Jesse marsch

Park County Sheriff Tom McGraw said the body was discovered Wednesday not far from the student’s car in a remote mountain area about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Denver, near the small town of Bailey, in Park County. The town had been ordered to shelter in place while while officers from a number of agencies including the FBI combed the forest.

The Park County coroner’s office confirmed in a Facebook post that the body was Lyle’s. Cause of death was not released, pending the completion of an autopsy.

The shooting occurred at a school shaken by frequent lockdowns and violence, including the recent killing outside the school of a classmate that prompted East High School students to march on the Colorado Capitol earlier this month.

Parents who converged on the 2,500-student campus Wednesday voiced frustration that officials had not done enough to protect their children.

“I am sick of it,” said Jesse Haase, who planned to talk with her daughter about taking her out of classes for the rest of the school year.

Some parents questioned why the school district became one of many in the U.S. that decided to phase out school resource officers in the summer of 2020 amid a summer of protests over racial injustice following the killing of George Floyd by police.

Amid the flurry of criticism over lax security, Denver school officials said after the shooting that they would once again put armed officers into the city’s public high schools.

There were no school resource officers on campus at the time of Wednesday’s shooting, Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas said.

Gun violence at schools has become increasingly common in the U.S. with more than 1,300 shooting incidents recorded between 2000 and June 2022, according to government researchers. Those shootings killed 377 people and wounded 1,025, according to a database maintained by researchers.

The Colorado shooting was at least the second to occur at or near a school this week in the U.S. On Monday, a 15-year-old was arrested in the fatal shooting of a student outside of a Dallas-area high school.

Wednesday’s shooting happened just before 10 a.m. in an office area as Lyle was undergoing a search as part of a “safety plan” that required him to be patted down daily, officials said.

The gun used in the shooting was not immediately recovered, Chief Thomas said.

One of the wounded administrators was released from the hospital Wednesday afternoon and the second was in serious condition, said Heather Burke, a spokesperson for Denver Health hospital.

Hundreds of students skipped class March 3 and marched in support of stricter gun laws following the death of Luis Garcia, 16, who was shot while sitting in a car near East High School.

In June 2020, amid a summer of protests over racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd, Denver Public Schools became one of the districts around the US that decided to phase out its use of police officers in school buildings. That push was fueled by criticism that school resource officers disproportionately arrested Black students, sweeping them into the criminal justice system.

After Wednesday’s shooting, two armed officers will be posted at East High School through the end of the school year, and other city high schools also will each get an officer, Denver Public Schools Superintendent Alex Marrero said.

In a Wednesday letter to the city’s Board of Education, Marrero said his decision violated district’s policies but added he “can no longer stand on the sidelines.”

“I am the leader of this district who is charged with keeping our scholars and staff safe every day,” he wrote. The school board said it supported the decision.

Students from East High School had been scheduled to testify Wednesday afternoon before the Colorado Legislature on gun safety bills.

“This is the reality of being young in America: sitting through a shooting and waiting for information just hours before you’re scheduled to testify in support of gun safety bills,” said Gracie Taub, a 16-year-old East High School sophomore and volunteer with Students Demand Action in Colorado.

Lyle transferred to East High School after being disciplined and removed from a high school in nearby Aurora last school year because of unspecified violations of school policies, said Cherry Creek School District spokesperson Lauren Snell.

Marrero said safety plans for students are enacted in response to “past educational and also behavioral experiences,” adding that it’s a common practice throughout Colorado’s public schools. Officials did not give further details on why Lyle was searched daily.

But daily patdowns are rare, said Franci Crepeau-Hobson, a University of Colorado Denver professor specializing in school violence prevention.

“Clearly they were concerned,” said Crepeau-Hobson. “I can’t imagine they’d do that if there wasn’t a history of the kid carrying a weapon.”

Safety plans often follow threatening or suicidal behavior from a student, said Christine Harms with the Colorado School Safety Resource Center.

In response to the shooting, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre repeated President Joe Biden’s calls for stricter gun laws, including bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, and for Congress to “do something” on gun control.

