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Local worries about Littleton friends

by Sally J. Taylor

Just before class at Lake Tahoe Community College on Tuesday, Ryan Shreve heard the news about the high school shooting in Littleton, Colo. Rather than settling into a desk for an hour of math, he headed to the phone.

His friends, the Potter family, lived in a development adjacent to Littleton.

Before moving to Highland Ranch last spring, the Potters lived behind the Shreves in Tahoe Paradise and went to the same church. He was especially close to Cooper, the second of the Potters’ four children.



“I was really, really worried,” he said. “Cooper had told me before (that) they had bomb threats at his high school.”

Shreve, 19, was relieved to hear that Cooper, a sophomore, attended a different high school in the area.



But for Shreve, and the Potters, the traumatic event that left 15 people, mostly students, dead and 23 wounded, had struck too close to home.

“That it could happen there is scary,” Shreve said. “It’s a nice area, the least place likely to have something like that happen.

“It’s sad. The girl who hid under a table and a girl next to her was shot in the head, she must be traumatized.”

Although the Potter family is physically well and accounted for, they remain concerned about friends and acquaintances closer to the trauma. Two students who attended Cooper’s church youth group go to the school as does a co-worker of his older sister, Winter.

“It’s tense,” Lara Potter, their mother, said Wednesday of the atmosphere in the community. “It’s really horrible.”

On Tuesday morning, Lara Potter was oblivious to the traumatic events until a friend from Tahoe called to see if everyone was all right.

“Then I turned on the TV,” she said.

“The weird part about it is when Cooper got to school (Tuesday) there was a bomb threat. They waited an hour and half to start school.”

Today, his school is in session with increased security. Other schools in the area have closed for the day.

“It’s strange that it’s so close to home,” she said. “It’s affected all the schools around (here). It makes it so people put themselves in that position. It’s real.”


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