This is a List of notable shootings in the U.S. State of Colorado .
This is a List of notable shootings in the U.S. State of Colorado .
Since the 1990s, three Colorado massacres in the Denver metropolitan area have garnered national attention: the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, which resulted in 15 deaths (including the post-massacre suicides by the two perpetrators); the Aurora shooting in 2012, which resulted in 12 deaths; and the 2021 Boulder shooting, which resulted in 10 deaths. [1]
The deadliest massacre in Colorado history took place in 1914 in Ludlow.
| Events | Location | Date | Number of persons killed | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ludlow Massacre | Ludlow | April 20, 1914 | c. 21 | The deadliest incident of the Colorado Coalfield War, a major coal miner strike. The Colorado National Guard as well as private guards employed by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company fired on a tent colony of 1,200 strikers and their families. |
| 1993 Aurora, Colorado shooting | Aurora | December 14, 1993 | 4 | Nathan Dunlap, 19, who was fired from a Chuck E. Cheese's restaurant as a cook, later returned to the restaurant and opened fire, killing four employees and wounding another. He was convicted of first-degree murder and attempted murder charges and was sentenced to death. [2] In 2013, then-Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper indefinitely delayed Dunlap’s execution. [3] Hickenlooper was expected to order a clemency in his death penalty before his term ended in early 2019 but took no such action. [4] He was succeeded by Governor Jared Polis, who commuted Dunlap's sentence to life imprisonment. Polis said he conferred with the families of Dunlap's victims and felt the crimes were "despicable," but took the action as being consistent with Colorado's prior repeal of the death penalty in cases of new crimes. [5] |
| Columbine High School massacre | Columbine | April 20, 1999 | 15 (including both perpetrators) | Two senior students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, embarked on a shooting spree in which a total of 12 students and one teacher were murdered. They also injured 21 other students directly, with three further people being injured while attempting to escape the school. The pair then committed suicide. It is the sixth-deadliest school massacre in United States history, after the 1927 Bath School disaster, the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the 2022 Robb Elementary School Shooting and the 1966 University of Texas massacre, and remained the deadliest for an American high school until the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting of 2018.[ citation needed ] |
| Subway Valentine's Day shooting | Littleton | February 14, 2000 | 2 | Stephanie Hart-Grizzell and Nicholas Kunselman were shot in a Subway restaurant. The case remains unsolved. [6] [7] |
| AMF Broadway Bowling Alley shooting | Littleton | January 27, 2002 | 3 | Bobby Zajac, Erin Golla and James Springer were shot at the AMF Broadway Bowling Alley. The case remains unsolved. [8] [9] |
| 2005 Denver police officer shooting | Denver | May 7–8, 2005 | 1 | Two Denver police officers were shot at a dance hall by Raúl Gómez-García. |
| Platte Canyon High School hostage crisis | Bailey | September 27, 2006 | 2 | Duane Roger Morrison took a high school classroom hostage and killed hostage Emily Keyes as she tried to escape. Morrison died after shooting himself and being shot by police. [10] |
| 2007 Colorado YWAM and New Life shootings | Arvada/Colorado Springs | December 9, 2007 | 5 | Matthew Murray opened fire at two church organizations in separate cities, killing four and wounding five others before committing suicide. |
| 2010 Deer Creek Middle School shootings | Littleton | February 23, 2010 | 0 | Bruco Eastwood fired a rifle in the school’s parking lot, wounding two students. He was tackled by faculty and arrested. Eastwood was found legally insane and committed to the state mental hospital. |
| 2012 Aurora, Colorado shooting | Aurora | July 20, 2012 | 12 | James Holmes opened fire during a midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises". Twelve people in the theater were killed and 70 were injured. [1] [11] |
| 2013 Arapahoe High School shooting | Centennial | December 13, 2013 | 2 | Eighteen-year-old student Karl Pierson entered Arapahoe High School carrying Molotov cocktails and a shotgun. He shot another student and then killed himself. [12] |
| October 2015 Colorado Springs shooting | Colorado Springs | October 31, 2015 | 4 (including the perpetrator) | Noah Harpham randomly killed three before being killed by responding police officers. Harpham had been open carrying; some opponents asserted this allowed a delay such that he was able to kill more people than if police intervention would have been warranted by his presence with a rifle. [13] |
