Teen Colorado School Shooter Identified

The Colorado school shooter who opened fire 'again and again' on fellow high school students on Wednesday has been named and pictured by police.

Desmond Holly, 16, is shown in his driving license photograph released by Jefferson County Sheriff's Office in the aftermath of the horror.

Holly died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after he fired at terrified children at Evergreen High School, close to Denver, during their lunch break just after noon.

Two students were rushed to hospital. Sheriff spokesperson Jacki Kelley said that one victim has been discharged while the other remains in a critical condition.

‘We know that the suspect had a handgun,' Kelley told a press conference on Thursday. 'He had to keep reloading. He would fire and reload, fire and reload, fire and reload. This went on and on. As he did that, he tried to find new targets.'

‘Lots of kids ran, but the ones who didn’t were locked down and they were being cared for,' she added.

Kelley said the first shots were fired from inside the school grounds, but the chaos 'spilled out into the street behind the school' where the second victim was shot.

A suspected motive has not been disclosed, but Kelley said Holly was 'radicalized by some extremist network'. 'The details on that will come down the road,' she said.

Holly used a revolver, and detectives are investigating who owned the weapon.

Kelley told the Daily Mail that police are 'in contact with' Holly's parents, who are cooperating with the investigation.

During an earlier press conference in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Kelley said 'a lot of kids indicated that they were shot at'.

'We have a lot of interviews to do,' she said on Wednesday.

Several students caught up in the horror opened up about what they experienced in the hours following the shooting.

Evergreen High ninth grader Cameron Jones said he was eating lunch outside when he heard three gunshots. A security guard then told him to run.

He said how he never believed a shooting would happen in Evergreen, which is in a quiet, leafy Denver suburb.

'I thought this was like a one-in-a-million thing, and it still feels surreal that it happened,' Jones told Colorado Public Radio.

Parent Wendy Nueman said her daughter didn´t answer her phone right away after the shooting. When the 15-year-old finally called back, it was from a borrowed phone.

'She just said she was OK. She couldn´t hardly speak,' Nueman told The Denver Post, holding back tears. She gathered that her daughter had run away from the school.

'It's super scary,' she said. 'We feel like we live in a little bubble here. Obviously, no one is immune.'

Photographs shared by police on Wednesday show several officers and sheriffs running towards the school wearing bulletproof vests.

Several emergency vehicles could also be seen lining the streets close to the school.