STATUS WOE: Students, community lament endless gun violence and apathy

AURORA | On April 3, hundreds of Denver Public Schools parents gathered for a press conference on public safety following the shooting last month at East High School that wounded two administrators and led to the shooter, a 17-year-old student, taking his own life.

The incident has sparked a fresh round of concern about gun violence, and particularly school safety, in a region that has seen more than its fair share of firearm deaths. The violence goes beyond schools, however — the shooting death of 13-year-old Phoenix Day outside the Town Center of Aurora on March 25 is a reminder that youth violence continues to be an urgent problem across the metro area.

In the wake of these incidents, Aurorans have come together in recent weeks to mourn and to talk about what needs to be different. 

The Colorado Legislature has not been idle in the meantime, either. Two of a slate of four gun safety bills going through the legislative process are on their way to Gov. Polis’ desk to be signed into law, and another bill cracking down on ghost guns is expected to be introduced this week.

Sen. Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora, one of the new bill’s sponsors and a longtime advocate against gun violence, wrote in a letter to the Sentinel that fighting against gun violence is everyone’s responsibility.

“There is no single solution that is going to eliminate gun violence,” she said. “It’s going to take all of us working together at every level to make real progress on this issue.”

A vigil for Phoenix Day

On Feb. 10, Phoenix Day celebrated his thirteenth birthday. Last Friday night, fewer than two months later, his loved ones gathered to mourn his untimely death.

In a city that has seen more than its share of gun violence, the death of someone so young has prompted a fresh round of shock and grief. Day was shot and killed the evening of March 25 in the parking lot outside the Town Center of Aurora mall, just across the street from the site of the Aurora theater shooting 11 years ago.

Several dozen people gathered Friday evening at Bicentennial Park for a candlelight vigil in his honor, hunching their shoulders against the gusts of wind that threatened to extinguish their candles. 

Organizer Shawn Vaughn-Reed distributed ribbons with Day’s photo attached to them as people in the crowd hugged each other and cried.

It’s just tragic,” she said of Day’s death. “There’s really no words.”

Vaughn-Reed grew up with Day’s stepfather, Bruce Navarro, and has known his mother, Tabatha Denney, for almost as long. 

Little has been released about what led to Day’s killing. According to police, an altercation began in the food court inside the mall near closing time, which culminated in Day being shot in the parking lot outside Dillard’s. At press time, no arrests had been made.

Interim Police Chief Art Acevedo, who attended the vigil with a group of officers, said that he could not share any information because the investigation is ongoing.

“We are following up on tips and encourage anyone with information to come forward,” APD spokesperson Syndey Edwards said in a statement. “Someone knows something, and while APD unravels this case, it’s up to those involved and those that witnessed this situation to

come forward and help bring justice to our community and the family of the victim.”

Tyler Peace came to the vigil with a friend, both holding electronic tealight candles. Peace just happened to be in the parking lot at the time of the shooting and provided CPR to Day at the scene before first responders arrived. She came to the vigil to pay her respects to his family.

“I was there through it all,” she said.

It was too fresh for her to be able to go into detail about what she saw, she said, but she never expected to experience anything like that.

Navarro thanked people for attending the vigil. Phoenix was a good kid who touched a lot of people’s lives, he said.

He wanted the young people present to know that violence isn’t the answer.

“This isn’t supposed to happen,” he said, fighting back tears. “This doesn’t have to keep happening.”

In an interview with KDVR, Denney said that her son had a big heart and a big spirit.

“It’s really hard for me not to be mad right now. This whole situation hurts my heart,” she told the station.

A GoFundMe fundraiser established on behalf of Day’s family has raised close to $10,000 of a $12,000 goal as of Friday evening.

Marlin and Charlotte Bender, pastors at Radiance Church in Commerce City, briefly addressed the crowd and gave a prayer. The two knew some of Day’s relatives and had been asked to come speak.

“Phoenix’s life mattered,” Charlotte Bender said. “It mattered to God, it mattered to his family, and in one act of violence that life was snuffed away.”

The church has suffered through the deaths of a number of its young people over the past 18 months, Charlotte Bender said, including a car crash involving several members of its youth group. She said her heart aches any time she hears about another shooting.

“And when they’re this young, it’s horrible.”

There’s a distinct kind of grief that comes with losing a son or daughter, said Marlin Bender, who described Day’s death as “crazy and senseless.”

“I’ve been to a lot of things like this but it never gets any easier,” he said.

After the prayer, people gathered to release balloons, and Vaughn-Reed gave Day’s family a canvas portrait collage of photos of him. 

Vaughn-Reed said that she hopes his parents will be able to find some measure of peace, and that a suspect in his murder will be named soon.

“These kids are just dying way too young and it’s all for naught,” she said.

She wanted to hold the vigil because her own stepson died in 2021 at age 16, and they held a vigil that was very moving for her and her husband.

“It was a little bit of light at a really dark time,” she said. “I was just hoping to give them a little piece of that tonight.”

A community under pressure

Three days before the vigil, a group of adults and young people gathered at Aurora Mental Health and Recovery offices for a community discussion held by the nonprofit and the Aurora NAACP.

Several community leaders had been invited for a panel discussion, but for most of the night the moderator gave the spotlight to the young people in the room, asking them to share their experiences.

A number of students at local schools expressed their consternation with the prevalence of school shootings, lockdowns and other disruptive incidents. Some felt like it was “more of a when than an if” something happened to them. Others said they were upset that at the news of another school shooting, their first reaction was not shock but resignation.

