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Columbine shooting surveillance tape
Eric Harris, left, and Dlyan Klebold, carrying a semi-automatic pistol, are pictured in the cafeteria at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colo., during their April 20, 1999 shooting rampage where they killed a teacher and 12 students. Photograph: AP
Eric Harris, left, and Dlyan Klebold, carrying a semi-automatic pistol, are pictured in the cafeteria at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colo., during their April 20, 1999 shooting rampage where they killed a teacher and 12 students. Photograph: AP

Ten years on and Columbine still feels the pain

This article is more than 14 years old
On 20 April 1999 two students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, walked into Columbine high school with pipe bombs and semi-automatic weapons and carried out one of the worst massacres in US history. We went back to hear the remarkable stories of survivors who, 10 years on, still suffer terribly from the emotional and physical fallout of that spring day

At 16, Craig Scott was too young to know much about death. When he heard a popping noise outside the school library one sunny April morning, he thought it was a student prank: nothing more sinister than the snap and fizzle of a firecracker set off against Tarmac. It took him 24 hours to discover that one of those popping sounds was a gunshot that killed his 17-year-old sister, Rachel.

Ten years later, he is still reliving it. "My life changed that day," says Craig, now a stocky 26-year-old with highlighted blond hair and thick, bronzed arms. "The hard part is going through it in my mind, over and over again."

It was just after 11.20am on 20 April 1999 at Columbine high school, Colorado, and Craig Scott was about to become part of the deadliest high school shooting in American history. Rachel was the first victim. In the ensuing 45 minutes, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, would stalk the corridors of their school, shooting down classmates, lobbing home-made pipe bombs through doorways and wreaking their own particular brand of indiscriminate carnage with an arsenal of semi-automatic weaponry.

They killed 12 students and a teacher before turning the guns on themselves. In the years that followed, Columbine would become a shorthand for school massacre. Those searching for an answer would variously blame lax gun controls, violent video games and, in the case of one local evangelical minister, Satan himself. Those who survived would never be quite the same again.

But, at first, it just sounded like firecrackers. It was only when a female teacher ran into the library, screaming at everyone to hide under the tables, that Craig began to get scared. He hunkered down underneath the desk with his two friends, Matthew and Isaiah, one of the school's few black students. Then Harris and Klebold burst into the library, wielding a 9mm semi-automatic carbine, two sawn-off shotguns and a handgun.

"They were shouting profanities, mocking students, like they were in a movie or something," recalls Craig. "They laughed. They had fun doing it. They came over to my friend Isaiah and began to make racial slurs towards him. That was the last thing he heard before they shot him." He pauses. "And the last thing he said was: 'I want to see my Mum'."

Then they shot Matthew dead. Craig, miraculously uninjured, was left sandwiched between the two slumped corpses of his friends, their blood pumping on to his sweatshirt. "I was experiencing so much fear I thought my heart was going to stop beating," he says.

Across the room, Valeen Schnurr, who had turned 18 six days before, was cowering beneath another table with her best friend Lauren. They had just been preparing an English presentation on the American Civil War novel Cold Mountain and their pencil cases were still on the desk above their heads. Valeen remembers Lauren holding her hand tightly. Then, without understanding why, Valeen felt her body jerk forcefully. She noticed she was bleeding and would find out subsequently that she had been shot nine times at close range. "The force of the bullets pushed me out from under the table," says Valeen, now 27. "I was in excruciating pain. It feels like fire running through your body. I was saying 'Oh my God, oh my God' and one of them [Klebold] asked me if I believed in God. I said yes. He asked why. I said 'My parents brought me up that way'."

Then she held her breath and closed her eyes, hoping he would leave her to die. The gunman walked away. "I didn't see his face," Valeen says. "But their voices... it was like they were happy. To them it was like playing a game." It was only afterwards, when she nudged her friend so they could make their escape, that she realised Lauren was dead. The ninth bullet had sliced through Valeen's shoulder and killed her.

The bloodshed in the library was a single component of a much broader destruction. Harris and Klebold had plotted their rampage with meticulous brutality over the course of the previous year, spewing forth expletive-laden rants in their personal journals and on videos that were deemed so incendiary the police would later refuse to release them to the public.

