The Cutthroat Café’s apron-clad owner hustled back-and-forth between the kitchen and tables, delivering platters of fish-and-chips, taking orders, and checking in occasionally on one of his longtime customers sitting at the counter, sipping a cup of coffee.
Co-owner Chip Thomas and regular Dan McCafferty share years of memories. Some, difficult.
McCafferty has been a loyal customer at the café since he and his late wife moved to town in 1999. Breakfast at Cutthroat quickly became a tradition for the Bailey couple.
Come 2006, McCafferty and his wife got acquainted with a young server named Emily Keyes, who waited on them frequently. They came to know the Platte Canyon High School junior as a beautiful person, whose “heart was open to everybody.”
“I just fell in love with her,” he said. “Me and my wife did.”
On Friday, McCafferty sat under Emily’s memorial at the café — a plaque and picture of the 16-year-old hung on the wall above a sign encouraging small acts of kindness in her honor.
On this day, her memory hung over the café community, as well.
Sixteen and one-half years ago — on September 27, 2006 — Emily was murdered in a school shooting at Platte Canyon, slain by a man who had taken seven girls hostage.
Thomas lost one of his beloved employees.
McCafferty lost the young server he’d come to love.
The entire town was gripped by the tragedy.
Then on Wednesday, a 17-year-old boy fled to Park County, stopping just outside of Bailey, after he allegedly shot two administrators at East High School in Denver. Law enforcement, who had identified the boy as Austin Lyle while they undertook an hours-long search for him, discovered his body that night. He died by suicide, law enforcement confirmed.
For the wake of another school shooting to arrive on Bailey’s doorstep conjured up painful memories and fervent questions in a town that has a grim familiarity with such tragedies, Thomas said.
“It brought back that day,” Thomas said. “And the chaos that seems to come to Bailey when this type of stuff happens.”
'I can't cry right now'
McCafferty shed quiet tears reflecting on the emotional toll of this week’s events. The school shooting in Denver and the 17-year-old’s death brought up recollections of Emily, and as grief goes, gave way to thinking about other losses in his life, he said.
Another customer and friend of the cafe, Vivian Rosso, could not hold back her tears on Friday, either. She remembers well the sight of law enforcement flying across town as they rushed to respond to the hostage taking at the school that led to the shooting that took Emily’s life.
That’s why when she saw law enforcement swarming Bailey again this week, to the point she once had to pull over while driving, she sent a prayer request to her church straight away.
“When I saw the SWAT and everything, my heart just sank, because I knew somebody wasn’t going to be alive anymore,” she said.
Her children attended school with Emily. Rosso can’t forget getting the call about a lockdown at Platte Canyon school, or what her children endured that day, such as being told to evacuate with hands on heads. When students were told to run, her son thought it was because the gunman was upon them, she said.
“They’ve been through something I could never imagine,” she said.
The experience molded her children into who they are today, she said. They are kind people, and compassionate. Both her sons became missionaries. She left the Cutthroat Cafe on Friday saddened once again by school violence, and wondering, what could have prevented the East High shooting.
"You wish he could have gotten help somehow," she said.
After his Friday lunch rush waned, Thomas settled down at a table and dug into a slice of pie. He could not talk too much about Emily’s impact on him, he said.
“I can’t cry right now,” he said.
But he has a favorite memory of her: The time she asked for the day off to celebrate her 16th birthday.
No one else got time off for their birthday, coworkers told her, and the answer was a "no." At first frustrated, the then 15-year-old took some time to process the decision and then came back to Thomas. Her birthday dinner wasn’t scheduled to begin until an hour after the café closed, she said, and it would all work out.
Thomas was proud of her for working through her disappointment. He got a laugh, too, when she jokingly refused to help staff clean up trash on the day of her birthday — because it was her special day.
The café’s staff treats the young people who work their like their own children, he said. When Emily died, the kids who worked at the café stayed at the restaurant after closing time for months, often until midnight, talking about what they were feeling while grieving the tragedy.
The kids who worked for him at the time have gone on to “grab hold of life,” Thomas said. They are striving in their careers, successful, raising beautiful families, and every so often, stop into the café, he said.
“They don’t waste a day,” Thomas said.
'An amazing kid'
East High School students flooded the state Capitol on Friday for the second day since the shooting to push for gun reform. Two East High School students who spoke to The Denver Gazette said they shared a math class with Lyle. They remembered him as dedicated, and hardworking.
“Honestly, he was an amazing kid,” Noah Vong said, an East High junior and classmate of Lyle. Thinking about everything that transpired during the incident “just breaks my heart,” Noah said.
Lyle was sweet, funny and shy, classmate Addi Kirkland said. Other students did not know Lyle was under a safety plan, she said, and nothing about him would indicate he was expelled from another Colorado district.
Following the shooting, law enforcement said the incident occurred while administrators performed a daily search of Lyle for weapons, something required as part of a safety plan the student was under. He was "removed" from the Cherry Creek School District before attending East High, the district said.
“He was the hardest worker in that class, I swear,” Addi said, a sophomore at East High.
She knew him as a good person, and was still grieving his loss while rallying, she said.
The community at Cutthroat has questions about what led to the East High School shooting: Why remove school resource officers in recent years with so many school shootings? Why not suspend a student who reportedly need to be searched each day for weapons before entering school? Where is the mental health, family and community support for young people?
Thomas wishes people would listen to one another more in seeking answers to curbing school violence, he said.
While they mourned for Emily again, McCafferty, Rosso and Thomas also mourned for the boy whose life ended at 17.
“It is somebody’s child,” Rosso said.
McCafferty is sad for the school employees who were shot. He’s sad for the 17-year-old’s parents. Yes, Thomas is upset about the Denver school shooting tragedy came to affect Bailey, but he can’t forget either that “this is a kid” who was alleged to have carried out the shooting, he said.
“I don’t know the story of this young man,” Thomas said, “but whatever it took to bring him to that, breaks your heart.”
Tom Hellauer and Julia Cardi of The Denver Gazette contributed to this report.