| November 2015 Colorado Springs shooting | Colorado Springs | November 27, 2015 | 3 | A shooting and five-hour police standoff occurred at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. [14] A University of Colorado Colorado Springs police officer and two civilians (a mother of two and an Iraqi war vet) were killed. [15] [16] Five police officers and four civilians were wounded. The killer, Robert Lewis Dear, [17] was captured after police convinced him to surrender. [14] During his arrest, he gave a "rambling" interview [18] during which he said "No more baby parts." [19] [20] [21] |
| Thornton shooting | Thornton | November 1, 2017 | 3 | Scott Ostrem walked into a Walmart, killed three people near the cash registers, then fled the scene. [22] Ostrem had been arrested 14 times before the killings. [23] |
| 2019 STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting | Highlands Ranch | May 7, 2019 | 1 | At STEM school in Highlands Ranch, nine were shot including one dead. In 2019, 18-year-old Devon Erickson and another boy stood trial for the shootings. [24] |
| Aurora Town Center shooting | Aurora, Colorado | December 27, 2019 | 1 | A 17-year-old boy was shot and killed inside a JCPenney in the Aurora Town Center mall. [25] Kamyl Xavier Garrette, 18, was charged with first-degree murder. [26] |
| 2021 Boulder shooting | Boulder, Colorado | March 22, 2021 | 10 | Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa opened fire in a King Soopers supermarket and killed ten people, [27] including police officer Eric Talley who ran towards gunfire in an attempt to stop the shooter. |
| 2021 Colorado Springs shooting | Colorado Springs, Colorado | May 9, 2021 | 7 (including the suspect) | Six adults were killed at a birthday party after which the shooter took his own life. [28] |
| 2021 Aurora shooting | Aurora, Colorado | November 15, 2021 | 0 | Shots were fired near William C. Hinkley High School, resulting in injury to seven. Four teens were charged with attempted murder. [29] [30] |
| 2021 Denver and Lakewood shootings | Denver and Lakewood | December 27, 2021 | 6 (including the suspect) | Lyndon McLeod (aka Roman McClay) killed five and injured two at multiple Denver and Lakewood locations. McLeod later exchanged gunfire with a Lakewood police officer and was killed. [31] [32] |
| Colorado Springs nightclub shooting | Colorado Springs, Colorado | November 19, 2022 | 5 | At Club Q, an LGBTQ+ club, five were killed and 25 wounded. [33] |
| American Elm restaurant shooting | Denver | April 24, 2023 | 2 | Emerall Vaughn-Dahler and Ignacio Gutierrez Morales were shot and killed inside the American Elm restaurant at 38th Avenue and Raleigh Street in the West Highlands. The case remains unsolved. [34] [35] |
In the early morning hours of December 9, 2007, 24-year-old Matthew John Murray opened fire at the Youth With A Mission training center in Arvada, Colorado, killing two and wounding two others before escaping. Later that afternoon, he attacked the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with a number of firearms, killing two more people and injuring three before being shot by Jeanne Assam, a member of the church's safety team. Murray then committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
This article describes crime in the U.S. state of Colorado.
On July 20, 2012, a mass shooting occurred inside a Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, United States, during a midnight screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises. Dressed in tactical clothing, 24-year-old James Eagan Holmes set off tear gas grenades and shot into the audience with multiple firearms. Twelve people were killed, and 70 others were injured, 58 of them from gunfire.
James Eagan Holmes is an American mass murderer responsible for the 2012 Aurora theater shooting in which he killed 12 people and injured 70 others at a Century 16 movie theater on July 20, 2012. He had no known criminal background before the shooting occurred. Before the shooting, Holmes booby-trapped his apartment with explosives, which were defused one day later by a bomb squad.
A shooting occurred on October 1, 2015, at the Umpqua Community College campus near Roseburg, Oregon, United States. Chris Harper-Mercer, a 26-year-old student who was enrolled at the school, fatally shot an assistant professor and eight students in a classroom, and injured eight others. Roseburg police detectives responded to the incident and engaged Harper-Mercer in a brief shootout. After being wounded, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. The mass shooting is the deadliest in Oregon's modern history.
