{"id":164410,"date":"2025-09-14T21:52:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T21:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/teen-colorado-school-shooting-suspect-reportedly-fixated-on-columbine-attack-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2025-09-14T21:52:00","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T21:52:00","slug":"teen-colorado-school-shooting-suspect-reportedly-fixated-on-columbine-attack-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/teen-colorado-school-shooting-suspect-reportedly-fixated-on-columbine-attack-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Teen Colorado school shooting suspect reportedly fixated on Columbine attack – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Desmond Holly also expressed neo-Nazi views online before a shooting critically injuring two students, ADL says
A teenager suspected in a shooting<\/a> attack at a suburban Denver<\/a> high school that left two students in critical condition appeared fascinated with previous mass shootings including Columbine and expressed neo-Nazi views online, according to experts.
Since December, Desmond Holly, 16, had been active on an online forum where users watch videos of killings and violence, mixed in with content on white supremacism and antisemitism, the Anti-Defamation League\u2019s Center on Extremism said in a report.
Holly shot himself following Wednesday\u2019s shooting at Evergreen high school in Jefferson county. He died of his injuries. It is still unclear how he selected his apparent victims. The county was also the scene of the 1999 Columbine<\/a> high school massacre that killed 14 people.
Holly\u2019s TikTok accounts contained white supremacist symbols, the Anti-Defamation League said, and the name of his most recent account included a reference to a popular white supremacist slogan. The account was unavailable on Friday. TikTok said accounts associated with Holly had been banned.
Holly\u2019s family could not be reached. The Associated Press left a message at a telephone number associated with the house that police searched after the shooting.
A spokesperson for the Jefferson county sheriff\u2019s office, Mark Techmeyer, declined to comment on the ADL\u2019s findings or discuss its investigation into the shooting. The office previously said Holly was radicalized by an unspecified \u201cextremist network\u201d but released no details.
Two recent suspects in school shootings were active on the so-called \u201cgore forum\u201d that Holly used called Watch People Die, according to the ADL. Holly appears to have opened his account in the month in between shootings in Madison, Wisconsin<\/a>, and Nashville, Tennessee<\/a>, the ADL said.
A few days before Wednesday\u2019s shooting, Holly posted a TikTok video posing in a similar way to how the Wisconsin shooter posed before killing two people during in December. He included a photo of the Wisconsin shooter in a post in which Holly wore black T-shirt with \u201cWRATH\u201d written on the front.
He also posted videos showing how he made the shirt that was like the one worn by a gunman in the Columbine<\/a> shooting, the ADL said.
\u201cThere is a through-line between those attacks,\u201d said Oren Segal, the ADL\u2019s senior vice-president of counter-extremism and intelligence. \u201cThey\u2019re telling us there is a through-line because they are referencing each other.\u201d
Watch People Die administrators said in an email that Holly lied about his age in order to access the site and was a not a very active user of it, with only seven comments. The email said the site is \u201cadamantly pro-Israel\u201d but does not silence opposing viewpoints. It referred to Holly and the shooters in Wisconsin and Tennessee as \u201cunhinged losers\u201d.
Holly was also active on TikTok\u2019s \u201cTrue Crime Community\u201d, where it says users have a fascination with mass murderers and serial killers, the ADL said.
Some TikTok posts shared by the ADL show one user encouraging Holly to be a \u201chero\u201d, a term it says white supremacists use to refer to successfully ideologically motivated attackers.
The person also told Holly to get a patch with a Nazi-era symbol that was worn by the men who carried out the 2019 attack<\/a> on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the 2022 attack<\/a> on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
Holly posted a photo of two patches that he had but said the Velcro on the back had fallen off.
\u201cI\u2019m gonna use stronger glue when I fix it,\u201d he said.
The Colorado school shooting happened on the same day that the far-right political activist, Charlie Kirk<\/a>, was shot dead<\/a> during an event in Utah.
Kirk\u2019s alleged killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was similarly an avid internet user.
Robinson \u2013 whose motives are still unclear \u2013 grew up in a gun-loving Republican home. He is reportedly not yet cooperating with law enforcement. Utah\u2019s governor, Spencer Cox, said on Sunday<\/a> that \u201cfriends that have confirmed that there was kind of that deep, dark internet \u2026 culture and these other dark places of the internet\u201d where Robinson \u201cwas going deep\u201d.
Ammunition left at the scene of Kirk\u2019s death had engravings related to internet memes, including lyrics from an anti-fascist Italian song, the words \u201chey fascist! CATCH!\u201d and an obscure sexual meme.
Jos\u00e9 Olivares contributed reporting<\/em><\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Desmond Holly also expressed neo-Nazi views online before a shooting critically injuring two students, ADL saysA teenager suspected in a shooting attack at a suburban Denver high school that left two students in critical condition appeared fascinated with previous mass shootings including Columbine and expressed neo-Nazi views online, according to experts.Since December, Desmond Holly, 16, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":164411,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-164410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164410\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}