When the Denver East High gunman started shooting March 22, he didn’t just rob his classmates of their security and their freedom of movement. In a very real way, he also stole their voices.

Senior Patrick Pethybridge, 18, was moments away from reading a unity poem at a packed morning assembly when the school went into lockdown. A teacher issued the immediate, emphatic command: “Silence!”

Pethybridge never got to read that poem.

The assembly had been called by a club called Latino Students United. It was intended to mark the upcoming Cesar Chavez holiday, to acknowledge the recent gun death of Denver East student Luis Garcia and mainly, Pethybridge said, “to celebrate the whole Latinx community at school.”

Jozer Guerrero, a 31-year-old graduate of nearby Denver West, had been invited to perform at the assembly with his Chicano funk band, Los Mocochetes. Ironically, Guerrero was reciting his own poem, “Walking Towards Freedom,” when he heard rustling backstage. Something, he knew, was up. But he continued with his poem, even stomping his boot on the stage to replicate the sound of a gunshot. The theme of his piece, he said, “is standing up as one community against gun violence.”

Then came the command for silence. The crowded theater, he said, became hauntingly quiet.

“The scariest part was witnessing 400-plus kids go from making all that noise to not saying one word,” Guerrero said. “It was complete silence. It was clear they had been trained for how to react in these situations, and we all got a small glimpse of what these students have been experiencing for the past few years.”

After the band finished, the program called for Pethybridge to read his poem, “Rallying Cry.” The greatest irony: That was to be followed by an actual moment of silence for Garcia, who was shot outside East High on Feb. 13 and died weeks later.

Instead, Pethybridge and his schoolmates found themselves in an entirely different, morbid contortion of a traditional moment of silence.

Pethybridge was born in Missouri and moved to Texas, Pennsylvania and finally to Colorado a little more than eight years ago. He joined East as a sophomore, carries a 3.86 GPA and is bound for the University of Colorado Boulder to study environmental design.

He has considered himself a serious poet since he was about 9, with the encouragement of his parents, Jeffrey Pethybridge and Carolina Ebeid. He was invited to read at the March 22 school assembly after having read another poem to the school’s staff to mark the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month.

Because of the large school enrollment, the assembly in the auditorium was planned to take place twice — at 9:25 a.m. and again an hour later. It began with Los Mocochetes performing.

“People were really excited about them being here,” said Pethybridge, who was backstage when he heard the word “lockdown.”

People were freaking out, he said, but his first concern was ensuring the safety of the band.

“They were our guests, after all,” Pethybridge said.

In all, he estimates the lockdown lasted 10 minutes that felt like forever.

“I remember thinking, ‘Why is this happening?’ he said. “We just buried Luis Garcia, so his loss is fresh in our minds. And what I kept thinking was: I hope we don’t lose another one.”

But Pethybridge has become numbingly used to these moments of frozen terror.

“We went on lockdown in September when we had that massive swatting threat,” he said — and again when Garcia was shot. This time, he said, “It felt severe. It felt real. Like there was something really bad going on.”

There was. He later learned that a classmate had allegedly shot two school employees. Pethybridge attended several student rallies at the state Capitol in the days that followed, and in an interview, he mentioned that he never got to read that poem.

Until now.

Denver Gazette Multimedia Editor Tom Hellauer and I reached out to Pethybridge with an offer: Read us your poem. Tell us what you want people to know. Tell us what you want us to do. He met us on Thursday on the front steps of East High, which is closed for spring break.

He was wearing a red, snapped shirt from Denver’s iconic Rockmount Ranch Wear store on Wazee Street. He chose it, he said, “because it vaguely resembles my culture as a Latino person,” before adding with a shy smile: “I also just wanted to look very presentable.”

The overall theme of his poem, he said, “is unity and inclusion and representation in our community.”

“Rallying Cry” invokes 15th century Mexican philosopher and ruler Nezahualcóyotl, the Denver school board and “violence from the unforgiving” before urging the country to move forward as a beacon of hope.

He points with pride to his penultimate stanza, which references all the nationalities and ancestral countries that comprise the umbrella Latin community. His list includes Hispanic, Chicano, Boricua, Cuban, Guatemalan, Argentine, Paraguayan and many more — ending, meaningfully, with “American.”

“I end with ‘American’ to emphasize that we all come from this mega-diverse diaspora that is not always valued in the general public sphere,” he said. “It’s a little hard. But we must persist as one voice.”

As for what he wants to see happen next, Pethybridge would like state lawmakers to pass all five gun bills up for consideration, ranging from expanding extreme-risk protection orders to a statewide ban on assault weapons. And he wants people to participate in our democracy.

“It is so important for both youth and grownups to use their political power,” he said. “And two of the ways are by voting and by writing to your representatives and elected officials.”

Guerrero said the best thing about what was an otherwise traumatizing experience at East High School was meeting Pethybridge. And here’s what Guerrero would have told him if he had the chance to hear Pethybridge’s poem on March 22 and talk about it afterward:

“I would tell Patrick that, as a young poet, his voice needs to be heard,” Guerrero said. “I would say that he plays a very important role because, in these terrible times, he becomes a historian. He’s witnessing it — so who better to tell that story?

“Patrick reminds me a lot of myself at that age. When you are a young poet, you have all that anxious energy, and you are only able to get that fix by being on that stage. So, I would tell Patrick: ‘Keep going.’

“I also think he would be a great candidate to be the city’s next youth poet laureate. The world needs to remember these tragedies, and maybe they can do that in a more beautiful light through his poetry.”

East High School senior Patrick Pethybridge reads his unity poem, “Rallying Cry,” which he was moments away from reciting at a school assembly that was stopped by the March 22 shooting.

John Moore, The Gazette