards,” the attorney said.

Until recently, few lawsuits were filed under the Claire Davis School Safety Act. The law, which is named after Claire Davis, the student killed in the Arapahoe High shooting, allows parents to sue if a school fails to provide “reasonable care” to protect students and workers from “reasonably foreseeable” violence.

The first known, and most high-profile, case came after the parents of Kendrick Castillo, a student killed in the 2019 STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting, sued the school three years ago. Castillo, 18, was killed after rushing one of the shooters. The Castillos refused a settlement with the school, with the parents saying they wanted to uncover more information about possible warning signs STEM officials might have received before the shooting.

The lawsuit by Luis’s parents alleges that DPS breached its duty to students and staff by removing school resource officers — or SROs — from campus, a decision that was made by the school board in 2020 during the national racial reckoning after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.

In the wake of both East shootings, DPS faced heavy criticism from parents and educators about its discipline policies and the removal of school resource officers from Denver schools. The board voted last year — following the shootings — to reinstate armed police, which are now in 13 of the district’s largest high schools.

The Colorado Governmental Immunity Act prohibits most lawsuits against public agencies, including schools, for liability. Historically, it has been very difficult to hold schools legally responsible for violence, such as a shooting, because it would have to be proven that the officials showed willful and wanton conduct.

But the Claire Davis School Safety Act opened the door to such lawsuits by saying that schools can be held liable when there is violence, including murder.

Proving that DPS officials failed to provide reasonable care by not having SROs on campus is “a very, very difficult argument,” said Igor Raykin, an attorney who specializes in education law and is representing families in lawsuits that are testing whether the Claire Davis Act can be used to hold districts responsible for not intervening when students are bullied.

The argument Luis’s family is making in their lawsuit is difficult because of the Governmental Immunity Act and because it would essentially mandate that schools must have an SRO on campus or they could be held liable if any incidents occur, Raykin said. He added, though, that while the argument is a difficult one to make in court, the lawsuit isn’t frivolous.

Research is not clear on whether SROs prevent shootings, although studies have found that , such as fights.

A judge will decide whether to make public information about the 2019 shooting at STEM School Highlands Ranch that the parents of Kendrick Castillo have learned through their lawsuit against the school — including what their attorney says are details of missed warnings about the shooters.

John and Maria Castillo said in court Wednesday that they have learned more about the May 7, 2019, shooting that took their son’s life, and want that information — collected through the discovery process during litigation — released so it can be used to improve school safety.

“We wanted to hear things that weren’t being told to us,” John Castillo said when asked why he listened to the depositions given as a result of the family’s lawsuit.

The Castillos have refused the $387,000 settlement offered in their lawsuit against STEM and want their case to go before a jury, which could find the school failed to protect their son. Kendrick Castillo, 18, died after rushing one of the shooters during the attack, which will mark its fourth anniversary next month. (The settlement is not an admission of liability.)

Retired Judge Christopher C. Cross served as a special master during Wednesday’s hearing in Douglas County District Court and will decide what materials and information should be made public.

Only part of the hearing, which included testimony from John Castillo and Michael Davis, the father of a student killed in a shooting at Arapahoe High School in 2013, was open to the public. The judge and attorneys for both parties were expected to spend the afternoon privately debating what specific discovery could be released.

For now, the information remains confidential. Douglas County District Court Judge Jeffrey Holmes previously put the records under a protective order to keep them from public review.

Attorneys with STEM and the Douglas County School District argued during the hearing that some of the materials should remain secret because of concerns about school safety and student privacy.

But during opening statements, they also appeared to agree with the Castillos’ attorney, Dan Caplis, that other information could be released to the public. It’s unclear exactly what that information is as it is confidential, but Caplis said it would prove that one of the shooters was “a walking red flag.”

The Castillos initially sued both the school and the district, but the latter was dismissed as a defendant.

The lawsuit is believed to be the first to test Colorado’s Claire Davis School Safety Act, which state legislators passed eight years ago. The law is named after Claire Davis, 17, who was killed by another student at Arapahoe High.

Michael Davis and others who helped create the law testified in support of the Castillos on Wednesday, saying that the intent of the law was for information — especially anything that sheds light on failures by a school or district to keep students and staff safe — to be released to the public so others could learn from those mistakes.

“We hope for the better, but systems fail,” Davis said during the hearing.

Cross said in an order making the hearing partially open to the public that the case is of the “highest interest to the public,” noting that “unfortunately, school shootings remain in the news and the public interest in doing anything possible to stop such violence is immeasurable.”

To his knowledge, the Claire Davis School Safety Act “has not been tested in court ” before, Cross said in his order.

The act allows parents to sue if a school fails to provide “reasonable care” to protect all students and employees from the violence that is considered “reasonably foreseeable.” Before it became law, it was even harder to hold schools legally responsible for shootings, in part, because it would have to be proven that officials showed willful and wanton conduct.

The Castillos’ lawsuit was potentially the first lawsuit filed under the act — or at least the first to make it this far in court. In recent months, at least two other lawsuits have been filed that are seeking to expand the law’s reach so it can be used to hold districts responsible for failing to stop bullying.

The crux of the issue centers on what the Castillos can do with the information they learned during their discovery. In most cases, such information can be shared with the public. But the law “only deals with allowing full discovery,” Cross wrote.

“Still, it very well may imply that the plaintiff can and should disseminate that information in the hopes that measures to prevent school shootings in the future might ensue,” Cross wrote.

He acknowledged that one of the arguments for keeping certain information confidential is that it could be used to help carry out future attacks.

Caplis, the Castillos’ attorney, previously has said they discovered information that “will shock the conscience of the public and will force urgently needed school safety changes.”

“Have they fixed the failures that led to Kendrick Castillo being carried out of that school dead?” Caplis said during Wednesday’s hearing, adding, “People can use that information to make things safer.”

The students who carried out the attack “were able to spot the fatal flaws in the STEM and DCSD security system,” Caplis said.

But David Jones, an attorney for STEM, pushed back on the idea of any kind of potential cover-up by the school.

