On Sept. 10, conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was shot. America was captured by the incident, though what not a lot of people talked about was Demons Holly, a sixteen-year-old student at Evergreen High School in Colorado, who committed a shooting the same day.
Holly brought a revolver with him to the secondary school and started the shooting during lunch time. He fired twenty rounds in about ten minutes and shot himself afterward. The shooting led to two victims, 18-year-old Matthew Silverstone and another anonymous student, who are currently hospitalized.
Perpetrators of mass shootings often die by suicide after the attack. Stephen Hanna, a psychologist at State High, explained the pattern.
“School shooters also may be seeking a desire to be remembered that is accompanied with their suicide. It has been reported that some often don’t have any friends or feel betrayed by others, and feel that suicide might lead to their recognition of pain. School shooters may be seeking a way to be remembered that can be accompanied with their death,” Hanna said.
The deceased shooter’s complete motive can’t be nailed down, but he is believed to have been “radicalized by some extremist network,” officials with the local sheriff’s office said.
The shooter had an account on a Reddit forum called “WatchPeopleDie.” This was a website in which users posted and interacted with different types of violent content, often including death. This was later banned from Reddit in March of 2019.
“It appeared that the person making those posts was developing a deep fascination with mass shooters. This is somebody who was expressing neo-Nazi views and that was active on a violent gore site that we know at least two previous school shooters were active on before him,” Oren Segal, senior vice president of Counter-Extremism and Intelligence for the ADL, stated after the incident.
The shooter’s participation in this online forum is the third example in less than a year of a teenager using the gore forum and attacking a school. This site has become the gateway to at least three school shootings, for instance, Abundant Life Christian School in Madison or Antioch High School in Nashville.
Because of these incidents, research by the ADL Center on Extremism indicates that Holly spent a lot of time in online spaces featuring extremist ideologies and violent content, ultimately adopting extremist views himself.
“It is often the case that when individuals feel that society isn’t working for them or that resources are being taken away from them, that they move towards groups they associate with themselves or the desire to fight back. We often flock to those who are similar to us. Groups such as neo-Nazis and other hate groups are aware of this, and frequently will use these platforms as recruiting tools to get those they can influence,” Hanna explained.
The State High community is aware of this shooting and many others that have come before it, and many have concerns and worries regarding the situation.
“I think too many people just move on to their next day,” Robert Furmanek, a State High social studies teacher, said.
These shootings, as well as the many that occur in the United States, affect people from State High’s community and environment more than people may think.
Hanna’s concerns surrounding State High include students starting to isolate themselves as a result of these worries, which would impact them significantly, as they don’t engage in more psychologically healthy coping strategies and/or socialization development.
“Although one is preserving themselves in the short term, they are having more long-term impacts to their overall fear drive, as the outside becomes associated with danger,” Hanna said. “Routines are everything to people, and once we build a routine, positive or negative, it can be difficult to overcome and/or reset.”
This shooting, as well as many others that occur in the United States, affected people from State High’s community and environment more than people may think.
