Utah police are searching for answers in the mysterious death of a high school student at a house party last weekend.
Police say 17-year-old Kaylissa Oleary, a senior at Copper Hills High School, died from a gunshot wound but it isn’t clear whether she accidentally shot herself or if foul play was involved.
“If it was self-inflicted we don’t believe it to have been intentional, but we don’t know that someone else did it,” Unified Police Department Sgt. Melody Gray tells PEOPLE. “So we are not at a point where we can say one way or another.”
Gray says they are listing the death as “suspicious” for now and are waiting for reports from the medical examiner’s office as well as cell phone downloads.
Gray declined to comment about whether anyone saw the teen with the gun of if a gun was found at all.
School principal Bryan Veazie told KUTV that Kaylissa was “very friendly, very upbeat, very personable, very willing to make eye contact, to say hello and have a casual and friendly interaction in the halls.”
Police were called to the scene of the house party in Taylorsville at 10:20 Friday night. “What we were initially told from people at the scene was that she had accidentally shot herself,” says Gray. “There were very few people at the house when police arrived, so that is one of the things that led us to believe it was a suspicious death. No one stuck around to tell us what happened.”
Gray says they have since spoken with the bulk of the people who attended the party.
Kaylissa’s 2010 blue Honda Civic was also missing, which raised suspicion, Gray says.
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Gray says the car has since been found but declined to discuss the circumstances under which it was discovered.
“We found the car, talked to most of the people at the scene, so we are kind of in a place right now where we are waiting for forensic evidence,” she says.
Anyone with information about this shooting is asked to call the Unified Police Department at 801-743-7000.
