How the shooting at Evergreen High School unfolded, moment by moment

EVERGREEN — At first, it looked like the boys were wrestling. 

But as Delmer Martinez approached in his work van, he could see that one of the two teenagers entangled at an intersection near Evergreen High School was holding a gun.

The armed boy waved his weapon around, pointing it in all directions, and then suddenly fired a shot into what Martinez thinks was the other boy’s rib area.

The wounded teen collapsed. The boy with the gun began to walk away nonchalantly, up a road leading to the school.   

That’s when law enforcement started pursuing the armed teen. A sheriff’s deputy repeatedly shouted at him to drop the gun. Martinez saw the boy open a vest and reload the firearm.

Then, another shot.

The Colorado Sun interviewed survivors and witnesses, and pieced together information from law enforcement and records, to develop a moment-by-moment account of the shooting last week at Evergreen High School.

Desmond Holly, 16, critically wounded two classmates Sept. 10 before fatally shooting himself. 

One of Holly’s victims, 18-year-old Matthew Silverstone, remained in critical condition Tuesday at St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood. The other, whose identity has not been released, was in serious condition at Children’s Hospital Colorado.

There are still many unanswered questions about the shooting — like where Holly got the revolver he used in the attack, which he was too young to purchase — and the shooter’s exact movements during the day. But The Sun’s reporting outlines how the nine-minute rampage unfolded.

FBI alerted to shooter’s online activity

The story of the shooting at Evergreen High School begins months before the first bullet was fired on the campus of 900 students tucked into the foothills west of Denver. 

That’s when the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office says Holly was “radicalized through an extremist network.” 

On social media, the teen engaged with conspiratorial, antisemitic and white supremacist content. He made references to the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School. His TikTok profile picture was an enhanced image of the gunman who killed six people and injured 14 others near the University of California Santa Barbara in 2014.

Holly’s online behavior, including joining a website featuring videos of people dying, was so disturbing that it caught the attention of the Anti-Defamation League, which alerted the FBI. 

The FBI said it launched an investigation, but it never identified Holly as being behind the online activity. The teen wasn’t using his name on the internet.

“In July 2025, the FBI opened an assessment into a social media account user whose identity was unknown and who was discussing the planning of a mass shooting with threats non-specific in nature,” the bureau said in a statement first reported by 9News. “We continued to work this assessment investigation to identify the name and location of the user up and until Sept. 10, 2025. During the assessment investigation, the identity of the account user remained unknown, and thus there was no probable cause for arrest or additional law enforcement action at the federal level.”

Then, on Sept. 10, the attack began to take shape. 

Evergreen High School had been without a full-time school resource officer for about 10 months while the deputy assigned to the school was out on medical leave. A roster of substitutes had been filling in. 

On the day of the shooting, one Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy was assigned to the school. But the officer left campus between about 10:30 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. to respond to a traffic crash. 

At 11:26 a.m., an X account linked to Holly posted a photo of a hand holding a .38-caliber, snub-nose revolver over a table with a box of bullets on it. There was no comment affixed to the post.

The shooting began less than an hour later.

“IT’S REAL”

Katie Clarkson had just finished cleaning up some applesauce she spilled on her shirt during lunch in her Spanish classroom when she heard a loud bang and ran to the door to see what it was. She opened the door and immediately heard a second bang followed by screams.

That’s when the 15-year-old sophomore knew the bangs were gunshots.

“I just started yelling, ‘There’s a shooter!’” Katie said.

She darted toward a corner of the classroom while her teacher jumped up from her desk to lock the door and turn off the lights.

Katie’s two sisters — they’re triplets — and three other students who were in the classroom joined her. They all sat huddled together, some of them with their knees pulled up against their chest. Their teacher was beside them, closest to the door.

One of Katie’s sisters called their mom at 12:21 p.m., after the first gunshot, while Katie sent a stream of panicked texts to their family group chat:

Their dad, whom their mom had called right away, texted back:

Katie also texted her longtime friend from North Carolina, where she lived before moving to Evergreen a little more than a year ago.

Her friend tried to console her and give her clear directions.

The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office says it received the first 911 call about the shooting just before 12:24 p.m.

As shots rang out in Evergreen High School, police and fire vehicles sped toward the school, past Sonya Sava’s flower shop in downtown Evergreen. 

She grabbed her phone to check what was going on. She already had a text from her son, a first-year student at Evergreen High School.

Sava immediately took off on foot from the flower shop, headed toward the high school about a mile and a half away. She ran as fast as she could in platform sandals and a dress.

Passerby records law enforcement confronting shooter

Before the first 911 call was made to police, some students had fled the school, sprinting toward neighboring houses, the library and the nearby recreation center.

At 12:23 p.m., a boy frantically rang the front doorbell of a nearby home, according to security camera footage shared with The Sun. Behind him, more kids ran up to the door.

“Thanks for stopping by,” said the doorbell’s upbeat automated greeting. “If you’d like to leave a message, you can do it now.”

The camera captured dozens of students running through the woods near the house.

Hearing no answer, the first group of kids to arrive kept running. Other students came up behind them.

“Ring the doorbell,” one said.

“No! Please!” another yelled, out of breath.

“I know these people!” one of the kids yelled, desperately banging on the door.

A pause as more kids arrived, panting and trying to catch their breath.

“Keep running!” a girl yelled. 

No one answered. About two dozen kids turned away and kept looking for a safe place to hide.

