The house belonged to an elderly couple who let me in and helped me contact my parents. As I waited to be picked up, I watched the news. I cried and cried as ambulances took my friends, including Anne Marie, away. For days, I didn't know if Anne Marie was alive or dead. On TV, I could see my bookbag lying in the parking lot where I'd left it.
Memorial items for Columbine: wreath with angel Beanie Babies, and book made by a first grade class I didn't get my bookbag back until June. When I did, it brought back all of my fear. My bag had been trampled on as students ran for their lives.
My hairbrush was broken, and all of my books were damaged. Eric and Dylan ruined so many lives. They were outcasts, but violence is never a solution. In junior high, I was tortured. I didn't wear the right clothes, and I didn't have the right hair. I had zero friends. But when I started at Columbine, I changed my situation. I joined the marching band and made tons of friends. Now the people that were so mean to me in junior high are signing my yearbook and giving me hugs in the hall.
I found a place to belong. If you're an outcast, you don't have to resort to violence. Join a club. Columbine offers clubs like the outdoors club, the Bible club, the chess club. There are tons of activities that you don't have to be an athlete or the smartest person in the world to participate in. High school doesn't have to be so terrible. If Eric and Dylan had tried to turn their lives around, maybe 12 of my peers wouldn't be dead maybe Anne Marie wouldn't be learning to walk again.
Create a List. List Name Save. Rename this List. Rename this list. List Name Delete from selected List. Save to. More than a decade later, Klebold's parents confirmed in a book that their son was an outcast and revealed that police told them during the shooting that he was a suspect.
Sean Graves , one of the survivors, has said in previous interviews that he knew the shooters but was not close to either of them. He said he was across the street from the school with his buddies when the bullets began to fly. Shot six times and left partially paralyzed, Graves became an inspiration to many when he climbed out of his wheelchair, leaned on a crutch and walked across the stage to collect his high school diploma in In anniversaries that followed, Graves would visit the spot where he was shot and light a cigar in memory of his friend, Danny Rohrbough, 15, who was killed there.
Graves said everybody who was at Columbine that day was a victim, not just the people who were hit by the gunfire. Some people never heal. Rachel Scott, 17, was the first person shot in the massacre.
She was eating lunch with her friend, Richard Castaldo, on the lawn outside the school when she was killed. Castaldo, who was also hit and played dead while the killers moved on, was left paralyzed. Darrell Scott said he frequently gets asked what he would advise other parents who have lost children in mass shootings.
And second, it would be, celebrate the life of your child. Harris and Klebold killed themselves with gunshot wounds to the head in the school's library at approximately p.
Read More. SWAT teams entered the school 47 minutes after the shootings started. Five hours passed before law enforcement declared the school under control. The Columbine shootings rank as one of the worst mass shootings in US history as well as one of the deadliest episodes of school violence.
January - Klebold and Harris are arrested after stealing items from a van. What we were seeing, though, was not quite what we thought. By the time the TV crews arrived, Harris and Klebold had in fact ended their rampage and turned their weapons on themselves. The sporadic shooting heard over the next three hours over the incessant wah-wah of the fire alarm came, in fact, from Swat teams pumping bullets into locked classroom doors in a painfully slow and clumsy effort to track down the killers.
Only later did the authorities realise Harris and Klebold were already lying dead in the library, along with 10 of their 13 murder victims. The illusion of an ordeal lasting for hours - some television stations even described it as a hostage stand-off - was just the first of many misconceptions. Harris and Klebold, we were told, were members of a campus group of losers and Marilyn Manson-worshipping goths called the Trenchcoat Mafia, who had few friends and attracted only derision from the cool kids.
They not only hated jocks, they were racists who picked 20 April for the attack because it was Hitler's birthday. Supposedly, they also had a grudge against evangelical Christians. A story soon spread that one of the murder victims in the library, Cassie Bernall, had been asked at gunpoint if she believed in God.
When she answered yes, Harris laughed and pulled the trigger. The story inspired dozens of sermons, spawned a best-selling book co-authored by Bernall's mother, and elevated Bernall to martyr status far beyond Columbine. Those of us who covered the shootings repeated at least some of these stories. We had no reason not to. They were confirmed, if not amplified, by the Jefferson County officials who gave news briefings several times a day.
How were we to know that John Stone, the county sheriff, was winging it, telling us, for example, that the boys had fully automatic weapons and at least one accomplice, when these were no more than his own wrongheaded assumptions? The stories were repeated, too, by traumatised students who drifted towards the television cameras stationed in a park across the street from the school.
We could not guess that these students did not know Harris and Klebold - this was a school with 2, students - and were, to a large extent, repeating things they were themselves picking up from the television coverage. I had long conversations with local teenagers, both in the park and in a local shopping mall, about the oppressiveness of jock culture and the enormous pressures of feeling out of place in a rigidly conformist, predominantly white middle class community.
It sounded like a plausible explanation at the time. Much of what we reported, though, was simply wrong, as attested by tens of thousands of official documents and other evidence that has at last seen the light of day after years of suppression by the local authorities. As the Colorado-based journalist Dave Cullen tells in his gripping and authoritative new book Columbine, Harris and Klebold had plenty of friends, did pretty well in school, were not members of the Trenchcoat Mafia, did not listen to Manson, were not bullied, harboured no specific grudges against any one group, and did not "snap" because of some last-straw traumatic event.
All those stories were the product of hysteria, ignorance and flailing guesswork in the first few hours and days. The truth was more sinister. Their ambition, harboured for about a year and a half and chronicled meticulously on Harris's website and in the boys' private journals, recovered after their deaths, was to blow up the entire school.
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