Wearing black trenchcoats and wraparound sunglasses, Harris and Klebold shot at teenagers eating lunch in the school grounds, at students in the cafeteria and the library, at teachers running through corridors, at the police snipers who tried to stop them and, finally, fatally, shot themselves. Craig Scott managed to escape the library and run home. Valeen Schnurr was taken to hospital by ambulance with life-threatening wounds to her chest and abdomen. Astonishingly, she was discharged within a week.

Days later she returned to the school with investigators to help them piece together what had happened. Everything was as it had been in the moments before the banal became blood-soaked; before the mundane was shattered like shrapnel and became something you could no longer believe in. In the library there were untouched newspapers from 20 April, the front pages bearing stories about the birth of a pair of polar bears at a local zoo. "There were still cans of soda in the cafeteria," Valeen says. "Ammunition lay all over the floor. I walked through the halls with my family and I stood right where I was shot and my blood was on the floor. It was an awful moment."

There are some who would have you believe that these survivors are the lucky ones: the students who made it home to their parents that evening, who walked out of Columbine with their lives more or less intact. But 10 years on it is these people who bear the brunt of remembrance, who struggle with the fragmented horror of that single day.

It is noticeable in the small details. You can see it when Craig recounts his story in a blank monotone, eyes slanting downwards, focusing on some indistinct point on the floor. Or when Valeen admits that she no longer wears sleeveless tops or bathing suits because she does not want to reveal the livid scars on her arms. Or when Kristi Mohrbacher, a 16-year-old Columbine high school junior in 1999, has a recurring nightmare about crawling along the floor of the school auditorium, fleeing an unnamed sinister presence. "In the dream," she says, sipping a polystyrene cup of coffee, "I'm trying to hide, trying not to make any noise." Or when big, strapping men like former fire chief Chuck Burdick talk about what happened that day with cracked voices and trembling hands and the shimmer of tears in their eyes.

Burdick, who co-ordinated the emergency response as Operations Chief of the Littleton Fire Department, had never seen anything like it. The scale of the disaster was overwhelming: at one point there were 250 students unaccounted for, eyewitness reports of six to eight shooters and a telephone network jammed by a 2,000 per cent increase in the average call volume. There were helicopters, ambulances and TV crews as far as the eye could see. Parents had started rushing to the perimeters of the school, begging for information that Burdick simply did not have.

Inside the building, Swat teams had their progress slowed by the home-made explosives and Molotov cocktails that littered the corridors. Panicked students had barricaded themselves into classrooms - upstairs, around 35 of them had squeezed into a 12 by 10ft music room. They were there for three hours. An asthmatic had to be lifted through a ceiling tile to gasp for air.

Four ad-hoc triage areas were set up in the school grounds. As injured students ran out of the building into nearby front lawns and garages, people came out of their houses to help them, mopping up blood with old T-shirts and towels. Burdick saw paramedics attend to a boy who had been shot in the face. "His whole jaw was hanging off, all the way down to his chest," he says. "That's when it became real. Working in this profession, we see death and destruction all the time. It's a terrific job but you can only do it for so long. You take a little bit of it home with you each day. Columbine turned out to take a big chunk."

A decade on, and talk of "closure", and "getting over it" is anathema to these people. Yes, they survived. But survival was not a question of forgetting: it was choosing how best to live with remembering.

Columbine was not the first campus shooting nor, despite its awful repercussions, was it the most lethal. Three years earlier, Thomas Hamilton walked into Dunblane primary school in Scotland and opened fire, killing 16 children, one teacher and himself. In 2007 a 23-year-old Virginia Tech undergraduate killed 32 people with two semi-automatic weapons before committing suicide.

But Columbine was different. It was the first high school shooting to be played out in real time, in front of 24-hour TV news cameras and on the internet. It left behind a trail of distressing imagery, including the shadowy CCTV footage of the gunmen stalking the cafeteria, and the videos, diaries and web pages they left behind outlining their visceral hatred for almost anything or anyone who crossed their path - country music, Star Wars fans, Christians, high school jocks, even people who mispronounced "espresso".