“That’s simply not true,” he said. “The essential lessons of this shooting were learned and have been in the public eye for almost four years. Some information should not be made public because it could be used as a roadmap for others who wish to (carry out) a violent act.”

Both STEM and the district argued that federal student privacy law and Colorado’s public records act prevent some details about current and former students and personnel records from being released.

“Douglas County School District is not here to shield any information from the public about what led to the events on May 7 and what happened on May 7,” said Gwyneth Whalen, an attorney representing the school district.

But, she said, the district “has to draw the line about releasing information about ongoing security and school safety measures.”

Releasing details about safety measures, such as panic button locations and threat and suicide assessment protocols, would endanger current students, Whalen said.

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“That¶¶Ňőap a lot of access and those are short periods of time,” said , a doctoral candidate at the Colorado School of Public Health and the lead author of the research letter describing the findings in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics.

The results come as Coloradans are reeling from yet another school shooting. On March 22, a 17-year-old student shot and wounded two school administrators at East High School in Denver. Police later found his body in the mountains west of Denver in Park County and confirmed he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Another East High student was fatally shot in February while sitting in his car outside the school.

The time it takes to access a gun matters, McCarthy said, particularly for suicide attempts, which are often impulsive decisions for teens. In research studying people who have attempted suicide, nearly half said the time between ideation and action was less than 10 minutes. Creating barriers to easy access, such as locking up guns and storing them unloaded, extends the time before someone can act on an impulse, and increases the likelihood that they will change their mind or that someone will intervene.

“The hope is to understand access in such a way that we can increase that time and keep kids as safe as possible,” McCarthy said.

The data McCarthy used comes from the Healthy Kids Colorado Study, a survey conducted every two years with a random sampling of 41,000 students in middle and high school. The 2021 survey asked, “How long would it take you to get and be ready to fire a loaded gun without a parent¶¶Ňőap permission?”

American Indian students in Colorado reported the greatest access to a loaded gun, at 39%, including 18% saying they could get one within 10 minutes, compared with 12% of everybody surveyed. American Indian and Native Alaskan youths also have the highest rates of suicide.

Nearly 40% of students in rural areas reported having access to firearms, compared with 29% of city residents.

The findings were released at a particularly tense moment in youth gun violence in Colorado. Earlier this month, hundreds of students left their classrooms and walked nearly 2 miles to the state Capitol to advocate for gun legislation and safer schools. The students returned to confront lawmakers again last week in the aftermath of the March 22 high school shooting.

The state legislature is considering a handful of bills to prevent gun violence, including raising the minimum age to purchase or possess a gun to 21; establishing a three-day waiting period for gun purchases; limiting legal protections for gun manufacturers and sellers; and expanding the pool of who can file for extreme risk protection orders to have guns removed from people deemed a threat to themselves or others.

According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, firearms became the of death among those ages 19 or younger in 2020, supplanting motor vehicle deaths. And firearm deaths among children increased during the pandemic, with an average of seven children a day dying because of a firearm incident in 2021.

Colorado has endured a string of school shootings over the past 25 years, including at Columbine High School in 1999, Platte Canyon High School in 2006, Arapahoe High School in 2013, and the STEM School Highlands Ranch in 2019.

Although school shootings receive more attention, the majority of teen gun deaths are suicides.

“Youth suicide is starting to become a bigger problem than it ever has been,” said , a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

“Part of that has to do with the fact that there’s more and more guns that are accessible to youth.”

While gun ownership poses a higher risk of suicide among all age groups, teens are particularly vulnerable, because their brains typically are still developing impulse control.

“A teen may be bright and know how to properly handle a firearm, but that same teen in a moment of desperation may act impulsively without thinking through the consequences,” said , a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. “The decision-making centers of the brain are not fully online until adulthood.”

Previous research has shown a disconnect between parents and their children about access to guns in their homes. A 2021 study who own firearms said their children could not get their hands on the guns kept at home. But 41% of kids from those same families said they could get to those guns within two hours.

“Making the guns inaccessible doesn’t just mean locking them. It means making sure the kid doesn’t know where the keys are or can’t guess the combination,” said , a senior researcher at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, who was not involved in the study. “Parents can forget how easily their kids can guess the combination or watch them input the numbers or notice where the keys are kept.”

If teens have their own guns for hunting or sport, those, too, should be kept under parental control when the guns are not actively being used, she said.

The Colorado researchers now plan to dig further to find out where teens are accessing guns in hopes of tailoring prevention strategies to different groups of students.

“Contextualizing these data a little bit further will help us better understand types of education and prevention that can be done,” McCarthy said.

is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at the . KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Re: “Parents seeking records, not cash,” March 14 news story

Instead of taking the money and running, the Castillos are choosing to honor their son, Kendrick, by getting and sharing information that may save other students. Good for them!

Peggy Caughlan, Fort Collins

Assault rifle lapel pins disrespectful

Re: “GOP’s filibuster sought to stall gun, safe-drug-use bills,” March 11 news story and “GOP digs in against gun bills,” March 7 news story

In light of the near-daily shootings and killings of Americans at our own hands, often with assault-type weapons, doesn’t it seem insulting to the dead and wounded, both present day and past, that any elected representative of any party would wear an assault rifle insignia on their lapel?

It is a disrespectful affront to any survivor to vaunt the instrument of destruction that deprived them of loved ones. Parents and school children fear attending what should be one of the safest havens for kids. Yet, in seeming ignorance and disregard for those killed and their families, some elected officials proudly display banal disrespect on their chests.

If they were personally affected by the loss of a loved one, what would their attitudes be? I doubt they would be so unconcerned.

Both sides of the mouth talk about mental health, and this utterly flagrant lack of care for public safety clearly shows where the mental health issues are. Obsessiveness over an inanimate object might be an indicator.

Richard D. Babcock, Colorado Springs

“Affordable for whom?”

Many people seem to swoon when they hear “affordable housing.” We may all think we know what affordable housing means. Many seem to think that affordable housing solves myriad problems vexing Denver. But the notion of affordable housing raises many questions. Affordable for whom? Affordable at what point in time? Affordable for how long? On what basis is affordability measured? Who determines affordability? What proof is required? In comparison to market-rate housing, is affordable housing as well built, and does it have the same amenities?

