A small community in Colorado appears to have narrowly avoided an attempted mass casualty event at an amusement park after a heavily armed man with an assault rifle and bombs was found dead over the weekend, local officials said on Monday.

“We had the potential for something very heinous and gruesome to happen in this community. We’re fortunate it did not occur,” Garfield County Sheriff Lou Vallario said on a virtual press briefing Monday. “If he had gone through with the worst case scenario, it could have been devastating.”

Diego Barajas Medina, 20, was found dead in a women's bathroom at Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park by a maintenance crew on Saturday morning, before the park opened to the public. He died of a self-inflected gunshot wound to the head, Garfield County Coroner Robert Glassmire said.

The sheriff said Medina was found wearing a ballistic vest and “black-colored tactical clothing” with patches and emblems intended to present him as a member of law enforcement. He was armed with a semi-automatic, AR-15-style rifle, a semi-automatic handgun, “multiple, loaded magazines for both weapons,” a series of realistic-looking fake explosives and real improvised explosive devices. Real and fake explosives were also found in his vehicle.

“I am not a killer, I just wanted to get into the caves,” was written on the wall of the bathroom in a dark marker or paint, Vallario said, but he could not definitely confirm Medina wrote the message.

A local bomb squad was called in and multiple bombs were detonated safely. Law enforcement also were concerned about booby traps near where Medina was found, but found none. His body wasn’t removed from the bathroom until Sunday.

Both of the guns are believed to be “ghost guns,” or illegal weapons manufactured without serial numbers and cannot be traced, officials said.

“Fortunately, for whatever reason -- we may never know -- although he was very highly prepared, very highly weaponized, he chose not to take advantage of any of that whatever his preparation was. He chose instead, as we believe, at this point, to commit suicide,” Vallario said. “We are, to say the least, extremely lucky that he did not fulfill whatever plan he may have intentioned. It could have caused devastating, it would certainly have caused a devastating impact on this community, the potential for many, many people to become killed and injured.”

The sheriff said they searched Medina’s home and that his mother and sister are cooperating, but law enforcement did not yet have a motive. Vallario said his office and the FBI intend to speak with family, friends, classmates, former school teachers and counselors to try to discover what drove Medina to this point. 

There were no prior indications, either at home or school, suggesting he was planning an attack, Vallario added, but in-depth interviews with relevant people were not yet underway as of Monday.

“We want to do what we can to get out to our community, to the state, to the country, what we know about this again, in order to maybe prevent it in the future,” Vallariao said, calling in from Hawaii where he is vacationing.

The discovery on Saturday came just days after an Army reservist killed 18 people at a bowling alley and a bar in Maine, the worst mass shooting of 2023. There have been 584 mass shootings this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that defines mass shootings as incidents with four or more people shot, not including the shooter. The U.S. is on pace for over 700 mass shootings in 2023, which would be the most on record.

The Garfield County sheriff said the amount of weapons and bombs Medina had exceeded the arms of the Maine gunman. 

Vallario did not specifically say what insignia the man was wearing to mimic law enforcement, but that the patches and gear resemble the “equivalent of maybe a SWAT team or even “an Army Ranger.”

Medina was from the nearby town of Carbondale, where he lived with his mother and brother, Vallario said. In a list of high school graduates published in a local newspaper in 2021, Medina said he planned to work for a year after graduation before attending Colorado Mountain College, a community college with several locations in western Colorado.

A search of his room by law enforcement found nothing to indicate explosives or bomb-making, and he had no known criminal history or prior encounters with police, the sheriff said.

The park, which is surrounded by state-owned public land, is on a mountain above the Colorado River in western Colorado. Its attractions include cave tours, an alpine coaster and a pendulum swing ride perched on the edge of a cliff that sends riders over the river canyon.

No employees or visitors were on scene when Medina entered the park, according to a statement issued Monday by Glenwood Caverns, and his body was found outside of restricted areas where rides are located.

“I can tell you that when I first saw this it was definitely a realization that this type of danger has come to quiet Glenwood Springs, Colorado, rural Colorado, rural America,” Vallario said.