Mobile phones were just beginning to be widely used - some children called TV or radio stations from within the building, leading one news anchor to implore them to turn any television sets off "or down, at least".

It was, according to Mark Obmascik, who covered the tragedy as a reporter for the Denver Post, "a precursor to reality TV. People found it hard to deal with because of the immediacy of it."

It was also different because of its magnitude. Harris and Klebold wanted to outdo Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma bomber. They had planned meticulously for over a year - the only reason the devastation was not far greater was because they used the wrong kind of alarm clocks for their home-made bombs: the tickers were plastic, not brass, and therefore incapable of making the necessary electronic connection.

"Those are the nightmares I have," says Burdick, who is now a senior consultant for the public safety firm iXP Corporation. "If those bombs had gone off, I know for sure I would have had hundreds of people dead in there. They weren't setting out to be a school shooting, they were setting out to make a name for themselves."

There was the inevitable search for blame. Unable to bring the two perpetrators to justice, America launched itself into a vigorous debate on gun control, on the influence of violent video games and films (Craig Scott remembers Harris and Klebold quoting lines from Natural Born Killers as they shot their victims) and on the segregated nature of American high schools. There were endless attempts to seek an explanation. Why had no one spotted the shooters' murderous intent earlier? How could Harris and Klebold, both of whom had a secure and stable upbringing, have found it in themselves to unleash such devastation? Did they feel alienated or unloved? Were they unreachable psychopaths? And, most pressingly of all, could it happen again?

As a result, Columbine left an indelible bruise on the national consciousness. It spawned two films - Michael Moore's 2002 documentary on gun control in America, Bowling for Columbine (so-called because Harris was said to perform a Nazi salute when he bowled) and Gus Van Sant's Elephant, a 2003 account of a fictional high school shooting. In the same year, Columbine also provided the inspiration for Lionel Shriver's award-winning novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin.

It was unwanted attention. Until 1999 Columbine had been a quiet community of 100,000, situated at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. It remains typical of American suburbia: a scattering of carefully landscaped parkland surrounded by four-lane highways and malls selling doughnuts and pizza slices. The mushroom-beige houses are built in an imitation frontier-style with outside decking. Ten years ago it was a good neighbourhood but one where people mostly kept themselves to themselves. The bad stuff - family quarrels, truanting children, divorcing parents - tended to be swept behind the picket fences. Columbine was a nice place, held together by shared aspiration.

After the shootings, however, the community was under media siege and its grieving played out in public. Then, every subsequent April, the TV cameras would come back with weary familiarity. The locals got used to speaking about what happened. At first they might have been resentful at the intrusion but today, if you ask someone about the shooting, the response is generally a tired look, a sad nod of the head and the admission that yes, they knew some people there that day.

Relationships cracked under the pressure. Frank deAngelis, the school principal, was divorced from his wife because of the stress put on their marriage in the shooting's aftermath. Chuck Burdick retired early from the fire department. Valeen Schnurr moved away to attend the University of Arizona, where she funded her studies by working part-time in a funeral home. "I'll never be normal," she says, matter-of-factly. "I really struggled with survivor's guilt, with why my friend had to die. I've forgiven them for what they did, but an event as traumatic as that changes you, it moulds you into a different person."

Mark Obmascik gave up journalism to write books. "It really bothered me not being able to show my kids what I did for a living," he says. He shakes his head, suddenly aware he has tears in his eyes. "The shooting froze lots of families at one moment in time for public scrutiny. Some families were really close, some hated each other, some parents may not have been around too much, there were fights and sibling rivalries. None of this stuff ever would have made the front page, but, because of Columbine, there was America, split open."

Ted Zocco-Hochhalter was on a business trip in Seattle when he got a call on his colleague's mobile phone telling him that there had been a shooting at the high school. His two children - Anne Marie, 17, and Nathan, 15 - were Columbine pupils. He bought a ticket for the first plane back. The captain came out to sit next to him. "He said, 'We're going to go as fast as we can,'" recalls Ted, 59. "'The wings are literally going to start flapping and when we get to Denver, we're going to drop like a stone.' And that's what happened. We got there half an hour early."