Affordable housing is an opportunity for the already housed, i.e., renters. Affordable housing offers an opportunity for the already housed to move into ownership. Affordable housing does not address the issue of the unhoused/homeless. Addressing the issue of the unhoused is a completely separate issue from building affordable housing. In swooning over affordable housing, we need to be very clear-eyed about what it is and is not, and what it does and does not.

MaryLou Fenili, Denver

Let’s slow down the reckless drivers

I just don’t feel safe driving on the streets of Denver anymore. What is it with all these reckless drivers?

Denver already has one of the longest yellow lights on its traffic signals compared to any other city I have been in, yet drivers frequently speed through red lights.

In northwest Denver, the city has added a number of roundabouts to slow down traffic. Yet despite the yield signs on all four ways of the roundabout, cars often speed through them, paying no attention to the other drivers.

We need cameras on intersections that have frequent accidents. And in place of roundabouts, either keep the stop signs or put in dips or speed bumps. Sadly, some people are more afraid of damaging their cars speeding through a dip or speed bump than they are of killing another person.

Catherine Hanisits, Denver

When the government tells you not to worry …

Re: “Government races to reassure U.S. that the system is safe,” March 14 news story

Monday, the federal government raced to reassure Americans that the banking system was secure after the second and third-largest bank failures in the nation’s history happened in the span of 48 hours. I’ve been around long enough to know that when the federal government tells you don’t worry, you better start worrying.

Leroy M Martinez, Denver

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Maria and John Castillo, whose 18-year-old son was hailed as a hero for rushing one of the shooters, have not accepted the settlement money in a civil lawsuit they brought against STEM School, their attorney, Dan Caplis, said Monday.

The parents hope refusing the funds will help them in a fight with the school over releasing more information about the May 7, 2019, school shooting that also injured eight others.

The two STEM students who attacked the school were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Douglas County District Court Judge Jeffrey Holmes in February ordered STEM to pay the Castillos the maximum amount of monetary damages allowed under state law, in particular the Claire Davis School Safety Act. After the damages were paid, the lawsuit against the school would be dismissed as moot because the maximum damages were awarded, Holmes ruled.

But the Castillos don’t want the lawsuit to be dismissed, court filings show. The parents want the information they learned during the discovery process to be made public. They also want to bring the case to a jury, which could find the school failed to protect their son. (The school’s settlement payment on its own is not an admission of liability.)

“John and Maria Castillo have succeeded in using the Claire Davis School Safety Act to find the truth about what led up to the mass shooting at STEM that their son Kendrick sacrificed his life to stop,” Caplis said in a statement. “Now the Castillos want to share that evidence with the public so that all schools can learn the lessons from the STEM shooting and be safer moving forward.”

The case is the first high-profile lawsuit to be filed under the Claire Davis School Safety Act, which was passed by legislators after a fatal shooting at Arapahoe High School in 2013. The law allows parents to sue if a school fails to provide “reasonable care” to protect students and employees from violence that is considered “reasonably foreseeable.”

STEM is fighting the release of some material, court records show. The school’s director of communications, Nicole Bostel, said the school doesn’t want to see the information released because of concerns about student privacy and school safety.

“We’ve never wanted to fight the Castillos in any form or fashion,” she said. “What we want to do right now is just protect student privacy. There is a lot more information in the documentation they have about other students that they got through discovery, and that is what we want to protect. Those students were not involved in what happened on May 7 and it¶¶Ňőap not right that that information be made public.”

She said the school also doesn’t want information on current security measures to be made public. Caplis said that across 20 depositions and thousands of pages of documents, the lawsuit uncovered information that the Castillos believe “will shock the conscience of the public and will force urgently needed school safety changes” if the material is released.

Holmes in February appointed a special master — a retired judge — to the lawsuit who will be responsible for reviewing the disputed materials and determining what will be made public. The two sides will appear before the special master for the first time on Wednesday, Caplis said.

Regardless of the special master’s decision, the Castillos also plan to eventually appeal Holmes’ ruling that the school pay the money and the case be dismissed, Caplis said. The parents hope to win the right to a jury trial through that appeal.

An attorney for STEM, David Jones, did not immediately return a request for comment Monday. The Castillos initially sued both STEM and the Douglas County School District, but the school district was later dismissed as a defendant, court records show.

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At 10:30 a.m. on Oct. 16, 2020, the director of Colorado’s Office of Emergency Management hopped out of his car at a Denver warehouse used to store personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“You! Now! In the warehouse!” Mike Willis said to one of his employees, pointing his finger at her and then the warehouse doors. The state’s joint incident commander for the pandemic response was raging over some sort of miscommunication about logistics.

“I’m so (expletive) pissed off at you right now,” Willis said to her, staring her down with “intense hatred,” she later told state investigators. “How can you let this happen?”

In a corner of the warehouse, the two went back and forth at each other loudly. Finally, Willis turned toward the employee, pointing his finger into her temple.

“Are you a (expletive) idiot?” Willis said, stepping up into her face. He stood so close — “towering over” her, one witness later said — that their masks were nearly touching, as he unleashed another tirade.

The situation was “as close to being physical than she had ever encountered,” the staffer told a state investigator — and she previously worked in the Department of Corrections.

This incident, a subsequent state investigation and the resulting suspension of Colorado’s emergency management director, detailed in a February 2021 investigative report, have not been previously reported. But current and former employees say it’s hardly an outlier.

During his five years at the helm of Colorado’s responses to natural and public health disasters, Willis has displayed a pattern of aggressive behavior and inappropriate, unprofessional conduct, according to interviews with 23 current and former colleagues, state and federal government officials, National Guard service members and a review of internal state investigations into his conduct.

Willis has been suspended twice over the past 18 months for behavior that included berating female staffers, throwing objects in rage and intimidating workers to the point they thought it was close to getting physical. The most recent suspension included a warning that Willis likely would be fired “for any similar misconduct” in the future.