On November 27, 2015, a mass shooting occurred in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, resulting in the deaths of three people and injuries to nine. A police officer and two civilians were killed; five police officers and four civilians were injured. After a standoff that lasted five hours, police SWAT teams crashed armored vehicles into the lobby and the attacker surrendered.
Garrett Preston Russell Swasey (November 16, 1971 – November 27, 2015) was an American competitive ice skater, figure skating coach, and police officer. As an ice dancer, he won the 1992 U.S. junior ice dance title at the U.S. Figure Skating Championships and went on to participate twice more at the senior level. He coached along with Doreen Denny. Swasey was shot and killed in the line of duty during the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting in 2015.
On October 31, 2015, a shooting occurred near downtown Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States. The shooting began around 8:45 a.m., though a 911 call was placed 10 minutes earlier on the morning of Saturday, October 31, which was Halloween. Three people were randomly shot and killed by a gunman, later identified as 33-year-old Noah Harpham, as they were walking down Prospect Street near downtown Colorado Springs. A man riding a bicycle was the first victim shot after pleading for his life, according to eyewitness reports. The gunman then turned and ran, killing two women. These women were either killed randomly as the gunman ran down the street, firing at random or sitting on a porch targeted by the gunman. The gunman was later killed in a shootout with four police officers in which he was struck once. In total, there were three crime scenes. This was the first of two shootings in Colorado Springs in less than a month; the second was the Planned Parenthood mass shooting, 28 days later.
On May 7, 2019, a school shooting occurred at STEM School Highlands Ranch, a charter school located in Douglas County, Colorado, United States, in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch. One student was killed and eight others were injured. Sixteen-year-old Alec McKinney and eighteen-year-old Devon Erickson were convicted on dozens of charges and sentenced to life imprisonment. It, along with the Columbine High School massacre, is one of the only 6 school shootings to be carried out by two individuals.
This is a list of George Floyd protests in Colorado, United States.
Elijah Jovan McClain was a 23-year-old American Black man from Aurora, Colorado, who was killed as a result of being illegally injected with 500 mg of ketamine by paramedics after being forcibly detained by police officers. He went into cardiac arrest and died six days later in the hospital. He had been walking home from a convenience store. Three police officers and two paramedics were charged with his death. Both paramedics and one of the officers were convicted of negligent homicide. The other two officers were acquitted of all charges.
On March 22, 2021, a mass shooting occurred at a King Soopers supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, United States. Ten people were killed, including a local on-duty police officer. The alleged shooter, 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa, was arrested after being shot in the right leg. He was temporarily hospitalized before being moved to the county jail. After undergoing mental evaluations during the legal proceedings, Al-Issa was found mentally incompetent to stand trial in December 2021 and in April 2022. On August 23, 2023, prosecutors announced that Al-Issa was mentally competent to stand trial; a judge ruled as such on October 6 of that same year.
On November 19–20, 2022, an anti-LGBT-motivated mass shooting occurred at Club Q, a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States. Five people were murdered, and 25 others were injured, 19 of them by gunfire. The shooter, 22-year-old Anderson Lee Aldrich, was also injured while being restrained, and was taken to a local hospital. Aldrich was then charged and remanded in custody. On June 26, 2023, Aldrich pled guilty to the shooting and state level charges and was officially sentenced to a total of five consecutive life terms plus an additional consecutive 2,211 years, all without the possibility of parole. On January 16, 2024, Aldrich was additionally charged with 50 federal hate crimes in connection with the shooting. On June 18, 2024, Aldrich pleaded guilty to the federal charges and was sentenced to 55 concurrent life sentences without parole, plus a consecutive 190 years.
On December 27, 2021, a mass shooting occurred in downtown Denver and later moved to Lakewood, Colorado, United States where 47-year-old Lyndon McLeod fatally shot five people and wounded two others. McLeod was fatally shot by Lakewood Police Agent Ashley Ferris, after the two exchanged gunfire.
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