Bailey, Colorado +Hostage Situation in a High School+
Bailey, Colorado +Hostage Situation in a High School+ A gunman claiming to have a bomb at Platte Canyon High School with at least 5 students that are being held as hostages, one was shot.
Swat Team is on the scene.
U/D: 21:01
One girl that was wounded in the Bailey high school hostage situation has died.
posted by VOS IZ NEIAS @ 9/27/2006 03:43:00 PM
1 Comments:
At 7:29 PM,
Anonymous said…
An armed standoff at a high school in Bailey, Colorado, ended Wednesday with a hostage and gunman being shot.
Sheriff Fred Wegener of the Park County Sheriff Department said it appeared the suspect shot one of the two female hostages -- a student -- and then shot himself when SWAT team officers approached.
Wegener said the gunman's identity and motive were not yet known.
"We looked at the situation and [the gunman's] behavior, which was becoming agitated," and decided to storm the classroom where the hostages were being held, Wegener said.
Video from the scene showed one person being brought out of the school on a stretcher and taken to an ambulance, which brought the person to a medical helicopter that landed on the school's football field.
The gunman had been holding two hostages in a second-floor classroom, Jefferson County sheriff's spokeswoman Jacki Kelley said earlier Wednesday. Six hostages were initially taken, but four of them were released, she said.
Previously, Lance Clem, spokesman for the Colorado Public Safety Department, said the gunman said he had a bomb.
Kelley said there was one "suspicious device" or the discussion of one, and said that was why the bomb squad was on scene.
She said both hostages were female students, while a law enforcement source close to the investigation told law enforcement analyst Mike Brooks that one of the two hostages may have been the wife of the gunman. Kelley said she did not know the students' ages or grades, and said their parents had not been notified. (Watch a newspaper editor explain how the gunman fired after a teacher defied him -- 3:39 )
"We have almost no information on the suspect, almost nothing," Kelley told reporters. "We don't know who he is. We don't know what he wants."
There were no injuries reported, she said.
A bomb squad, SWAT team and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had been dispatched to the scene, Kelley said.
Negotiations with the gunman were "sporadic," Kelley said. She added later that negotiators had spoken to the gunman from a hallway and via telephone, but police were trying to establish a "more reliable means of communication."
The Park County Sheriff's office would not provide further details. Bailey is in Park County, and Jefferson County authorities are assisting in the investigation.
The lack of information from police and the school system was concerning parents who have children at the school, according to the Denver Post.
"We've had no phone calls from the district. We don't know what's going on," said Pat Bramelette, who has two children, one attending the high school, one in middle school.
His wife, Susan, told the newspaper, "The most I got was off the bottom of the TV screen."
Sally Impson told the Denver Post that she hopes her 17-year-old son, Andrew, will find a way to contact her, although his cell phone doesn't work in the school and the road to the school is shut down.
"I'm so shook," she said. "It's just scary. You don't know what's going on. You hear shots are fired. I hope to God that everything is OK."
The 450 students at Platte Canyon High School and the 340 youngsters at the adjacent Fitzsimmons Middle School were evacuated, officials said. (Watch students board a bus to safety -- 1:11 )
The students were evacuated to a safe place about 12:10 p.m. (2:10 p.m. ET), the Park County School District superintendent's office said.
Bailey is about 45 miles southwest of Denver. It also lies about 40 miles southwest of Littleton, Colorado, which is where two students killed 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999.
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