More than once, Willis has been drunk after-hours at industry conferences and nearly fought other attendees, multiple witnesses told The Post.

A state employee in 2019 notified human resources that they believed Willis was intoxicated in the state’s Emergency Operations Center during the response to the shooting at STEM School Highlands Ranch — an allegation reported at the time to Willis’ supervisor Kevin Klein, the head of Colorado’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

But the state didn’t investigate the allegation in 2019. Klein only launched an inquiry this month after The Post began asking for records and conducting interviews. (Willis denied being inebriated that day and Klein concluded that the allegations were not sustained.)

Willis, Klein and Stan Hilkey — who runs Colorado’s Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management — declined interview requests from The Post.

In emailed responses to questions, Willis said, “I continue to learn through my experiences,” admitting that he “can be intimidating on occasion” but is working on his affect and delivery.

“In my role, I have to instill a sense of urgency into situations that require rapid, meaningful action,” he wrote. “Getting a large bureaucracy to move is important and our ability to respond timely and efficiently to any crisis can cost or save lives.”

The governor’s office, through a spokesperson, wouldn’t answer questions about whether Gov. Jared Polis has been informed of or received complaints about Willis’s behavior.

“He rules by fear; he intimidates; he threatens,” said the now-former employee who reported the STEM incident, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they still work alongside the state. “That’s his mantra for being an effective leader.”

Quick-trigger temper

When Willis applied in 2017 to run the state’s Office of Emergency Management, he sounded all the right notes about what it means to be an effective leader.

“…(E)motional responses nearly always sabotage conflict resolution,” Willis wrote in the application, a copy of which was obtained by The Post through an open records request. “Great people are passionate about what they do and believe; therefore leaders must guide stakeholders through conflict in a way that does not allow it to devolve into an emotional tug of war. This starts with the leader’s own responses as that sets the tone.”

Willis was picked after an “extensive national search” that included more than 60 applicants, the department in November 2017.

But in reality, current and former state employees told The Post, Willis runs his office through anger and force of personality.

Staff soon learned of his quick-trigger temper, which could erupt at a moment¶¶Ňőap notice. It didn’t just happen during crises, they said. It could be a routine meeting during which someone tells him something he doesn’t like, or another department doesn’t give him what he wants. He’s known to pound on the table, throw his glasses in disgust or abruptly leave meetings altogether.

“He’s always angry,” said Fran Santagata, a retired emergency manager, who said she was on the receiving end of Willis’s explosions. “I don’t care what meeting he goes to, he’s always angry and always on edge.”

During one meeting in 2018 to discuss the cyberattack on the Colorado Department of Transportation, Willis grew upset over what he viewed as a lack of productivity, according to the accounts of two people who were there.

At regular intervals, Willis reconvened the group to see who had accomplished their tasks and who hadn’t. One by one, Willis went through the staff. If you completed your assignment, he sent you to one corner of the room. If you didn’t, Willis sent you to the opposite corner.

“It was all just for show,” said one employee who watched it unfold, speaking on condition of anonymity because they still work alongside the department. “All for public shaming.”

Personnel from the Office of Information Technology were stunned.

“To have someone talk to them like that,” said the individual who reported the STEM incident and was also in the room for the CDOT meeting, “that is unheard of.”

Willis, in an email, said this portrayal of the day’s events “is an intentionally inaccurate depiction of a highly effective problem-solving strategy.”

In reality, he wrote, if a team briefed a problem that they didn’t have the resources to resolve themselves, “a representative was asked to move to an area on the operations floor near the front (not a corner).” In the end, the team “addressed the problem in greater detail.”

People who worked under Willis described him as the most challenging boss they’ve ever encountered. One former employee said he was going through a bottle of whiskey a week as a coping mechanism.

“I was distant from my family,” this person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he still works with the state. “I was a bad father, an even worse husband.”

Santagata recalled her doctor expressing alarm after seeing one of her mental health evaluations. The stress made her drop 10 pounds as she constantly felt on edge, she said, trying to anticipate what might make her boss lose his temper.

“I was showing genuine signs of PTSD,” Santagata said. “It was horrible, just horrible.”

The former staffer who said he resorted to drinking recalled walking down the hall to a different exit, just so he wouldn’t have to walk past Willis’ office.

“He’d yell to the point where you’d have to shut the door,” said Robyn Knappe, a former emergency management official. “He would definitely act like we were all a bunch of grunts.”

Willis, in an email, said, “I am sure I can be intimidating on occasion and I am passionate about our mission and ensuring those that work, live and play in Colorado are served to the best of our ability.”

His current team, he said, “feel safe in their environment and are not intimidated by either me or the challenges of preparing for, responding to and recovering from disasters in our state.”

The director elicited some positive responses in staff evaluations and interviews with The Post.

“I feel like he has been the best director we’ve had in a very long time,” one employee wrote in 2019, according to employee evaluations obtained by The Post through an open records request. “The changes he’s marched through have been great, his vision is right, he’s engaged and approachable.”

Others wrote that Willis provides a clear road map for the direction of the department and applauded his open-door policy. Some employees from other state agencies who have worked with Willis were surprised when told about his suspensions, saying they’ve never seen this side of him.

Suspensions and warnings

But Willis’ hyper-aggressive managerial style has landed him in trouble multiple times during his tenure.

One employee, interviewed as part of the investigation into the 2020 warehouse blowup, said she had documented 19 incidents involving Willis over a six-month span, many of which she detailed to Klein, his boss. They included verbal altercations, yelling, cursing and conversations that were perceived as inappropriate and unprofessional in the workplace.

The woman, who was not named in the report, said she started to avoid Willis as much as possible.

“You never know if you are going to get Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde,” she told investigators.

Willis said in his interview with HR that he apologized after one of the incidents. But on another one, he said he felt the woman “was interfering with his mission and it wasn’t his first rodeo.” She’s always telling him no, he told investigators.

In the warehouse case, the department concluded Willis violated three state policies governing workplace violence, ethics and professional conduct, and being an inclusive, respectful and professional employee.

