For over a decade now, Colorado's gun laws have become more and more restrictive. And for most of that time, the state's violent crime rate has gone up and up.
That violence includes a number of school shootings in recent years. One of them took place at Denver's East High School in 2023, when a student opened fire on two staffers before fleeing the school and later taking his own life.
Eric Sinclair, who was one of those school employees shot by the student, has filed a lawsuit against the Denver Public Schools arguing that the district's policies directly led to the shooting. This week a federal judge allowed Sinclair's lawsuit to proceed after declaring the district "appears to have exhibited a shocking disregard for the risk [the student] posed to an entire school full of children, faculty and staff — as well as to himself."
Prior to enrolling at East, [Austin] Lyle had been expelled from Overland High School in the Cherry Creek School District after police found an AR-15 assault rifle, two fully-loaded magazines, a plastic bag with spent shells, boxes of ammunition and a silencer in his bedroom, according to court documents.
East High administrators placed Lyle on a safety plan when he enrolled, which included daily check-ins with Assistant Principal Shawn Anderson, documents show.
On March 2, 2023, an East High student sent Anderson a text with a picture that appeared to show a gun in Lyle’s pocket. The assistant principal searched the student’s backpack but did not find a weapon.
Anderson altered Lyle’s safety plan four days later to require a daily search of the student’s backpack, court records show.
On March 23, Lyle entered the school and told Mason he needed to see Anderson, who did not respond after being radioed. Sinclair took Lyle into Anderson’s office to wait for the assistant principal.
The student told Sinclair he could check his backpack if he wanted. While searching the bag, the dean “noticed a bulge in the front pocket” of Lyle’s hoodie, the judge wrote in his ruling.
Lyle grabbed Sinclair’s hand and put it on the outside of the hoodie, saying, “Here, touch it,” the judge wrote.
Sinclair knew it was a gun after feeling the hoodie and tried to keep Lyle in the office. But the student pulled the gun and a struggle began between the two.
Lyle shot Sinclair in his thigh and through his stomach and chest, resulting in the loss of his spleen.
Gallagher did dismiss the individual members of the Denver Public School Board of Education and the assistant principal from Sinclair's lawsuit, but is allowing the litigation to move forward against the school district and the Board of Education as a whole.
In his ruling, the judge said that the school district and BoE “seem to have knowingly opened the door for a mass shooting and/or outbreak of gun violence” at East High, accepting, at least at this stage of the case, that Sinclair's allegations that he and other staffers received little training about how to search students for any weapons they might have, as well as his contention that the district failed for follow its own discipline policies.
Lyle was already on probation and had been expelled from one school district when he was allowed to enroll at East High. Even if he had been caught with a gun on campus without shooting anyone, there's no guarantee he would have been expelled from the Denver public schools as a result. The Denver Post reported not long after the shooting that some school staff "described DPS as reluctant to expel students after they were found on campus with a gun, despite district policy stating otherwise."
“In my experience, especially in cases that I know about or have been a part of, they are not willing to expel for weapons in all cases,” said a DPS administrator who spoke to The Post on the condition of anonymity over fear of retaliation by the district.
According to the Post, the district's efforts to avoid putting students into the "school-to-prison pipeline" has led to the lowest expulsion rate of any public school system in the metro Denver area.
“A free and public education system is a lifeline for our communities,” district spokeswoman Rachel Childress said. “We don’t want to disallow a student from (receiving an education) for mistakes, especially mistakes when we lack the evidence to support.”
It would be one thing if the district was reluctant to get law enforcement involved when students were fist-fighting, choosing to use school disciplinary measures instead. It's something else entirely, though, if the DPS is turning a blind eye to students bringing guns onto campus... especially when those students may already have a criminal record or a history of violence.
Colorado's restrictive gun laws didn't stop Austin Lyle from bringing a handgun to school, and as it turns out, neither did the Denver Public Schools' "safety plan" and disciplinary policies. At the time, DPS also had no school resource officers on campuses; a decision the school board reversed just a few months after the shooting at East High.
That decision may be the only sensible action the district has taken to safeguard students and staff on campus in recent years, and it came too late for Sinclair and the other administrator who was shot. Preferably, the district would also allow for armed school staff in addition to SROs, but I don't see that happening no matter how many other incidents like this might happen.
