It’s been a “devastating” three weeks for residents of suburban Denver, as elementary school teacher Tonya West put it, with one violent calamity seemingly following another, with a manhunt, a shooting and a sober remembrance of victims of the Columbine shooting from 20 years ago.

At home, children are numb, refusing to eat, dreading going back to class. At school, they practice active-shooter drills and lockdowns; some parents received a notice that their children would now be drilling twice a week.

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High-schoolers coped in their own ways — angrily walking out of a vigil on Wednesday night they said was politicized, then gathering for an impromptu support group at the local library Friday.

“It’s a community that’s devastated, exhausted and on edge,” said John McDonald, executive director of security and emergency management for Jefferson County Public Schools, Colorado’s second-largest district, covering a cluster of Denver’s suburbs. “People cannot wait for this year to be over.”

But it’s not: School districts all over the Denver area have received violent threats, with Jefferson County officials receiving 12 different reports in the past few days, he said.

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The region was preparing to observe the 20th anniversary of the killings at Columbine High on April 20 when the FBI announced it was searching for an 18-year-old Florida woman who they said was “infatuated” with the massacre, was armed and in the area. The woman eventually killed herself about an hour away from the city, but not before hundreds of schools were shut down.

Then, on Tuesday, two students at the STEM Highlands Ranch charter school — about seven miles from Columbine — opened fire in classrooms, wounding several students and killing a senior, Kendrick Castillo, who tried to stop the attack.

A STEM parent, Denver-area musician Steve Holley, captured the mood when he lamented in a tweet: “There was a shooting at my son’s school today. He’s safe but . . . I’m sitting in a gym with hundreds of parents waiting to see their kids. This is the third time I’ve had to pick up my boys from school during a lockdown.”

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There have been as many as nine school shootings in the area since the Columbine massacre in 1999, which left 12 students and a teacher dead. Four other major shootings have occurred within 20 miles of the suburban high school, including a 2012 shooting at a movie theater in Aurora that left 12 dead.

“If you had suggested to anybody behind me or in this room that within 20 years in 20 miles we would have dealt with Columbine, the Aurora theater, Arapahoe High School, the shooting of Zack Parrish and four other deputies, we’d have thought you mad, and yet here we are again,” District Attorney George Brauchler said at a news conference Wednesday, referencing a 2013 high school murder-suicide and a Dec. 31, 2017, attack on law enforcement officers who were responding to a domestic disturbance at the Copper Canyon Apartment Homes.

The Denver region has grown nearly 20 percent in the past decade, with newcomers drawn to its clean air, laid-back lifestyle and snowy peaks visible on the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. But residents fear that it’s becoming a magnet for dangerous individuals obsessed with Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who have spawned legions of twisted fan websites and other Internet-fueled adulation.

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Peter Langman, the author of “School Shooters: Understanding High School, College and Adult Perpetrators,” estimates on his website SchoolShooters.info that 40 attackers have been directly influenced by Klebold and Harris, including the Aurora shooter.

In the long, agonizing minutes after Tuesday’s deadly shooting, Shaylynn Hall, 31, stood in the rain behind yellow police tape and strained to catch a glimpse of her third-grader, Cameron. Teachers wiped tears from little faces.

Cameron had called her from his music teacher’s cellphone to tell her that he was okay and that he hadn’t seen or heard anything during the shooting, which took place just yards away. She saw him as he prepared to board a bus to the recreation center, where parents waited to hug their children.

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“I will never forget hearing his voice on that call,” Hall said. “The weight of the world was off my shoulders.”

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Hall, who graduated from Columbine High in 2005, said the trauma from that event is so ingrained in her worldview that she could almost predict what would follow Tuesday’s tragedy.

“It was eerie the way things played out — it was like I knew what would happen next,” Hall said, reaching her arms out in a line. “The kids would line up and come out of the school with their hands up — including my son — and they did.”

Three days later, Hall stood at the Highlands Ranch Recreation Center on a very different mission. Nearby were piles of Gatorade, restaurant gift cards, boxes of Milk Duds, blue squishy balls, crayon drawings and handwritten notes of thanks. Volunteers placed the donations in plastic bins and teal cloth bags, each one with a white placard affixed to it with the name of a teacher or staff member in the STEM school.

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Hall had placed an ad on the STEM parents’ Facebook page, drawing local business owners and retirees and kindergartners who wanted teachers and police officers to know they appreciate them. The donation drive, Hall said, is a way for her to heal and to help the community come together.

“We can choose to be scared all the time — or we can choose to do things like this,” she said, adding she wants to put the bins and bags near teacher and staff doors when the school reopens. “I want teachers to pull these cards out 10 years from now and remember that, yes, it was a horrible time, but something good came out of it, too.”