Hilkey, who runs the Colorado Department of Public Safety, told Willis and Klein during a Jan. 19, 2021, meeting that the behavior outlined in the investigation put both the department and Klein “in a position of liability unless it stops and something is done,” according to a summary of the meeting obtained by The Post through an open records request.

Willis said “he just needed to be better and not let it happen again,” the memo states. Hilkey agreed, saying he hoped this would be the last time he heard about this type of behavior.

It wouldn’t be.

Klein suspended Willis for two days without pay for his role in the warehouse fracas, mandated he write apology letters to the women who filed the complaints, and ordered him to attend professional coaching sessions.

Willis “demonstrated a pattern of inappropriate behavior that must be corrected,” Klein wrote.

Almost exactly one year later, however, two more women filed complaints with HR — outlining behavior from Willis that felt all too similar: throwing objects, staring them down, intimidating through yelling.

“I felt intimidated by his actions, raising his voice and staring me down and I don’t know how I would’ve responded had it been an in-person meeting,” the woman wrote in the complaint, first reported by The Post in May. She cried afterward and didn’t go to a meeting two days later.

Once again, Klein suspended Willis, this time for three days without pay. Once again, he ordered Willis to write apology letters to the people he harmed. Once again, he ordered him to go to professional counseling. He also stripped the director of travel privileges, which have since been reinstated.

“I consider this the last time that sanctions other than termination will be applied for any similar misconduct by you,” Klein wrote.

Willis, in an email, said he wouldn’t comment on the formal investigations beyond what he told HR in his interviews.

“I continue to learn through my experiences,” Willis said when asked by The Post if his behavior has changed since the suspensions. “I’ve taken these events and reports seriously and worked on my affect and delivery, while I continue to strive for high-functioning teams to bring to bear critical services for the people of the state of Colorado.”

Hilkey told The Post in an email that the department takes allegations of inappropriate behavior “very seriously.”

But even before Willis was appointed by Klein to his current position in 2017, he exhibited similar patterns of belligerent behavior during his years in the Colorado National Guard, according to multiple people who served with him.

Some 10 years ago, John Dolan recalls three people walking into his office to tell him about one particularly nasty blowup. Willis had heard something during a briefing that he didn’t like, the individuals told Dolan, who was the guard’s director of personnel at the time.

“He was pissed and threw a chair full across the room into the wall,” Dolan said he was told. “Reckless, intimidating, violence in the workplace. It was certainly a breach of military conduct.”

Willis, in an email to The Post, said the chair incident never happened. “There were no incidents in my military career and I was not disciplined,” he said.

STEM School shooting incident

The state recently launched a third inquiry into Willis’s behavior, this time related to the response to the May 7, 2019, school shooting in Highlands Ranch.

State officials had gathered in the Emergency Operations Center in Centennial that afternoon, monitoring the scene in case Douglas County authorities needed assistance.

A state employee, though, noticed Willis “was not functioning clearly,” the individual told Klein this month, according to the 23-page incident inquiry summarizing Klein’s probe.

“…(H)e was visibly intoxicated,” the worker, who was not identified in the report, told investigators. “His face was… red. His eyes were red, bloodshot and he struggled to focus on things.”

As the day wound down, the staffer said they felt the need to report what they saw. That night, they called the head of HR and told her the entire story — a call memorialized at the time in a memo included in Klein’s report.

The following day, the HR director called Klein “and relayed the information for his knowledge,” the memo states.

Klein, in an email to The Post, said he had been with Willis earlier on May 7 and “did not notice any signs of intoxication.”

The person who had called HR on May 7 made it clear they weren’t filing a formal complaint, Klein said. “As a result,” he said, “I decided to closely monitor him.”

None of the other witnesses interviewed as part of Klein’s probe this month told him they had noticed anything unusual about Willis’ behavior on May 7, 2019. Two people who were there that day and interviewed by The Post said he did not seem intoxicated.

But another then-employee, the person who described the 2018 meeting about the CDOT cyberattack, told The Post that Willis was wobbly that day in the Emergency Operations Center, his eyes glazed over. His behavior, the second person said, was consistent with someone under the influence.

Willis, in his interview with Klein and in response to questions from The Post, denied being inebriated.

Ultimately, Klein and Hilkey agreed that the claims of intoxication were not substantiated. Both department heads, in the report and an accompanying memo, questioned the credibility of whistleblowers they believed to be talking to The Post and took issue with them reaching out to other colleagues.

“I also find that there appears to be a coordinated effort by former employees… to malign (Willis) in a local newspaper,” Klein wrote.

Still, Klein once again noted “incidents of intimidating behavior” by Willis detailed by an employee during the inquiry into the 2019 allegation.

“I have addressed similar behavior with (Willis) and my expectations for improvement stand,” he wrote in the final line of his report.

“Belligerent, narcissistic behavior “

Those who’ve worked with Willis say his behavior outside the office is just as troubling.

One former employee, who told The Post about drinking due to stress from the job, remembers seeing Willis walking to an elevator at the 2018 annual emergency management conference in Loveland.

In the middle of the hallway, Willis stopped abruptly.

“You know what your (expletive) problem is?” Willis said to the employee, an account corroborated to The Post by a second person. “I don’t (expletive) like you.”

Willis told The Post in an email that he didn’t recall this conversation, but said he “sometimes joke(s) around with some employees in a manner that has always been understood to be in fun. It is possible that someone overheard this sort of banter and now four years later is trying to make it into something it wasn’t.”

Other industry professionals and employees told The Post about similar incidents at conferences, usually at night after the drinks started flowing.

One night during the 2018 National Emergency Managers Association conference in Savannah, Georgia, Willis had clearly been drinking, according to another individual who witnessed his behavior. He was loud, bombastic. He slurred his words.

A normal, casual conversation with someone at the bar quickly devolved into Willis nearly coming to blows, the individual said.

“People have too much to drink (at these conferences), but I’ve never seen that kind of belligerent, narcissistic behavior before,” said the individual, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they still do business with the state. “It’s embarrassing.”

Willis denied ever being in a situation at a conference in which a conversation was close to turning physical.

“I have enjoyed conversations and healthy disagreement with other emergency management professionals on complex issues,” he said via email.