He was met by four police officers and his brother-in-law who drove him to the hospital. Nathan had survived. Anne Marie was in a critical condition having been shot by Harris in the back and chest while she was eating lunch outside. One of the bullets had cut through her spinal cord. The only way the attending doctor could staunch the bleeding was to put his finger in her spleen like a bottle stopper. No one thought she would make it. According to her stepmother, Katherine: "Her wounds were so severe that the doctors cut her open like a cadaver as if they were doing a cause of death operation."

When Ted got there, Anne Marie was on life support. "All I could see of her was her face," he says. "The rest of her body was covered in tubes." He pauses, pressing his lips together tightly. His eyes start to film over. "I can't really talk about it."

Anne Marie did recover, after a fashion, but she was left paralysed from the waist down. She spent three months in physical therapy and underwent surgery to remove the bullet from her lower back and drain fluid from her heart. Then, six months after Columbine, her mother, Carla, who had a history of depression, went into a pawn shop, bought a gun and shot herself.

"The events at Columbine certainly contributed to her death," says Ted, sitting at a polished wooden dining table in his front room as the snow falls silently in the valley outside. "I've come to that conclusion. That's all I want to say."

Ted found himself in a depressive stupor, unable to function beyond minimal day-to-day existence, relying on the goodwill of neighbours to cook meals and clean the house. He found he had difficulty seeing things through - he would start a project and then be unable to finish it. He started to grow his hair so that it now snakes down the back of his denim shirt in a long white ponytail. When people asked if he was angry he would reply that he had no time: "I was so focused on having my family survive."

He says now that the hardest thing he had to deal with was the realisation that, as a father, he had failed to protect his children. "You send them off to school and they're meant to be in a safe environment," he says. "It's still raw. Real raw."

In the end, he had to move away from Columbine, to remove himself from the stifling good intentions, the sympathetic glances and constant questions. He bought a house 8,420 feet up in the mountains, surrounded by 35 acres of pine forest. He chopped down trees for 12-hour stretches, making firewood that he would then give away. Slowly, he came to accept the past. In 2002 he married Katherine, who had been his grief counsellor. Nathan joined the navy for five years. Anne Marie became the manager of a nearby bath and beauty store and Ted is now a school safety activist who trains parents in the best way to respond to a crisis.

For the last 10 years Ted has not wanted to talk publicly about what happened. He found it too painful. Most of the media attention was focused on those who were killed, or on the few families who spoke out. "It has taken 10 years for different perspectives of that day to be heard," says Katherine. "There were layers of people - the children who were injured, the families, the Swat teams, the pastors, the counsellors. It was a ripple effect. You don't come out of a situation like that and not be deeply affected."

"You never get over it," Ted concludes. "You can't. It is how you deal with it that defines you."

It is a familiar refrain. For every tale that you hear of death and pain and grief, there are positive stories; stories that have taken the coal-dark nugget of terror and polished it to a diamond sheen. There is Patrick Ireland, who was shot in the head by Klebold and who made his escape by throwing himself out of the library window - an event watched by millions on live television. Ireland had to relearn how to speak and walk. He is now married, works in finance and travels the country giving motivational speeches.

There is Craig Scott, who runs his own film production company and also works for Rachel's Challenge, a charity set up by his father, in honour of his murdered sister, to provide educational programmes to encourage schoolchildren to be kinder and more understanding.

There is Valeen Schnurr who now works for the social services, arranging adoptions and helping to rescue traumatised children from abusive parents. "I guess that dealing with the loss of naivety that you have when you're younger has helped me cope," she says of her job. "Most of humanity doesn't think about mortality. But I look at myself in the mirror every day and I see the scars that I survived, and I realise that my life could have been cut short that day."

And then there is Ted Zocco-Hochhalter, up on the mountainside, chopping up tree trunks for firewood and giving it all away.

