The 16-year-old suspect in the Evergreen High School shooting was radicalized by online posts about white supremacy and mass shootings, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League.
The suspected shooter, Desmond Holly, opened fire at the Denver-area high school on Wednesday, critically injuring two other students before dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Before the shooting, Holly posted neo-Nazi views on his social media accounts and was active on online threads that depicted extremely graphic violence, the ADL’s Center on Extremism said in a published analysis.
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Spokeswoman for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office Jacki Kelley said in a media press conference that the suspect was “radicalized by some extremist network.” The sheriff’s office did not specify which type of extremist network this was.
“The details of that will be down the road, but we wanted to at least give you that much about maybe mindset for him,” Kelley said in the media press conference on Thursday.
The ADL Center on Extremism report says Holly spent time on an online gore forum that has “served as a gateway” for three teenage school shooters, including Holly. He appears to have joined the forum in December 2024 following the Abundant Life Christian School shooting in Wisconsin.
He also posted content on his TikTok account that promoted white supremacist extremist language and imagery and idealized other school shooters, such as the perpetrators of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. Columbine High School is also located in Jefferson County.
According to the ADL report, Holly posted imagery on his TikTok and X pages of himself wearing a shirt he created to mimic one of the Columbine attackers, of a revolver and ammunition hours before the shooting, and of a skull mask he wore adorned with antisemitic and school-shooting related language.
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The Associated Press reported that TikTok said it has banned all accounts associated with Holly.
The Evergreen High School shooting came on the same day that 22-year-old Tyler Robinson allegedly assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah. It also came two weeks after two children and 17 others were wounded by suspected 23-year-old transgender gunman Robin Westman in the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minnesota.