Current and former employees say they can’t understand how Willis still has his job after the multiple investigations, aggressive behavior at conferences and countless workplace blowups that leave adults in tears.

“It is a chronic pattern of abuse, of dereliction of duty and of incompetence,” said the former employee who reported the STEM incident. “And it¶¶Ňőap gone unchecked by senior leadership within the department.”

John and Maria Castillo say they are hoping to use the act to uncover more information about possible warnings school officials received before the shooting almost three years ago and their response, alleging in the lawsuit that officials “breached their duty” to protect students and employees from an act that was “reasonably foreseeable.”

“We knew that there was a credible threat one week before the shooting,” John Castillo said. “It¶¶Ňőap information like that, that normally wouldn’t be brought out and exposed if it wasn’t through the ability to go through depositions and pursue the truth (via the Claire Davis Act).”

Historically, it has been “basically impossible” to hold a school legally responsible for a shooting despite any kind of warning in advance of a possible attack because it would have to be proved that officials showed willful and wanton conduct. The Colorado Governmental Immunity Act also prohibits most lawsuits against public agencies for liability, according to education attorneys and mass shooting experts.

But the Claire Davis School Safety Act – which was passed following a fatal shooting at Arapahoe High School in 2013 — opened the door to such lawsuits in Colorado by allowing parents to sue if a school fails to provide “reasonable care” to protect all students and employees from the violence that is considered “reasonably foreseeable.”

Yet, few — if any — lawsuits have been filed under the act since it passed seven years ago — until the Castillos filed their suit last year.

None of the attorneys or experts who spoke to The Post were aware of another case besides the suit filed by the Castillo family. The state’s civil court records system doesn’t allow for keyword searches so a Denver Post reporter was also unable to find other lawsuits.

There have likely been few cases to make it as far as the Castillos lawsuit against STEM because while the law is clear that schools can be held liable when there is violence, such as murder, first-degree assault, or a sexual assault, it is murkier whether that is also the case in more common situations when another student injures a peer, resulting in say a broken bone, said Igor Raykin, an attorney not associated with the lawsuit, who specializes in education law.

Coloradans have faced more school shootings than most, but they are still rare.

Supporters of the law said it is a way for families to get information about school shootings without having to “beg for information.” School safety experts said such information can be used to improve how schools respond before a shooting ever occurs. But there are critics, too.

“The Claire Davis Act is an extraordinarily, sloppy, poorly written piece of legislation,” Raykin said, adding, “It is not entirely clear when there would actually be a liability in these kinds of cases and even what constitutes a crime of violence.”

When legislators passed the Claire Davis School Safety Act, schools opposed the law because they believed it would increase their insurance liability and wouldn’t prevent violence. Some lawmakers were also concerned about potential unintended consequences of the act, fearing it could stop schools from helping students with mental illnesses and that schools could expel more students in an effort to avoid liability.

These fears have come to fruition with schools suspending or expelling students who they believe pose any potential threat, even minor ones, Raykin said.

“Schools are using the Claire Davis Act as a weapon right now,” he said.

But the Castillos and their attorney, Dan Caplis, said the law is allowing them to glean information about the shooting at STEM — which marked its third anniversary on Saturday — that would otherwise be kept secret.

“Over time, the Claire Davis Act is going to do more to protect students and teachers than any law ever passed by the legislature,” Caplis said.  “The Claire Davis Act…gives survivors the power to investigate and to find the truth about whether a school failed to do what it should have done to protect the kids.”

“We want the truth”

Most school shootings feature some kind of warning in advance, including prior threats and communications that a shooter plans to carry out an attack. And in many cases, someone — students, school staff, family members — observed a sign but did not act on it, according to

It’s the impetus behind which allows students and others to report concerns they have about their peers and has become a critical part of the state’s efforts to prevent another school shooting after the Columbine High School massacre more than two decades ago.

“(Gunmen) always talk about what they are going to do because they are consumed with this idea, this plan they have,” said Jaclyn Schildkraut, an associate professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Oswego, who studies mass shootings.

The Claire Davis School Safety Act was passed in 2015, two years after 17-year-old Claire Davis was killed by another student at Arapahoe High School.

After the shooting, Davis’ parents helped draft the law amid their own fight for information about the shooting. Their battle paved the way for a report on the shooting by the University of Colorado Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence and the University of Northern Colorado’s Department of Criminal Justice.

The report found that school administrators botched a threat assessment on the student who carried out the attack, as well as a culture of silence that strained the flow of information between school officials and law enforcement, and other failures to act on warning signs.

The Castillos allege in their lawsuit that STEM officials received multiple warnings about the risk of a possible shooting, such as when an unnamed person changed a mention of programs to prevent suicide and shootings on the schools Wikipedia page to include “Do they work? We shall see” in April 2019, according to the lawsuit.

The Castillos’ son, Kendrick, was killed after tackling one of the two shooters who entered STEM on May 7, 2019 and fired on their classmates. Eight other students were injured.

One of the gunmen has been sentenced to life without parole for killing Kendrick Castillo. The second shooter pleaded guilty, including to first-degree murder, and was sentenced to life in prison, plus 38 years with the possibility of parole.

Attorneys representing STEM and Douglas County School District declined to comment on pending litigation. A district spokeswoman also declined to comment.

The lawsuit alleges the school also failed to act on other warnings, including a call from an anonymous parent to Douglas County school officials where the parent told them she feared a “repeat of Columbine and Arapahoe (shootings).”  The school investigated the allegations but found no evidence to support them,

“We want the truth and we want to be able to talk about it,” John Castillo said. “We want to be able to find out what things need to take place to make positive change in our schools all across our nation, not just here in Colorado.”

School officials also knew of one of the shooter’s disciplinary history and mental health struggles, which included self-harming and suicidal thoughts, according to the lawsuit.

The overlap between suicidal thoughts and mass shootings is complex. The decision to carry out a violent act, such as a mass shooting, can imply suicidal intentions, but it¶¶Ňőap rarely the sole or primary factor, according to the Secret Service study.

