DENVER — The 16-year-old who shot and wounded two students before turning the gun on himself at his high school in Evergreen, Colorado, left hints of his intentions online in the days leading up to the attack, the Anti-Defamation League said.
The attacker reposted a photo on X of a revolver and a box of ammunition two hours before Sept. 10’s shooting, the ADL said in a report released Friday based on research conducted by its Center on Extremism.
According to the research, Desmond Holly had previously shared the photo on his X account, and on TikTok he had posted images of a skull mask, a ballistic vest and a knife with a Nordic rune drawn on it, the league’s analysis shows.
The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office declined to comment Monday but said last week the shooter was “radicalized by an extremist network.” It did not provide details.
The two injured students were taken to a nearby hospital. One was released and the other was in serious condition, the sheriff’s office said.
A few days before the shooting, the teen posted pictures on TikTok of himself wearing a black T-shirt with “WRATH” written across the chest in red paint, the ADL said.
Holly assembled his gear in a piecemeal fashion, the ADL said, drawing inspiration from the equipment used by previous mass shooters.
For example, Holly posted a now-deleted TikTok video in which he modeled a tactical helmet and a gas mask, using background music from a Serbian folk song that the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooter played while livestreaming the New Zealand massacre.
The ADL said the shooter was active on a violent gore site and spent “substantial amounts of time” in online spaces that featured extremist ideologies and violent content while amassing tactical gear to carry out his shooting. It did not describe the extremist ideologies.
The Evergreen shooter is among several mass shooters who have been active on social media before carrying out their attacks, the ADL said. He had an account on the gore forum WatchPeopleDie, where he liked and commented on posts about American mass shootings, such as those in Parkland, Florida, and Buffalo, New York, the group said.
He appeared to have joined the site in December 2024, during the month between school shootings at Abundant Life Christian school in Madison, Wisconsin, and Antioch High School in Nashville, Tennessee, the ADL said.
The Evergreen shooter acquired tactical gear with extremist symbols, the ADL said. It did not say what those extremist symbols were. The shooter also posted content emulating the former Columbine High School shooters, who killed 14 people in 1999. Evergreen High School is about 37 miles from Columbine.
The Evergreen shooter’s TikTok accounts were filled with white supremacist symbolism and neo-Nazi code phrases, the ADL found.
On his previous TikTok account, his profile photo featured a picture of the white supremacist gunman who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022 being arrested.
His most recent profile photo was of the attacker who killed six people during a shooting rampage near the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014, the ADL said.