By


The Associated Press

February 23, 2010, 7:25PM

A woman embraces a girl outside Deer Creek Middle School in Littleton, Colo., after Tuesday’s shooting. (AP Photo / The Denver Post, Andy Cross)

LITTLETON, Colo. — Teachers tackled and subdued a man armed with a high-powered rifle just after he shot two teenage students Tuesday at a suburban Denver middle school that’s just miles from Columbine High School, the site of one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings, authorities said.

The seventh-grade math teacher who tackled the suspect, David Benke, is a 6-foot-5-inch former college basketball player who has taught at the school for about 10 years, his wife Sandra Benke, told KUSA-TV. Other teachers quickly piled on the gunman, the station reported.

“Some staff acted very quickly, and very heroically,” Jefferson County Sheriff’s office spokeswoman Jacki Kelley said.

One male and one female were shot at about 3:30 p.m. outside Deer Creek Middle School in Littleton, Kelley said. Both students were taken to a nearby hospital and were expected to survive.

The school typically finishes its day at 3:05 p.m. The mother of one uninjured student, Sheri Hasse, said students were boarding buses when the shootings took place.

The school is about three miles southwest of Columbine High School, where two teens — Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris — killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 others before killing themselves in 1999.

Kelley said authorities don’t yet have a motive for the shootings.

“Why this school, why this happened, why these students, we don’t have any of those answers yet,” she said.