Mental health experts have said that people with suicidal thoughts or mental illness are more likely to be the targets of violence than harm others and rhetoric that they are dangerous promotes stigma and can prevent people from seeking help.

Going to trial

Nationally, the results of lawsuits against schools and districts following a shooting have been mixed. A lawsuit filed by parents of two children killed in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was dismissed in 2018 after a judge said the district was protected by governmental immunity.

Last year, it was revealed the Broward County school district will pay the families of the 17 people killed and others injured or traumatized in the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., a total of $25 million,

Such lawsuits can bring closure to survivors, but they should also result in lessons that all school officials can use to improve their responses to potential warnings of violence and school safety, said Susan Payne, a school safety and prevention expert who founded the Safe2Tell tipline.

Last year, STEM and Douglas County schools said in court filings that they would deposit $387,000 – the most they said the Castillos can receive under the act – into the court registry without admitting liability and asked Douglas County District Judge Jeffery Holmes to dismiss the case as moot.

But Holmes denied their request to dismiss the case, writing in a Sept. 28 order that under the Claire Davis School Safety Act, the Castillos have “a special entitlement to discovery in cases involving incidents of school violence” and that dismissing the case “could hamper the ability to obtain appropriate discovery.”

The Castillos suit against STEM and the district is set to go to trial in September.

“The Claire Davis Act said it¶¶Ňőap not just about the governmental immunity lift or a finite amount of dollars, it¶¶Ňőap also about the discovery of what happened,” Payne said. “People do want to seek to understand what happened and it could be very painful to not know.”

Because two students opened fire in room 107 that day, there are 20-year-olds who are afraid of the dark. It reminds them too much of the dark classrooms they huddled in and listened to gunfire as high school students.

Some never returned to school, or are afraid to leave their houses.

“I know what it¶¶Ňőap like to get phantom pains in your leg because you were shot,” Joshua Jones, one of the students in room 107 that day, said during his attacker’s sentencing Friday. “I know so much more than I should for someone my age.”

After more than two years of court proceedings, a judge in Douglas County on Friday sentenced Devon Erickson, the second of two gunmen, to a mandatory sentence of life without parole for killing 18-year-old Kendrick Castillo and wounding eight others in the school shooting that traumatized a community.

Kendrick’s father, John Castillo, said the final court proceeding has provided a little bit of closure.

“It¶¶Ňőap bittersweet,” he said. “It¶¶Ňőap cathartic. But when we go home the house will still be empty.”

For more than three hours Friday, the students, teachers and parents traumatized that day told Douglas County District Court Judge Theresa Slade how the two shooters irrevocably change their lives.

Students spoke of passing pools of blood on the floor and stepping on shattered glass as they fled. Some still feel guilt that they survived while Castillo did not, or felt that they should’ve done more to save him. Even though they recognize it¶¶Ňőap not rational, it¶¶Ňőap still there.

Students recalled texting and calling their mothers to tell them they loved them and that they might die. Mothers remembered the blind panic that followed those messages and, in some cases, waiting hours before knowing their child was alive.

“There will never be an easy way to say the words: I was in a school shooting,” one former student wrote in a letter read by her mother.

One student said he has flashbacks when doing quadratic equations because that¶¶Ňőap what he was doing as an eighth-grader when the gunfire began. Lauren Harper, the teacher in the room where the shooting happened, said she still has two nightmares from that day — one of the shooters pulling out the guns and one of learning that Kendrick was dead.

“I have seen the holes not only in my classroom but also in the bodies of my students,” she said. “I see a grave where I should see a young engineer.”

Kalissa Braga, a mother of two of students, said she was in the school volunteering when the shooting happened. She hid in a bathroom with an infant she was nannying and her 5-year-old child, wedging the children between the toilet and the sink in hopes they would offer protection in case bullets pierced the walls.

For weeks after the shooting, her 5-year-old would repeat the school’s lockdown announcement — “locks, lights, out of sight” — without knowing what it meant. On a later trip to Home Depot, the little girl saw broken glass on the floor and hid because she’d walked through broken glass the day of the shooting and thought it meant there had been another one.

A jury in June convicted Erickson of nearly four dozen charges, including three counts of first-degree felony murder for killing classmate Castillo. He was also convicted of 31 attempted-murder charges, along with a variety of lesser charges including arson, theft, possessing a weapon on school grounds, criminal mischief, burglary, and reckless endangerment.

In addition to life without parole, Slade on Friday sentenced Erickson to 1,282 years in prison.

George Brauchler, former district attorney for the 18th Judicial District and special prosecutor on the case, said the sentence is likely the longest ever recorded in Douglas County. Every year is warranted, he said.

“There is no regret, there is no sadness, no sorrow,” he said of Erickson.

Erickson’s parents, sister, grandfather and girlfriend told the judge that the now-20-year-old was not the monster he seemed and that he was deeply loving and loved. Erickson’s parents, Jim and Stephanie, apologized to the victims and everyone affected by their son’s crimes, which they said they still could not explain.

Though Erickson did not show emotion during the victims’ testimony, he sobbed while his family spoke.

“We pray for these people every day,” Jim Erickson said. “We hope they can find peace. And we also hope they can find forgiveness — I know that¶¶Ňőap a hard ask.”

All of Erickson’s family said he was sorry for the terror he wreaked. But Erickson chose not to speak when offered the chance.

Slade, the judge, noted the lack of apology while handing down her sentence. She said she received letters about the sentencings from all over the world and from survivors of other school shootings, as well as many STEM School students and families.

“They were exposed to a war zone in their own school,” she said.

May 7, 2019, also showcased remarkable heroism from teenagers barely old enough to vote — Jones and Brendan Bialy bolting from their seats to help Castillo take down a shooter before he could do more harm. English teacher Lauren Harper, student Jackson Gregory and IT director Mike Pritchard risked their own lives to disarm the other gunman.

During Erickson’s three-week trial, prosecutors used more than 60 witnesses to describe how Erickson and his co-conspirator, Alec McKinney, planned the horrific school shooting in advance — and then carried out their mission on May 7, 2019.