The sheriff’s office said this week that while the shooting began inside the school, Holly eventually went outside and crossed the football field.

It was about that time that Delmer Martinez reached the intersection of South Olive and Buffalo Park roads, just northeast of Evergreen High School, on his way to a roofing job. He pulled out his phone and began recording a series of videos. 

The first was timestamped 12:30 p.m. — nine minutes after Katie’s sister called their parents to report hearing gunshots and about six minutes after the first 911 call about the shooting was made to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.

Law enforcement had been on scene for about five minutes.

The first video captured by Martinez shows an armed deputy walking up South Olive Road toward the school. One or more officers are shouting commands at someone off screen. 

“Drop the gun!”

“Drop the fucking gun!”

“Drop the fucking gun!”

“Drop the gun!”

“Drop the gun!”

And then a loud bang. 

It was at that moment that Holly apparently shot himself. (St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood announced his death that night.)

Authorities say Holly fired about 20 rounds in total.

The video shows that while officers were pursuing Holly outside the frame, a person was lying between two sheriff’s office SUVs at the intersection of South Olive and Buffalo Park roads. The sheriff’s office said this week that it was Matthew Silverstone.

Another video, timestamped 12:31 p.m., shows a deputy checking on Silverstone — the boy Holly had been wrapped up with. 

A third video captured by Martinez, timestamped 12:33 p.m., shows a deputy performing CPR on Silverstone between the sheriff’s vehicles.

At 12:33 p.m., a first responder reported over their radio that they had two patients near the intersection of Olive and Buffalo Park roads, according to emergency dispatch radio traffic archived on Broadcastify.com.

“CPR in progress,” a first responder reported over the radio at about 12:38 p.m.

A few moments later, another first responder said they had a report of someone with a gunshot wound at Wulf Recreation Center, just south of Evergreen High School. (That was confirmed shortly thereafter.)

At 12:40 p.m., a dispatcher reported that one of the people receiving CPR was the suspect.

Martinez and other drivers who happened upon the scene on the side of the road began to turn around. Martinez’s hands were trembling.

“I couldn’t drive,” he said. “I saw that in front of me like on a big screen. He was a boy, a young boy.”

It wasn’t until he finished work and arrived home that night that he realized what he had witnessed: a school shooting.

“Is this really happening?”

Sava, after running from downtown Evergreen, arrived at a hill overlooking Buffalo Park Road where a group of about 10 to 15 other parents were waiting. One parent told her she saw someone taken away in an ambulance a few minutes earlier.

Sava’s son, recovering from a broken ankle, hobbled to Wulf Recreation Center. He told his mom that when he arrived, staff were helping a student with blood on their face in the foyer.

Her son continued to text her, saying he had been at lunch when a lockdown drill began. He realized it wasn’t a drill and saw people running, so he fled the school, too.

“Is this really happening?” she remembers thinking. “This can’t be real.”

That’s when the parents’ phones began ringing with calls from Jeffco Public Schools. It was 12:52 p.m.

Sava answered and said she heard a robot greet her in a cheerful voice and then cut out.

Subsequent calls said the high school was on lockdown. She would get at least nine robocalls updating her about the shooting from the district before the day was over.

Katie, meanwhile, continued hiding in the corner of her classroom with her sisters, classmates and teacher for about 45 minutes. Soon after they took shelter, the gunshots that continued sounded fainter.

She urged her sister to stop talking on the phone, worried the sound of her voice would attract the shooter.

“How many (are) there? Is he done? How many people are hurt?” she said she was thinking. “Are the sheriffs here yet? What’s that noise? What’s happening?”

She tried to remember her training during lockdown drills, especially if a shooter entered their classroom. Was she supposed to try to fight back or hide in a closet?

Katie’s mind flashed back to the first week of her freshman year, when she sat at a table near a crawl space underneath a set of stairs by the cafeteria. Curious, she opened the door, which stood about only 3 feet tall, and found herself in complete darkness, though she could see paint buckets stored away. She remembers thinking that area would be a great place to hide from a shooter.

While hunkered in her Spanish classroom during the real shooting, the memory of that spot bubbled back up.

She thought, “I really hope someone else knew about that spot because I knew a lot of other people were over there. I was hoping that if someone needed it, that they would know about it.”  

Her panic deepened as someone began pounding on the classroom door. A man’s voice yelled “police!” and “sheriff’s office!” Katie recorded the moment and posted a video story on Instagram at 12:53 p.m.

“If you see this do not open your classroom door I think there pretending to be police. They grown men begging to be let in,” she posted.

In her 33-second video, students could be heard breathing heavily in the background.

“I’m so scared. I’m so scared,” one said.

Law enforcement returned about 15 minutes later and unlocked the classroom door before entering, guns drawn and pointed at the students. They had been the ones knocking. Katie said she was terrified one would pull the trigger, even as they were told “you’re safe, you’re safe.”

The students filed out of the classroom. She quickly glanced behind her before leaving the building, gazing across a scene of overturned chairs and abandoned backpacks littering the floor — so much chaos in so little time.

At home the night of the shooting, Sava didn’t want her son to sleep alone.

He looked like himself, she thought, except for his eyes.

“How do you process that as a 14-year-old?”

Sava, her husband, and their teenage son and daughter gathered in the family room in their pajamas. Her son chose the new Superman movie to watch.

The family of four spent the night right there, within arms reach.

Type of Story: Analysis

Based on factual reporting, although it incorporates the expertise of the journalist and may offer interpretations and conclusions.