What Are We Doing to Our Children?
/By Don Varyu
Jan 2026
he following story is true. It is tragic. And unfortunately, it is also common. On average, nearly every week in America, a person starts shooting a gun inside a school or on school grounds…and injures or kills someone. This is now so common that students and staff are well versed on how to react to an ‘active shooter’…the same way students once were in cases of fire or nuclear attack.
No other country in the world suffers the same way. But we, in America, refuse to seriously correct this.
What are we doing to our children?
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It was the opening weeks of a new school year at Evergreen High School, nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains outside Denver. Students were doing what they’ve always done: whispering about who “likes” who…moaning about some “lame” teacher…and looking forward to the football game on Friday night. But that Friday, there would be no game.
According to police,this is what unfolded at Evergreen on September 10, 2025:
10:15am
As always, a county sheriff’s deputy “school resource officer” is assigned to Evergreen. But on this day, in midmorning, he is dispatched from the school to the scene of a nearby multi-car crash.
11:26am
An Evergreen student, “Derrick” (I will use aliases in this story), posts a photo on X showing his hand grasping a .38 caliber snub nose revolver, with a box of bullets sitting on a table. No text is included.
Derrick, age 16, was a member of at least one online site that glorified school shootings…and urged its members to engage in such acts.
12:21pm
Derrick enters school and fires his first shot while walking down a hallway.
12:21pm
“Elle” and her two sisters—they’re triplets—are having lunch in their Spanish classroom. Elle hears a loud bang, runs to the door and opens it—only to slam it shut when a second shot rings out. Her teacher jumps in, locks the door, turns out the lights and huddles her handful of students into a corner, out of sight from the door window.
Elle then sends the text that would horrify any parent: “Shooting. We are having a shooting. It’s fucking real.”
Her Dad immediately responds, “Hide. I’m coming.”
Another student types, “Guys I’m scared, like I’m not just saying this. I’m scared for my friends.”
Similar text interchanges occur literally hundreds of times between kids and families, within the next few minutes.
Within 40 seconds, all interior classroom doors are locked.
In the school cafeteria, a large throng of students rushes to follow the instructions they’ve been taught: “if you can, run.” They stream through an exterior door, up a hill, through a wooded area and into a neighborhood of homes.
“Liam”, a sophomore, along with a couple of his friends, move to confront the shooter. Two more rounds are fired. Liam is wounded but not felled. The shooter moves on, while a librarian opens the door to her space, and then silently points to an exterior door, where Liam and his friends exit. Liam, despite his wounds, climbs a small hill to an adjacent community center. In the foyer of that building, with blood on his face, Liam is tended to by a medical staffer.
Meanwhile, Derrick reloads his revolver and keeps shooting, sometimes randomly, sometimes in the direction of other students. There are screams throughout the hallways.
12:22pm
The first 911calls come into police and the first police unit hears it and races toward the school. Many other units are dispatched within the next three minutes.
12:27pm
Apparently frustrated by his inability to enter classrooms, Derrick has exited the building as he reloads. He walks across the football field down toward a nearby road.
A roofer driving to a job sees what appears to be a physical tussle between two teens. Then he realizes one has a gun, which he waves wildly around. Then the one with the gun points it directly at “David”, a fellow student, who had celebrated his 18th birthday the day before. Now he is trying to stop the shooter. Shots are fired, and David is wounded in the chest and head. David falls to the ground…and Derrick continues down the hill.
Meanwhile, the students racing up the hill in the opposite direction hear those gunshots, which they realize are no longer coming from inside the school—could the shooter be coming up behind them? They are literally racing for their lives. The desperate students ring neighborhood doorbells, but repeatedly, no one is home.
A video captured on a Ring doorbell recorded their flight…(note: after viewing you will need to click back to this page)
Finally, at one door, a woman answers and immediately shepherds a group of students in. She has them sit together on the floor, out of sight, and passes around a sheet of paper. She tells them to print their names. She then calls police to let them know that these kids are safe.
12:30pm
The first police units arrive at the school, but soon realize there is no shooter inside.
However, on the road, several deputies have confronted Derick and loudly demanded that he “drop the fucking gun!” He freezes—then points the gun at his own head the pulls the trigger.
At the same time, his second victim, David, is administered CPR. He is lying on the ground nearby, between two police vehicles. He is then transported to the hospital.
The shooter, Derrick, is also given CPR on the way to the hospital. But he would die later that evening from his self-inflicted wound.
Apx. 12:30
Elle and her friends remain cowered in their classroom when they hear loud pounding at the door. Voices shout, “police!” The students and teacher do not move. They have been instructed previously that often gunmen will pose as law enforcement, in order to trick them.
