Gunman sexually assaulted hostages
The gunman who killed a student and committed suicide during a high school stand-off methodically selected six girls as hostages – apparently favouring blondes – and sexually assaulted at least some of them, authorities and witnesses said.
Sheriff Fred Wegener said the assaults went beyond touching or fondling.
“It was pretty horrific,” Wegener said yesterday, without elaborating.
The killer was identified as 53-year-old Duane Morrison, a petty criminal who had a Denver address but had apparently been living in his battered yellow Jeep when he walked inside the school on Wednesday with two handguns and a backpack that he claimed contained a bomb.
Investigators did not immediately say what was in the backpack.
Authorities said they knew of no connection between Morrison, his hostages or anyone else at Platte Canyon High School in this mountain town of about 3,500.
During the siege, he took the girls hostage in a second-floor classroom and eventually released four of them. Morrison, still holding two girls, soon cut off contact and warned that “something would happen at 4 o’clock,” authorities said.
About a half-hour before the deadline, a SWAT team used explosives to blow a hole in a classroom wall in hopes of getting a clear shot at him, but they couldn’t see him through the gap, and they blew the door off the hinges to get inside, said Lance Clem, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety.
Morrison fired at the SWAT officers, shot 16-year-old Emily Keyes in the back of the head as she tried to run away, and then killed himself, authorities said. During the lightning-fast gun battle, police said, they shot Morrison several times.
A sorrowful Wegener defended the decision to try to take Morrison by force.
“My decision was to either wait, with the possibility of having two dead hostages, or act to try and save what I feared he would do to them,” the sheriff said. “We have confirmed he did traumatise and assault our children. … This is why I made the decision I did.
“We had to go try and save them.”
Classes were cancelled for the rest of the week as the community tried to come to grips with the bloodshed, which evoked memories of the 1999 shooting rampage at Columbine High School, less than an hour’s drive away, that left 15 dead.
“This is – this is something that has changed my school, changed my community,” the sheriff said. “My small county’s gone.”
Louis Gonzalez, a spokesman for the Keyes family, said the girl’s father was among scores of parents anxiously awaiting word from their children inside the school during the stand-off. John Keyes had just bought Emily and her twin brother cell phones for their 16th birthdays.
“How are U?” a volunteer text-messaged Keyes on her father’s behalf.
At 1:52pm, she messaged back: “I love you guys.”
Police stormed into the classroom less than two hours later.
“In memory of Emily we would like everyone to go out and do random acts of kindness, random acts of love to your friends or your neighbours or your fellow students because there is no way to make sense of this,” Gonzalez said. “It’s what Emily would have wanted.”
Student Chelsea Wilson said she was in the college prep English class when the gunman came in and told the students to line up facing the chalkboard.
“All the hairs on my body stood up,” Chelsea said. “I guess I was somewhat praying it was a drill.”
One by one, the gunman started letting students go, and Chelsea, a tall brunette, said she was the first girl to leave. Her mother, Julia Wilson, said she thinks the gunman made all the blond, smaller girls stay. Keyes’ yearbook photo shows a smiling blond girl with blue eyes.
“He’s a pervert,” Chelsea said. “I’m not sure of motivation. I just knew it wasn’t good.”
Morrison was arrested in July in the Denver suburb of Lakewood after he failed to appear on a 2004 harassment charge in Littleton, another suburb. He was also arrested on suspicion of larceny and marijuana possession in 1973.
“He’s a weird dude. It was a telephone harassment. He left some messages at a business in the city,” Littleton police Sgt. Sean Dugan said. He declined to release details of the charge, but said Morrison received a nine-day jail sentence in August that was suspended.
Lynda Richards, 64, said Morrison was a tenant at a Denver apartment complex she managed in 2004 and 2005 and that she saw him nearly every day. She said he occasionally made inappropriate sexual comments.
“I was in (the laundry room) and he came in and before he left, I was washing underwear and he said ’Oh, my, look at those sexy panties,”’ she said. “And that scared me at that point. I thought ’What is up with this?”’
Morrison – wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt that made him look like a student - walked into the school shortly before noon on Wednesday. Authorities said that during he stand-off, he spoke at first with sheriff’s deputies, then used the girls to relay his messages.
Authorities say they found a motel key and possibly prescription drugs among Morrison’s possessions and they were checking into the possibility that he had been camping in the area.
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