A student at a suburban Denver high school set himself
on fire in the school's cafeteria today and is in critical condition,
authorities said.
A female teacher was treated for minor cuts when
she broke a pane of glass to access a fire extinguisher and a school
custodian used the extinguisher to put the fire out, Westminster Police
Investigator Cheri Spottke told ABC News.
The student, who is 16 but otherwise not identified, is in critical condition with severe burns, Spottke said.
The
incident happened at 7:12 a.m. in the cafeteria of Standley Lake High
School in Westminster, Colo. Police said students were present in the
cafeteria at the time, but none were injured.
The school released a
statement saying in part, "A student sustained severe burns when he
entered the school cafeteria and lit himself on fire. The student has
been transported to an area hospital and is in critical condition. Our
hearts and prayers go out the family and school community."
"At this time we do believe that this was a suicide attempt," Spottke said.
Investigators
do not know why the boy set himself on fire, and are talking to his
friends, school employees and his parents for clues, Spottke said. They
are also reviewing surveillance video from inside the school cafeteria,
police said.
Police would not comment on whether the boy said
anything before lighting himself on fire, or if he had doused himself in
gasoline or any other accelerant.
Spottke told ABC News affiliate
KMGH, "We don't know of any threats ahead of time at this point but
that's something that we're looking into obviously-social media and that
type of stuff we're looking at to see if there were any threats made."
She
added, "We're taking the most precautionary measures. Nowadays with
everything that happens in these schools, we're going to go through the
entire school- room by room, floor by floor, to make sure there's not
any other devices or anything like that."
School is closed today and Tuesday, and counselors are being brought in to help, police said.
Today's incident was the latest to affect a Denver-area school in recent weeks.
On
Thursday, Columbine High School, where two gunmen killed 13 people in
1999, went on high security alert after receiving a series of
threatening phone calls. The alert applied to a half-dozen other schools
in the area, in the same school district as Standley Lake, but was
lifted the same day.
On Dec. 13, student gunman Karl Pierson, 17,
fatally shot Claire Davis, a 17-year-old classmate at Arapahoe High
School in Centennial before killing himself in the school's library.
Pierson reportedly had threatened a teacher and librarian who had
disciplined him last year and allegedly was seeking that teacher when he
entered the school, investigators have said.
Westminster was home
to 10-year-old Jessica Ridgeway, who was abducted on her way to school
and killed in 2012. Austin Sigg, who was 17 at the time of the crime,
was sentenced to a life sentence plus 86 years. Jessica's disappearance
put Westminster and neighboring Denver suburbs on edge as police, aided
by an army of volunteers, searched for her and then her killer.