This is a short video Elle recorded at that moment…
Within a half hour, the loud voices return to the door with the same announcement…and then begin to open the door with a key. The kids recoil. The police walk in with their weapons trained on these hostages—to make sure none poses a threat.
Then finally, after 45 minutes, Elle and her sisters and her classmates and her teacher are safe to walk out.
Throughout, parents receive a series of robocalls from police to let them know the latest status. The parents are informed that their kids will be moved to several nearby middle schools, where they can be reunited.
The roads leading to those schools are immediately jammed. More than one mother, stuck in the mess, leaps from her car and races on foot to the school—for some, more than a mile away—desperate for that reunion.
At the end of that day, one Evergreen High School student was left dead, and two others critically wounded. At last word, Liam was recovering, but still only communicating by writing notes. His first question was to ask how his friends were doing.
David “will need help” for the rest of his life.
But those shot were not the only victims. No one inside that school that day—no child or adult—was left undamaged. Some, to this day, have not healed enough to return to their school.
e look at something like this and we feel the tragedy. And we’re also enraged. But in another sense, it’s also just another school shooting. It seems to happen all the time.
In the interest of full disclosure, this one matters much more to me because my two grandkids were in that school that day. My granddaughter, a sophomore, was one of the kids running up that hill begging for escape…and fortunately found it in the emotional embrace of that one kind and wise woman.
f course, in the wake of all the fear and anger, immediately there arose a search for blame. The police were quick to emphasize that the school did everything right. But people asked, why couldn’t there have been another resource officer on campus? And, did the police respond fast enough?
Which, to me, is like asking why the fire department’s ladders didn’t extend up another two floors to the condo where the fire started…while ignoring the faulty wiring that ignited the blaze in the first place.
Most of all, people will search for the reason why Derrick walked into his school with a gun. What prompted him? How did he get his gun? (No one is saying anything, even at this writing, about the weapon.) Did he have mental health problems? Perhaps. But these shootings are happening 40 times a year. Does anyone pretend there is a common diagnosis that will lead to a full cure?
I can give you one place to point a finger. In this case, the FBI had been tipped off to a dangerous post on one social media platform in the month before the shooting. But the poster did not identify himself. In these cases, law enforcement has to obtain a warrant to search online for that identity. But by law, the host platform is granted a 35-day window to respond. And often, two or three warrants have to be issued consecutively before any action is taken. Derrick operated freely during that time, right up to the day he attacked. The FBI could do nothing.
This is an obscenity. Our society reveres tech titans like Jeff Zuckerberg and Elon Musk for their financial success. But much of their wealth depends on their refusing to help identify people dead-set on doing harm. Rage builds engagement, and engagement builds their fortunes.
These masters of the universe cry freedom of speech…while the kids at Evergreen cry freedom of life.
Derrick had an account on the “gore forum” WatchPeopleDie. It is an online hangout for real and would-be killers. Derrick was urged by online “friends” to commit his shooting—to be a hero…to be a “man”. In their eyes, he is now that hero.
It is not clear why platforms that can actively and constantly ban child pornography will not similarly shut down sites and forums that prompt child murder. They refuse to act.
And the danger is much wider and more diverse. Kids live online in a swamp of anger and threat…ridicule and humiliation. For them, this can be debilitating. There is a troubling number of cases where this perversion has caused young people to take their own lives.
We allow this.
I ask my fellow Americans; can our nation not do better?
What are we doing to our children?
ortunately, I don’t need to end this on a downer. There is a footnote that reveals what our country is still all about.
Evergreen understandably remained closed for several days. There were bullet holes in lockers…blood stains to be mopped off the floor. But during those days, some events, not occurring in the school itself, did take place.
In one, the girls’ gymnastics teams traveled to a neighboring school for a meet. Ane we have to remembver, that despite that awful day, these are stilll high school kids…you would expect school spirit—and school rivalries—to emerge.
But not on that day. When the Evergreen girls walked in, the walls displayed posters supporting them; simple messages that communicated: “We’re with you!”
During the event, Evergreen girls would complete their individual routines, and their teammates would rush out to hug and cheer her—and so did girls from the other school!
That host school was another in Evergreen’s district—but it was special. It was Columbine High School, the place where 26 years earlier two seniors—their “Derricks”--teamed up to murder 13 of their classmates and injure another 20 people.
Sure, no current student at Columbine is old enough to remember what once happened in their school. But they’ve all heard the stories; they understand what kind of damage results.
Can the same be said for our country? Do we really understand?
Can America’s adults ever feel what the kids at Evergreen and Columbine will live with forever? Can we act?
What are we doing to our children?
(This story could not have been written without the excellent reporting of the Colorado Sun and the Denver Post.)