“It’s not even surprising anymore,” said one boy in the audience. 

Salomae Jenkins, a student at Prairie View High School in Henderson, described a recent lockdown at her school that she said was chaotic and stress inducing. She asked the adults in the room “to work a little bit harder” to make sure their children don’t have access to guns. She also said adults need to listen to young people when they say they are concerned.

“When we do decide to tell you things, please take us seriously,” she said. “Because there have been countless times that I know people have gone to the counselors or gone to the principal and they kind of just brush it off and say ‘oh, it’s not that serious.’”

Aurora’s Police Department reported nine murders and 126 aggravated assaults where the offender or known suspect was a juvenile in 2022. Violent crime believed to be committed by youths climbed 21% between 2021 and 2022, compared to an overall increase of about 14%.

Recidivism among juveniles have dropped across Colorado, meanwhile, with the state reporting a one-year recidivism rate of 22.1% for juveniles discharged during the 2019-2020 fiscal year — the lowest figure since 2010 and less than the previous year’s rate of 30.6%. The three-year recidivism rate for those discharged in the 2017-2018 fiscal year was 59.4%.

Aurora NAACP youth co-advisor Danielle Young-Kombo spoke about growing up in Los Angeles during the 1990s and said she had become used to violence in her community as a child, but she remembered being shocked when the Columbine shooting happened because Littleton seemed like such an affluent, suburban community.

“I was so surprised they were experiencing that kind of gun violence. And then fast-forward to today, it’s like an everyday occurance,” she said.

The adults in the room reacted with sadness to many of the things the students brought up.

Aurora Police Department Officer Matthew Alcorta said he was a high school student during Columbine, and that he’s dismayed by how prevalent school shootings have become since then.

“It blows my mind that our children as a society are having to do active-shooter drills,” he said.

He asked students a question about a recent survey saying that one in four Colorado teens have easy access to a firearm. Several said they did not personally have access to a firearm but had seen other students brag about having access to weapons on social media.

“I feel as though an apology is necessary to the youth that are in the room,” said panelist Mordecai Brownlee, president of the Community College of Aurora. “And I want to say I’m sorry on behalf of society, for the lack of intentionality that we have shown” in addressing this issue.

“I believe that our youth are going to change things, I do, but we’ve got to figure out how to keep them alive so they can,” he said.

Longing for safety at school

After the East High School shooting, the DPS school board decided to suspend its 2020 decision removing police from all district schools. When students came back from spring break on Wednesday, 14 officers were stationed at 13 of the district’s high schools for the remainder of the school year while the district discussed how to move forward.

The decision was controversial, partly because of a lack of clarity of what options were discussed in the closed-session meeting. Some community members have said more security is needed, while others raise concerns that having SROs back in schools will be detrimental to students of color.

Both Aurora Public Schools and the Cherry Creek School District have SROs, which come mainly from the Aurora Police Department as well as the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, which serves a handful of CCSD schools.

The departments both described their SROs as having a preventative effect on school violence and said that they were not there to have an antagonistic relationship with the students. Officers in both departments must receive specific training to work in schools.

“We are so supportive of our SROs,” said APD spokesperson Sydney Edwards. 

Questions also remain about the safety plan of the shooter, who was under an agreement to be searched for weapons at the start of each school day because of a previous history with firearms.

It’s unclear how common that arrangement is. APS declined to state if any district students have safety plans requiring students to be patted down, while CCSD said it did not have any.

Franci Crepeau-Hobson, a professor in the University of Colorado Denver’s school of education who’s research focuses on school violence and youth suicide prevention, said the arrangement is not common but also not unheard of.

“It shouldn’t be all the school is doing,” she said.

Ideally, schools should work to figure out the reason why a student exhibited threatening or concerning behavior and tailor their response, especially when it involves a weapon. Is the student suicidal? Is the student carrying a weapon because they are afraid of other students? Each of those situations would require different interventions, she said.

Safety plans are a standard procedure that schools use to help address threatening or concerning behavior from students, and depending on what they are for can include disciplinary action, mental health resources, modified school schedules and other resources, Crepeau-Hobson said. How effective they are exactly can be difficult to track.

“That’s the million-dollar question, right? Because prevention is a really difficult thing to prove,” she said. But in terms of tracking subsequent behavioral infractions, “for most kids we do tend to see a decrease in these problematic behaviors.”

“For the most part yeah, they’re effective, because these kinds of incidents are still relatively rare—I know it doesn’t feel like it right now,” she said.

In some instances it might be appropriate to remove a student from school and transition them to online learning or an alternative school — like some have suggested DPS should have done for the East High School shooter — but it can be a dilemma.

“Under federal law schools have to provide a free and appropriate education for every kid and yet they also have to keep everybody safe,” she said. “And that can be really tricky.”

Physical safety interventions like SROs and metal detectors can be appropriate in some situations, but making sure students feel emotionally safe at school is also a necessary part of curbing school violence, she said.

Having high but realistic academic standards, consistent and fair discipline and making sure that every student in the school has an adult they trust and feel like they can talk and having a safe way that students can bring up concerns about their peers to all go a long way, she said.

“The big thing is yes, we need physical safety measures but we miss the boat if we don’t also attend to psychological safety,” she said.

— Sentinel Staff Writer Max Levy contributed to this story