Wednesday was also the second anniversary of 10 people being shot and killed at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.

___

Associated Press reporters Sarah Brumfield in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana, contributed to this report.

___

Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

Viewers at home were just as stunned. Did Landry just kill a guy? The NBC drama, based on H. G. Bissinger’s acclaimed nonfiction book, had debuted in fall 2006 to critical applause for its naturalistic storytelling. The Landry-kills-a-guy storyline strayed from the established tone and was “universally disliked,” recalled showrunner Jason Katims. It wasn’t the only eyebrow-raising Season 2 plotline, either, but the writers had a plan to bring everything back “to the show people loved,” according to Katims.

Then, calamity struck: The Writers Guild of America (WGA) went on strike.

Fighting for a stake in what was dubbed “new media” (e.g. online downloads and on-demand streaming), roughly 12,000 film and television writers represented by both branches of the labor union participated in the action against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The 100-day strike, which began in November 2007, shut down numerous television productions and cost the Los Angeles County economy an estimated $2.5 billion. The WGA won jurisdiction over writing for the internet, a new frontier for original content.

It could all happen again, as Hollywood is bracing for a potential sequel to the strike amid another round of high-stakes contract negotiations. That truncated season of “Friday Night Lights” remains an awkward testament not only to how a labor dispute can affect what we see on our screens, but also to how it can impact the people who produce the work. This time around, the union has proposed a significant overhaul of how writers are compensated in the streaming era, which the major networks and studios represented by the AMPTP are likely to push back on.

The current agreement expires May 1. WGA West president Meredith Stiehm recently told The Washington Post that rumors of another strike authorization vote were premature since negotiations only began Monday. Still, the possibility looms. People in all corners of the industry are mentally preparing. Stiehm said the sentiments driving the nervous chatter might be “more intense this year because the writers are so unified and the issues are so serious.”

Plus, memories of the 2007-08 strike persist. “Friday Night Lights” was one of most prominent series to have its season cut short that year. The writers had completed scripts for 15 of 22 planned episodes when the strike began. They never got the chance to write those final episodes, even after the action ended and a new contract was ratified in February 2008. The season ended with the 15th episode in “a very random way,” said Katims, whose feelings toward the strike are “complicated.”

As showrunner, Katims felt a responsibility to look after the well-being of the more than 100 people employed by the production. But as a guild member who believed in the bold action, he had to make peace with the fact that a couple episodes of Season 2 would have to be completed without him after the strike began in the midst of shooting episode 13. The writers were not only advocating for fairer pay but ultimately for their place in a changing industry.

“At that time, it was about the internet – it was before Netflix [took hold], before all these things. It was prescient,” Katims said. “Now, it’s about streaming and the fact that the way television is made has fundamentally changed. There are fundamental changes in how writers’ careers go. … It’s rapidly, rapidly evolving.”

Hollywood is one massive group project, and writers help keep it moving. Allison Liddi-Brown, a prolific television director who worked on several episodes of “Friday Night Lights” throughout its five-season run, credited writers with driving much of the innovation in modern television, dating back to “The Sopranos.”

“This is TV?” she said. “We’re making magic again and it’s just getting better and better and better, and it’s because of the creative force of writers. If it’s not on the page, none of us have anything.”

Developed by Peter Berg, “Friday Night Lights” was heralded upon its series premiere as “extraordinary in just about every conceivable way.” One critic said it had the potential to be “great – and not just television great, but great in a way of a poem or a painting.” The football players were relatable, and the obstacles faced by their new coach, Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler), compelling. While the show’s sophomore outing wasn’t received as well, viewers held out hope: It could find its footing again.

Liddi-Brown directed the ninth episode of Season 2, titled “The Confession” after Landry admitting to local police he killed the man who attacked Tyra. The episode wasn’t directly impacted by the strike, but Liddi-Brown remembered a “heavy” sense of worry plaguing productions “for months ahead of time.”