Today Columbine high school remains at the bottom of a gently curved hill, a squat beige construction of concrete and green-tinted glass. The library and the cafeteria have been rebuilt. Behind the main building, above the playing fields and basketball courts, there now stands a memorial to the victims of what was at the time the worst high-school shooting in American history. The names of the dead are carved into panels of granite. Along one semi-circular wall is a quote from an unnamed student. It reads simply: "I didn't have any answers."

A couple with a child in a buggy come to look around. There is the occasional muted cheer from the baseball pitches below and the rumble of a nearby skateboard. Normal life continues. And, 10 years on, the survivors of Columbine have accepted that some questions have no answer, other than to carry on living.

Survivor stories

Kristi Mohrbacher a survivor of the Columbine High School shootings 10 Years on
Kristi Mohrbacher Photograph: James Chance/Rapport

Kristi Mohrbacher, 26, was a 16-year-old junior at Columbine on the day of the shooting. She and her 15-year-old twin siblings, Dan and Kim, all escaped unharmed. She is now studying print and broadcast journalism at the University of Colorado.

I was sitting in a math class when the fire alarms went off. At first, we didn't get up to go because we thought it was a student prank. Then one of the teachers came screaming down the hallway and we got out of the school. No one knew what was going on. There were all sorts of rumours flying around. I ended up at a friend's house and it wasn't until we watched the news on TV that we found out what was happening.

I realise now how much I observed everything. You would cry and you would go to funerals but it felt like I was watching from the outside. I don't think I felt anything for six months. Afterwards, I think I did feel guilty. Why did I get out? Was it luck? What was it?

I remember thinking that the Friday before [the shooting] I had been worried about going to prom, about my dress and about being a terrible dancer. The next Friday was totally different. It changed a lot of my priorities.

My parents have stuff they'll never get over. My dad is not a particularly emotional guy but he couldn't cope with not knowing how to help us that day. My mom still feels guilty for having three children who came back.

Ted Hochhalter's two children attended school on the day of the Columbine shootings
Ted Hochhalter and Katherine Zocco-Hochhalter Photograph: James Chance/Rapport

Ted Zocco-Hochhalter's 17-year-old daughter Anne Marie was left paralysed from the waist down. His first wife committed suicide shortly after the shooting. Ted, 59, has remarried and is a school safety activist, training parents in how best to respond to emergencies.

I struggle with an explanation for what happened. If you are of sane mind, it's very hard to be able to understand what would motivate anyone, let alone kids, to do something so self-destructive. Another one of the struggles was that because the shooters killed themselves, there was no one to bring to justice.

Anne Marie spent three months in physical therapy. To begin with, she couldn't talk. She wrote notes asking me questions. One of the things that stuck in my mind was when she asked me about the other kids, whether there had been deaths, I had to say yes, there were.

I very seldom think about Eric [Harris] and Dylan [Klebold]. I think more about their parents than them. We will be living with this for the rest of our lives, so we need to do something positive with it.

Darrell and Sandy Scott, parents of Rachel Scott who was a victim of the Columbine shootings
Darrell and Sandy Scott, parents of Rachel Scott who was a victim of the Columbine shootings Photograph: James Chance/Rapport

Darrell Scott's 17-year-old daughter Rachel was the first victim of the Columbine high school shooting.

After her death, Darrell, 59, set up Rachel's Challenge, a non-profit-making organisation that employs 30 motivational speakers to visit schools encouraging children to act more compassionately towards one another.

I'm not good with the "How do you feel?" questions. It's like asking a baseball pitcher how he feels when he's lost the game. There are no words. It's more important to honour Rachel's life than talk about her death.

Rachel had a very outgoing personality. She was beautiful both physically and spiritually. I have five children and three stepchildren and Rachel was the middle child; she was like a spark plug in our family, mischievous and bubbly. Through simple acts of kindness, she reached out to kids who were bullied or teased and disabled. That's why we set up Rachel's Challenge, to follow her example.

It has given me a sense of purpose. I think she would be happy to know what we had achieved. I believe Rachel's life was as it was meant to be. Would I have prevented it if I could have? Absolutely. At the same time, you
come to accept that Rachel's life was what it was.

