On Friday, there was another school shooting in Colorado, this time at the Arapahoe High School in Centennial, near Denver. An 18-year-old student opened fire, injuring one other student before shooting himself. The shooting happened a day before today’s one-year anniversary of the shooting in Newtown, Conn.
Early reports had said that two students were injured, but the Associated Press reports that Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson confirmed that the girl was covered in the blood of the student who was injured. The girl who was injured is 15 and is in critical condition.
The sheriff identified the shooter as Karl Halverson Pierson, 18. Although Pierson targeted a teacher, Robinson did not go into further details on the motive. He said that Pierson and the teacher had a “confrontation or disagreement.” Robinson added that Pierson did not hide his weapon as he entered the school and asked for the teacher by name.
The Denver Post reports that authorities think Pierson acted alone. Federal and local investigators went to his home Friday night with a bomb squad. They are also searching his father’s home in Denver.
Pierson also took two Molotov cocktails to the school and detonated one, reports KUSA-TV. The other was found by authorities.
The school has around 2,100 students and is just eight miles away from Columbine High School, the site of a shooting in 1999. It is also 15 miles southwest of the Aurora movie theater were 12 people were shot and killed last year.
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said Friday that it was an “all-too-familiar sequence of gunshots” and pleaded for the violence to stop.
Robinson added Friday that the teacher made a smart decision by leaving the school once he heard he was being targeted “in an effort to try to encourage the shooter to also leave the school.”