The schoolchildren who walked into STEM School Highlands Ranch on May 7, 2019, fled the school later that day with night terrors, anxiety and panic attacks.
Because two students opened fire in room 107 that day, there are 20-year-olds who are afraid of the dark. It reminds them too much of the dark classrooms they huddled in and listened to gunfire as high school students.
Some never returned to school, or are afraid to leave their houses.
“I know what it’s like to get phantom pains in your leg because you were shot,” Joshua Jones, one of the students in room 107 that day, said during his attacker’s sentencing Friday. “I know so much more than I should for someone my age.”
After more than two years of court proceedings, a judge in Douglas County on Friday sentenced Devon Erickson, the second of two gunmen, to a mandatory sentence of life without parole for killing 18-year-old Kendrick Castillo and wounding eight others in the school shooting that traumatized a community.
Kendrick’s father, John Castillo, said the final court proceeding has provided a little bit of closure.
“It’s bittersweet,” he said. “It’s cathartic. But when we go home the house will still be empty.”
For more than three hours Friday, the students, teachers and parents traumatized that day told Douglas County District Court Judge Theresa Slade how the two shooters irrevocably change their lives.
Students spoke of passing pools of blood on the floor and stepping on shattered glass as they fled. Some still feel guilt that they survived while Castillo did not, or felt that they should’ve done more to save him. Even though they recognize it’s not rational, it’s still there.
Students recalled texting and calling their mothers to tell them they loved them and that they might die. Mothers remembered the blind panic that followed those messages and, in some cases, waiting hours before knowing their child was alive.
“There will never be an easy way to say the words: I was in a school shooting,” one former student wrote in a letter read by her mother.
One student said he has flashbacks when doing quadratic equations because that’s what he was doing as an eighth-grader when the gunfire began. Lauren Harper, the teacher in the room where the shooting happened, said she still has two nightmares from that day — one of the shooters pulling out the guns and one of learning that Kendrick was dead.
“I have seen the holes not only in my classroom but also in the bodies of my students,” she said. “I see a grave where I should see a young engineer.”
Kalissa Braga, a mother of two of students, said she was in the school volunteering when the shooting happened. She hid in a bathroom with an infant she was nannying and her 5-year-old child, wedging the children between the toilet and the sink in hopes they would offer protection in case bullets pierced the walls.
For weeks after the shooting, her 5-year-old would repeat the school’s lockdown announcement — “locks, lights, out of sight” — without knowing what it meant. On a later trip to Home Depot, the little girl saw broken glass on the floor and hid because she’d walked through broken glass the day of the shooting and thought it meant there had been another one.
A jury in June convicted Erickson of nearly four dozen charges, including three counts of first-degree felony murder for killing classmate Castillo. He was also convicted of 31 attempted-murder charges, along with a variety of lesser charges including arson, theft, possessing a weapon on school grounds, criminal mischief, burglary, and reckless endangerment.
In addition to life without parole, Slade on Friday sentenced Erickson to 1,282 years in prison.
George Brauchler, former district attorney for the 18th Judicial District and special prosecutor on the case, said the sentence is likely the longest ever recorded in Douglas County. Every year is warranted, he said.
“There is no regret, there is no sadness, no sorrow,” he said of Erickson.
Erickson’s parents, sister, grandfather and girlfriend told the judge that the now-20-year-old was not the monster he seemed and that he was deeply loving and loved. Erickson’s parents, Jim and Stephanie, apologized to the victims and everyone affected by their son’s crimes, which they said they still could not explain.
Though Erickson did not show emotion during the victims’ testimony, he sobbed while his family spoke.
“We pray for these people every day,” Jim Erickson said. “We hope they can find peace. And we also hope they can find forgiveness — I know that’s a hard ask.”
All of Erickson’s family said he was sorry for the terror he wreaked. But Erickson chose not to speak when offered the chance.
Slade, the judge, noted the lack of apology while handing down her sentence. She said she received letters about the sentencings from all over the world and from survivors of other school shootings, as well as many STEM School students and families.
“They were exposed to a war zone in their own school,” she said.
May 7, 2019, also showcased remarkable heroism from teenagers barely old enough to vote — Jones and Brendan Bialy bolting from their seats to help Castillo take down a shooter before he could do more harm. English teacher Lauren Harper, student Jackson Gregory and IT director Mike Pritchard risked their own lives to disarm the other gunman.
During Erickson’s three-week trial, prosecutors used more than 60 witnesses to describe how Erickson and his co-conspirator, Alec McKinney, planned the horrific school shooting in advance — and then carried out their mission on May 7, 2019.
McKinney pleaded guilty last year to first-degree murder, along with more than a dozen other charges, and is currently serving a life sentence plus 38 years. Because he was a minor at the time, McKinney is automatically eligible for parole in 40 years.
One of Castillo’s best friends, Alison Thompson, said Friday during the sentencing that the two of them had planned to go on a camping trip the summer after they graduated. He was supposed to send her off to the Air Force Academy that fall.
But instead of writing letters to Kendrick from school, she wrote them to his parents. She now avoids her hometown at all costs — it brings back memories of seeing John Castillo searching for his son at the reunification site, of the sliding doors in the emergency room when she learned Kendrick was dead. She fears she’ll forget what her best friend’s laugh sounded like.
“When I have kids, am I going to be scared to send them to school because someone might hurt them?” she said. “What if they don’t have a Kendrick in their class?”
The Castillos still visit their son’s grave every day. In her testimony, Maria Castillo read the note she and John had written for the 2019 STEM School yearbook before Kendrick was murdered. It told him how proud they were of him and how they couldn’t wait to see what he did next.
“None of that ever happened,” she said. “A life without Kendrick is not a life.”
For some of those injured and traumatized by the shooting, the sentencing Friday marked a turning point. No longer will they have to file into the windowless Douglas County courtroom every few months to watch hearings or provide testimony.
“They’re no longer victims,” said Jennifer Krause, mother to one of the students in the room. “They’re survivors.”
Denver Post reporter Sam Tabachnik contributed to this report.