We've learnt a lot in the past 10 years. Twelve million people have heard her story in live settings. We've seen so many lives touched, changed and saved. If you could subtract Rachel's death from the equation, it's been 10 of the most fulfilling years you can experience. But, of course, you can't.

Chuck Burdick was one of the first to arrive on the scene during the shootings at Columbine
Chuck Burdick Photograph: James Chance/Rapport

The former operations chief at Littleton fire department, Chuck Burdick, 57, responded to the first emergency call and co-ordinated the crisis response. He retired from the fire department in 2001 and is now senior consultant for the public safety firm iXP Corporation.

I was there within four minutes of the initial call. The biggest problem was the size of it: there were 40-45 different law enforcement agencies there and almost 2,000 emergency workers. There were 54 ambulances on the scene, three helicopters and about 250 students unaccounted for. That's what we were dealing with.

When the Swat teams went in, they faced an intense, loud, obnoxious environment. There was smoke and haze, strobe lights from the fire alarms. They had to weave in and out of explosives, stepping over backpacks in case they contained bombs. All the doors in the school had locked automatically so they had to break through 240 doors before they could get into classrooms.

Where Columbine was different was that Klebold and Harris weren't setting out to be a school shooting. They were setting out to make a name for themselves. Harris was the leader. He was probably a psychopath, and if this hadn't happened, then he would have gone on to do something else. He wanted to be bigger than Timothy McVeigh [the Oklahoma bomber]. Klebold maybe went along for the ride.

They planned it for a year. Plan A was that the bombs were meant to go off in the cafeteria, they would shoot at people as they fled the building and then they would get into cars and drive through the community, shooting as many as they could. Then they were going to Denver international airport to board a plane to New York with a pipe bomb. That's what keeps me up at night.

When I got home at the end of the day my family were standing at the top of the stairs waiting to embrace me. They had seen it all on TV. Yeah, I was crying. It was very powerful, very emotional. We didn't realise then the impact it would have.

I went back to the school a week later and it was totally bizarre. There was still a plate of nachos in the cafeteria. I'd never seen anything like it. It was something just frozen in time. It was very eerie.

I don't know whether you ever cope with it. It's like the loss of a family member - it will never leave you. Anniversaries have an impact. I won't even turn on the TV that day because it just brings up too many memories.

The incident wasn't that bad [to cope with]. It was what happened in the aftermath, with everyone second-guessing the decisions we made when we had only a fraction of a second to make them. It definitely speeded up my retirement.

Mark Obmascik received a Pulitzer Award for his reporting on the Columbine shootings
Mark Obmascik Photograph: James Chance/Rapport

Mark Obmascik, 47, was part of the team that reported the shootings for the Denver Post. The newspaper later won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage.

I remember the first calls coming in and we threw the whole newsroom at it. To begin with, there were conflicting reports. No one knew who the killers were. Then we heard it was kids killing kids...

A couple of stories stuck with me. One kid, Daniel Mauser, ended up in the library because he had no one to have lunch with, and he got killed. It didn't make any sense. Why would they want to get even with him?

Winning the Pulitzer was hard because there was no joy in this story. We did our jobs while other people had horrible grief.

How the tragedy unfolded

20 April 1999
11.10 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold arrive at Columbine high school.

11.15 The pair take bags stuffed with homemade bombs into the cafeteria. They are set to explode at 11.17 but don't.

11.20 Dressed in black trenchcoats, they begin to shoot at students eating lunch outside.

11.24 In the cafeteria, sports coach Dave Sanders hears the gunfire and orders students to evacuate.

11.27 Harris and Klebold walk into the school corridors firing shots. One of the bullets hits Sanders.

11.29 They walk into the library, killing 10 people.

11.35 Klebold and Harris shoot their last victim. It will later emerge they have killed 13: 12 students and teacher Dave Sanders. .

12.08 The gunmen kill themselves.

22 April 1999
An unexploded bomb with the power to kill hundreds is found in the school's kitchen.

Aftermath
There have been numerous US school shootings since Columbine, including the shootings at Northern Illinois University last year and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, in which Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people.
Natalie Woolman

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