That feeling hit the lower ranks especially hard. Aaron Rahsaan Thomas, co-creator of the CBS procedural “S.W.A.T.,” these days believes that “in a business that tends to run on fear and anxiety a lot of the time, few big changes really get made without a figurative threat of violence, so to speak.” But looking back at his time working on “Friday Night Lights,” he said, “that perspective wasn’t necessarily there yet. I was concerned about paying my bills.”

Thomas, who was just starting out, had relished the opportunity to learn from more experienced colleagues in the room. He wrote the 14th episode, which escalated some of the show’s trademark teen drama (including Landry ditching his new love interest for a jealous Tyra). It turned out to be the penultimate script of the season; the next episode – the unplanned finale, which even introduces a new character played by Berg himself – left much to be resolved.

As the probability of a strike grew during the season, Thomas began to wonder whether his career would end before it ever really began. Everyone was spooked by the unknowability of new media. Thomas’s peers had “heated debates” over “whether or not there would be the same avenues to build careers that there were for writers before us.”

Similar worries exist today over the increasingly prevalent concept of a “mini-room,” in which a smaller group of writers is hired to draft scripts for a show that may or may not go to production. Buoyed by the on-demand nature of streaming, mini-rooms present network and studio executives with a cheaper, more flexible alternative to the traditional pilot process.

According to Katims and Thomas, mini-rooms are subpar training grounds for younger writers, who are often paid less than they would otherwise be. Because these writers may no longer work on a show by the time it goes into production, they risk missing out on the chance to pick up producing skills on set. The WGA previously advised that mini-rooms can be “unpredictable” and has proposed setting standards related to the size and duration of writers’ rooms.

“Even though the gross number of job opportunities is greater, the quality of those opportunities has diminished – just as far as having longevity on a show, having opportunities to gain the necessary experience to become producers,” Thomas said. “That’s the fight now, to preserve and protect the very nature of what it is to build a career.”

Despite all the critical acclaim, “Friday Night Lights” suffered in ratings. NBC aired the 15th and final episode of Season 2 in February 2008, mere days before WGA members voted to end the strike and return to work. Katims and his staff were unsure what this meant for them; their show had found itself on the bubble.

“We were left in this precarious situation,” Katims said. “The fact that the second season ended abruptly the way it did, that was … probably a contributing factor to why the show almost didn’t make it.”

That March, NBC worked out a Hail Mary deal: The network would share production costs for a third season of “Friday Night Lights” with DirecTV, the satellite service that would offer exclusive access to the show in the fall before the same episodes began airing on NBC the following February. The deal was unprecedented, a glimpse into the future.

At the time, Katims wasn’t thinking about “how radically things would be changing in television.” He was just relieved to keep telling this story, and the DirecTV deal gave him three seasons to get things back on track. He quickly did, with Season 3 jumping ahead nine months, all murders a distant memory. By the time “Friday Night Lights” ended in 2011, Katims said, “we got to do everything I would’ve ever wanted to creatively do with the show.”

Deals like the one NBC struck helped shape a new landscape. The WGA wasn’t sure what new media would look like at the time of the strike but fought for it anyway. “If we hadn’t won that – 50 percent of our work right now is on streaming services and platforms. We wouldn’t have been covered for that,” said Stiehm, the WGA West president.

Well into the streaming era, that landscape is less hazy. Shorter season orders and evolving hiring practices have “wreaked havoc with the way writers are paid,” according to Cynthia Littleton, co-editor-in-chief of Variety and author of “TV on Strike: Why Hollywood Went to War Over the Internet.” She referred to the ongoing negotiations as “part two” of what the WGA accomplished in 2008. They planted their flag in the world of streaming, and now “have to go many layers deeper and figure out, truly, how to change their compensation systems to meet the demands of the new moment,” she said.

In a statement alluding to talk of a potential writers’ strike, the AMPTP noted that “the goal is to keep production active so that all of us can continue working.” It said the represented companies “approach this negotiation and the ones to follow with the long-term health and stability of the industry as our priority.”

Writers, such as Thomas, might argue they are advocating for the very same thing.

“That’s the fight now,” he said. “To preserve and protect the very nature of what it is to build a career.”