Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to get the latest reporting from us, plus curated news from other Colorado outlets, delivered to your inbox.A lawsuit filed against Denver Public Schools by one of the deans shot by a student at East High School in 2023 will move forward, a judge has ruled.U.S. District Court Judge Gordon P. Gallagher wrote that “DPS appears to have exhibited a shocking disregard” for the risk that the student posed to his peers, the East High staff, and himself. The student took his own life after the shooting.Gallagher cited the student’s prior expulsion from a high school in Aurora after police found guns in his bedroom and DPS’ decision to remove police officers from schools. He also referenced a general rise in students bringing guns to school and the fatal shooting of an East High student outside the school a month before the deans’ non-fatal shootings.Taken together, Gallagher wrote that DPS seems to have “knowingly opened the door for a mass shooting and/or outbreak of gun violence at East High School. This conduct is illogical, baffling, and plausibly conscience shocking.”In a statement Thursday, DPS noted that at this stage in the lawsuit, the judge was required to view the facts in the light most favorable to the former dean, Eric Sinclair. The judge’s ruling doesn’t mean that the district violated the law, DPS said, but that the lawsuit can move forward to the next stage, which involves presenting evidence.“Denver Public Schools is confident that the evidence will demonstrate that its actions in this case were consistent with legal requirements and looks forward to the opportunity to present its arguments in court in the near future,” the statement says.Michael Mihm, an attorney for Sinclair, said his legal team had no comment Thursday.Judge’s ruling provides more details about shootingThe judge’s March 25 ruling provides more details about how the shootings of Sinclair and fellow East High dean Wayne Mason unfolded three years earlier. The shooter, Austin Lyle, had enrolled at East High in January 2023 because he was living in the school’s boundary. He’d previously been expelled from Overland High School in Aurora “after police found an AR-15 assault rifle, two fully loaded magazines, a zip-lock bag with spent shells, boxes of ammunition, and a silencer in his bedroom,” the ruling says.After Lyle started at East High, an assistant principal, Shawne Anderson, created a safety plan that required Lyle to verbally check in with Anderson each day, the ruling says. The check-ins escalated to a daily backpack search after another student reported what appeared to be a gun in Lyle’s pocket on March 2. When a campus security guard tried to search Lyle, he “became agitated and fled the school,” according to the ruling. Lyle’s father refused to let police search his son’s bedroom.On March 23, Anderson didn’t respond to radio calls to search Lyle’s backpack. Sinclair, who didn’t know about Lyle’s history with guns, offered to do the search instead, according to the ruling. He found nothing but noticed a bulge in the front pocket of Lyle’s hooded sweatshirt.Lyle implied it was a phone and “grabbed Mr. Sinclair’s hand and put it on the outside of the hoodie, saying ‘here, touch it,’” the ruling says. “Upon feeling the object, Mr. Sinclair immediately knew it was a gun and became alarmed.”Hundreds of students were across the hall at a school assembly. When Lyle tried to leave the office where Sinclair was searching him, Sinclair blocked the exit and Lyle pulled a gun.Sinclair radioed for help and Mason responded, the ruling says. Lyle then fired multiple shots at Sinclair, hitting him in the abdomen, chest, and thigh. He also shot Mason.Judge finds that risk of violence was obviousSinclair and Mason each sued DPS last year, alleging that the district’s safety policies and practices were too lax. DPS asked the court to dismiss the lawsuits, arguing that the risk posed by Lyle was not “immediate and proximate,” which is the legal standard to find DPS liable.Gallagher disagreed, finding that the risk that Lyle would use a gun at school was obvious.“He had been expelled from Overland High School for possessing guns and ammunition, he was suspected of having a gun on March 2, and no measures aside from a daily backpack search conducted by an untrained staff member were implemented to prevent him from bringing a gun into the school,” Gallagher wrote. “It is not hard to imagine the terror that students and the parents of other students at East High School would have felt if they had known of this chain of events,” he added.Sinclair named DPS, the Denver school board, and Anderson in his lawsuit. Gallagher dismissed the claims against the school board and Anderson but not against DPS. Gallagher also dismissed Sinclair’s claims that DPS violated a state law called the Claire Davis School Safety Act. Named for the victim of a Colorado school shooting, the law says districts can be held liable if they fail to exercise “reasonable care” to protect students and staff from “reasonably foreseeable” acts of violence at school. But Gallagher ruled that Sinclair’s claims fall under the state’s Workers’ Compensation Act instead, since Sinclar was injured on the job.“Mr. Sinclair would not have been injured but for the fact that he was engaged in employment-related duties,” Gallagher wrote.Mason’s lawsuit is ongoing. The judge in that case has not yet ruled. The family of the student who was fatally shot outside of East High several weeks before Sinclair and Mason were injured dropped its lawsuit against DPS earlier this year. The judge in that case ruled that the district was not liable because 16-year-old Luis Garcia was on a public street in front of East High when he was shot inside his car.Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.