McKinney pleaded guilty last year to first-degree murder, along with more than a dozen other charges, and is currently serving a life sentence plus 38 years. Because he was a minor at the time, McKinney is automatically eligible for parole in 40 years.

One of Castillo’s best friends, Alison Thompson, said Friday during the sentencing that the two of them had planned to go on a camping trip the summer after they graduated. He was supposed to send her off to the Air Force Academy that fall.

But instead of writing letters to Kendrick from school, she wrote them to his parents. She now avoids her hometown at all costs — it brings back memories of seeing John Castillo searching for his son at the reunification site, of the sliding doors in the emergency room when she learned Kendrick was dead. She fears she’ll forget what her best friend’s laugh sounded like.

“When I have kids, am I going to be scared to send them to school because someone might hurt them?” she said. “What if they don’t have a Kendrick in their class?”

The Castillos still visit their son’s grave every day. In her testimony, Maria Castillo read the note she and John had written for the 2019 STEM School yearbook before Kendrick was murdered. It told him how proud they were of him and how they couldn’t wait to see what he did next.

“None of that ever happened,” she said. “A life without Kendrick is not a life.”

For some of those injured and traumatized by the shooting, the sentencing Friday marked a turning point. No longer will they have to file into the windowless Douglas County courtroom every few months to watch hearings or provide testimony.

“They’re no longer victims,” said Jennifer Krause, mother to one of the students in the room. “They’re survivors.”

Denver Post reporter Sam Tabachnik contributed to this report.

Over these past twenty-six years as an attorney, I have been a prosecutor for the Columbine High School massacre, the murder of Claire Davis at Arapahoe High School, the attempted mass murder at Mountain Vista High School, the Aurora theater massacre, the mass shooting of Douglas County deputies and the murder of Zach Parrish, and the mass shooting at STEM. Invariably, in each of these horrific events, tales of heroism emerge that generally turn out to be just a bit less than originally billed.

The opposite is true of the events of May 7, 2019.

Amidst unthinkable premeditated acts of evil, there were unpredictable acts of self-sacrifice and courage that undoubtedly saved the lives of everyone in Room 107. There were real heroes in that classroom. Their names should always be remembered for what they did that day. These are The Heroes of Room 107.

Just after a 1:51 p.m. message to his accomplice who was blocking one of the exits in 107 to “go now,” the 18-year-old would-be mass murderer positioned himself in front of the only other escape route. The room was dark. The students watched The Princess Bride. It was three days before the end of most of the students’ high school careers. They had no idea they were in a kill box fashioned by a classmate, who planned to murder everyone one of them. The killer removed a magnetic strip from the door, locking out any possible help. He pulled a fully loaded .45 caliber hand cannon hidden in a guitar case, turned to menace his classmates, and announced “nobody (expletive) move!”

We will never have to know what horror would have occurred if Kendrick Castillo had not acted. With the killer’s words barely past his lips, the well-liked, smart, loving, only child of John and Maria sprang from his seat and charged the gunman. No fear. Or, no display of fear. From where does such bravery come? Boom. The killer pulled the trigger and sent a lethal bullet through Kendrick, but not before the hero slammed him into the wall, thwarting his plans for mass murder.

Nearly simultaneous with Kendrick’s heroism, Brendan Bialy and Josh Jones sprung from their seats and charged the gunman. After Kendrick fell, they wrestled the killer to the ground while he continued to pull the trigger. Boom. A bullet went through a wall and struck another student. Boom. A bullet went through the wall and lodged into the ceiling. Boom. A bullet tore through Josh’s hip and pierced his leg.

After being shot through both legs, Lucas Albertoni had crawled across the room towards the other exit. He looked up into the face of the person who shot him and had the courage to say “you don’t have to do this.” Twice. The shooter pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger. He moved just fast enough for the bullet to enter his shoulder, breaking his clavicle. To this day, he carries two of the nine bullets the second shooter fired, one each in his shoulder and in his leg.

Jackson Gregory, hiding behind his teacher’s desk, remembered that the Columbine shooters killed everyone who hid under tables in the library. He decided not to be a victim. “Action” Jackson leaped from the desk onto the second killer and fought to disarm him, oblivious to the bullet in his shoulder. It took two. Ms. Lauren Harper, the British Lit teacher who believed she had been shot, joined with Jackson to fight and stop the shooter. They succeeded.

Douglas County Sheriff Lieutenant Lori Bronner, the former head of the department’s school resource officers, Sergeant Joel White, and several other deputies sped to STEM within mere minutes of the shooting. They disregarded their own safety — and likely DCSO rules — by not even spending the time necessary to put on body armor. Kids were at risk and that is what drove them on. Entering the school, they were nearly shot by the STEM security guard who had apprehended one of the shooters, but they pressed on, not knowing how many shooters were where or doing what. Fearless. Sgt. White found Gerry Montoya-Ojeda — shot three times, including a head injury — threw him over his shoulder, and ran for nearly one block to get him help.

Admittedly, every survivor of 107, especially those shot — like Mitchell Kraus — and every person in STEM that day showed courage in the face of death, and again when they faced the student who tried to kill them in court.

The political debates of our day: the role of law enforcement in our schools and in our community, the demands placed upon the teachers of our children, can gun laws protect us from criminals, concerns about the next generation of Coloradans … and more met in Room 107 on that dark day and revealed apolitical answers.

In matters of evil and lawlessness, there is no substitute for SROs and selfless law enforcement officers in our neighborhoods.

Our teachers are called upon to do far more than educate, and we must find ways to recruit and retain more like Ms. Harper.

No gun law proposed or passed could have prevented the two killers from using an axe and crowbar to break into a safe to steal and use lawfully owned firearms.

And finally, and to this Dad, most importantly, the kids are alright. Courage, bravery, resilience … they have it all.

I have but one desperate, reckless hope. There should never again be a necessity for those like the Heroes of 107. No more Kendrick Castillos. No more murders in schools. No more need for courage in a classroom. Let us honor them today and pray there are no more like them tomorrow.

George H. Brauchler is the former district attorney for the 18th Judicial District. Follow him @GeorgeBrauchler.

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