• Suspect armed with shotgun, machete, Molotov cocktails
• Shotgun and ammunition were bought legally, locally
George Hickenlooper, the governor of Colorado, said on Sunday that the school shooting which occurred in his state on Friday was "kind of inexplicable", and added: "This kid by all accounts didn't exhibit the warning signs of mental illness."
On Saturday, Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson said the 18-year-old suspect in the shooting, Karl Pierson, had apparently acted in retaliation for discipline he received months ago from the school's debate club coach.
Robinson said Pierson had stormed into the school, Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado, carrying a pump-action shotgun and a machete, with an ammunition belt strapped cross his chest and carrying a backpack holding three Molotov cocktails, one of which he detonated in the school library moments before shooting himself. His body was found by law enforcement officers who never fired a shot.
One pupil, Claire Davis, 17, was shot in the head at point-blank range, apparently at random. She remains hospitalized, in critical condition. Davis and Pierson were not thought to have had any particular acquaintance. "I believe she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time," Robinson said.
The pump-action shotgun and ammunition used by Pierson were legally purchased from local retailers, Robinson said. He said Pierson bought the shotgun on 6 December and the ammunition on the morning of the shooting. Pierson, a senior remembered by classmates as studious yet argumentative – and described by some as socially awkward – was 18 when he made the purchases, the minimum age for buying a shotgun or other types of rifles in Colorado.
Hickenlooper, asked in an interview with CNN whether the shooting at Arapahoe High School had been linked to the following day's first anniversary of the Newtown school shooting, in which 20 children and six adults were killed, Hickenlooper said: "We don't see any connection at this point."
The sheriff's comments, made at an afternoon news conference, shed new light on circumstances of a shooting that unfolded in less than a minute and a half and marked the latest of more than two dozen instances of gun violence on US school campuses this year.
The faculty member believed by investigators to have been Pierson's intended target managed to flee the school unharmed. According to Robinson, the librarian imposed some unspecified disciplinary action in September against Pierson, "related to the debate team", for verbal threats other students reported that Pierson had directed at the faculty member. But the sheriff said he did not believe the punishment was "overly harsh" and he denied Pierson had been suspended or ejected from the debate team, as a number of students have said in accounts to Reuters and other media outlets.
Pierson repeatedly called out the faculty member by name as he stalked through the hallways of the school on Friday. The faculty member has not been publicly named by authorities, but local media accounts and students have identified him as librarian Tracy Murphy. Students who knew Pierson said he was heavily involved in the speech and debate club, until he was placed on some kind of restriction by the coach.
"Speech and debate was his platform," senior classmate Dylan Johnson, 17, told Reuters outside the school on Saturday. "When Mr Murphy took that away, I think that's what set him off, because he didn't have an outlet anymore."
Johnson said Pierson was known for speaking without "a filter", blurting out inappropriate comments that could get him in hot water. He said he was in Spanish class with Pierson when his classmate got angry and cursed at the teacher.
"He was just this big, goofy kid," Ryan Curtin, 16, a sophomore who knew Pierson from a weight-training class. "He was just kind of goofy and awkward, but never bullied that I could tell."
Zack Runberg, 18, another senior who took a world literature course with Pierson, said: "He was not a loner. He did have friends and would speak his mind in class."
The violence on Friday unfolded just eight miles from Columbine High School, where a pair of students shot 12 classmates and a teacher to death before killing themselves in 1999. Centennial is also where James Holmes, the former graduate student charged with shooting 12 moviegoers to death in nearby Aurora, Colorado, in July 2012, is being held in custody, awaiting trial on capital murder charges.
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