BAILEY, Colo., Sept. 28 — Grief is not enough, many people here said Thursday, to fill the holes from what happened at Platte Canyon High School. The gunman, Duane Morrison, killed Emily Keyes and himself.
Without even a partial explanation so far of why Duane Morrison, a 53-year-old drifter, came to the school Wednesday bent on violence, the world feels random and terrifying, they said, even beyond the bleakness that the loss of life and innocence has brought.
Mr. Morrison, a Denver man who had apparently been living his car, took six female students hostage inside a classroom and sexually abused some of them over a nearly four-hour period, the police said, but he made no demands and sought nothing from negotiators. As a SWAT team stormed the room, he killed one girl, 16-year-old Emily Keyes, and then himself.
What really shook this mountain town of 15,000 people about 40 miles southwest of Denver, dozens of people said, was the realization that the assailant was anonymous and unknown. That is contrary and deeply threatening to what small towns are about.
“We’re 45 minutes away from Denver and a lot of people don’t lock their doors,” said Mary Marshall, who has two twin daughters in the eighth grade at the middle school that adjoins Platte Canyon High. “That’s the kind of trusting atmosphere that there is out here. This incident has probably changed things forever.”
Ms. Marshall said the unexplained nature of the crime was what plagued her thoughts. “The randomness gives you the impression of less safety,” she said
Park County’s sheriff, Fred Wegener, was even more to the point. “My small county is gone,” Sheriff Wegener said at a news conference. “This is something that has changed my school, changed my community.”
The sheriff stood by his decision to send in the police team that led to the standoff’s violent end. Mr. Morrison had said, according to the police, that he had a bomb in his backpack and that something would happen at 4 p.m.
That threat compelled the decision to act, Sheriff Wegener said. He declined to say what an examination of the backpack had revealed because the investigation is still under way.
“Did I do everything I could to ensure the safety of these individuals? Yes,” Mr. Wegener said. “Am I going to regret for the rest of my life that Emily died? Yes.”
The officers burst in with shields extended, and Mr. Morrison shot Emily in the back of the head as she tried to flee toward them, the sheriff said. Everything was over in perhaps two to three seconds.
What was left on Thursday, in places like the Bailey Community Church and the Platte Canyon Grill, was a search for meaning — and it was not coming easy.
Chip Fair, whose daughter Hannah had been close friends with Emily since grade school, said he felt consumed by the pressure to do something. Mr. Fair paced in his house Wednesday night, he said. On Thursday he arrived at the church just after noon, having come from the bank where he had started a fund in Emily’s name, though he is not sure yet what the fund will do.
“You’re up one minute and you fall to pieces the next,” Mr. Fair said. “That’s kind of the way it’s going.”
A spokesman for the Keyes family, Louis Gonzalez, stood outside the church and asked the world to practice “random acts of kindness” in Emily’s name.
A deputy sheriff distributed pictures of Emily and the last text message she managed to send to her family about an hour and half before she was shot. “I love U guys,” it read.
Tera Daughtry and Niamh Connell, both recent graduates of Platt Canyon High, held hands as they walked outside the church talking to other young people and to reporters about their last memories of Emily. As they spoke, they laced their fingers together for support.
“I wasn’t even there and I’m having nightmares,” Ms. Daughtry said.
People described Emily as a smart and articulate student who excelled on the speech team.
“We are heartbroken at just really how random these things can be,” said Ellen Campa, 54, who has lived in Bailey for 30 years and is a friend of the Keyes family. Ms. Campa said she had watched Emily grow up.
“She was a sweetie, just a typical teen,” Ms. Campa said. “A neat kid and you look at her and think of all the potential — she’ll never get to grow up now.”
Gov. Bill Owens, who visited the school and the church Thursday afternoon, said he thought school security improvements made in Bailey after the 1999 attack at Columbine High School in nearby Littleton had probably kept Wednesday’s attack from being worse. The school was built with evacuation fully in mind, including a system that allowed students in adjoining classrooms to escape quickly, Mr. Owens said.
The town also got money after Columbine for a full-time police officer at the high school. But when Mr. Morrison arrived at the school late Wednesday morning, the officer was off campus at the town’s police building, Mr. Wegener said.
Katie Kelley contributed reporting from Denver.
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