DENVER — The 16-year-old who shot and wounded two college students earlier than turning the gun on himself at his highschool in Evergreen, Colorado, left hints of his intentions on-line within the days main as much as the assault, the Anti-Defamation League mentioned.
The attacker reposted a photograph on X of a revolver and a field of ammunition two hours earlier than Sept. 10’s capturing, the ADL mentioned in a report launched Friday primarily based on analysis carried out by its Middle on Extremism.
Based on the analysis, Desmond Holly had beforehand shared the picture on his X account, and on TikTok he had posted pictures of a cranium masks, a ballistic vest and a knife with a Nordic rune drawn on it, the league’s evaluation reveals.
The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Workplace declined to remark Monday however mentioned final week the shooter was “radicalized by an extremist community.” It didn’t present particulars.
The 2 injured college students had been taken to a close-by hospital. One was launched and the opposite was in severe situation, the sheriff’s workplace mentioned.
Just a few days earlier than the capturing, the teenager posted footage on TikTok of himself carrying a black T-shirt with “WRATH” written throughout the chest in pink paint, the ADL mentioned.
Holly assembled his gear in a piecemeal vogue, the ADL mentioned, drawing inspiration from the tools utilized by earlier mass shooters.
For instance, Holly posted a now-deleted TikTok video wherein he modeled a tactical helmet and a fuel masks, utilizing background music from a Serbian folks track that the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooter performed whereas livestreaming the New Zealand bloodbath.
The ADL mentioned the shooter was lively on a violent gore website and spent “substantial quantities of time” in on-line areas that featured extremist ideologies and violent content material whereas amassing tactical gear to hold out his capturing. It didn’t describe the extremist ideologies.
The Evergreen shooter is amongst a number of mass shooters who’ve been lively on social media earlier than finishing up their assaults, the ADL mentioned. He had an account on the gore discussion board WatchPeopleDie, the place he preferred and commented on posts about American mass shootings, resembling these in Parkland, Florida, and Buffalo, New York, the group mentioned.
He appeared to have joined the location in December 2024, in the course of the month between college shootings at Considerable Life Christian college in Madison, Wisconsin, and Antioch Excessive College in Nashville, Tennessee, the ADL mentioned.
The Evergreen shooter acquired tactical gear with extremist symbols, the ADL mentioned. It didn’t say what these extremist symbols had been. The shooter additionally posted content material emulating the previous Columbine Excessive College shooters, who killed 14 individuals in 1999. Evergreen Excessive College is about 37 miles from Columbine.
The Evergreen shooter’s TikTok accounts had been stuffed with white supremacist symbolism and neo-Nazi code phrases, the ADL discovered.
On his earlier TikTok account, his profile picture featured an image of the white supremacist gunman who killed 10 Black individuals at a Buffalo grocery store in 2022 being arrested.
His most up-to-date profile picture was of the attacker who killed six individuals throughout a capturing rampage close to the College of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014, the ADL mentioned.
