Columbine (14 page)

They sat side by side, presuming they shared the same basic assumptions. It was seven years before they discovered that they arrived at St. Anthony's in completely different mind-sets.

John was racked with guilt. "There should have been something I was able to do to protect him," he said. John knew it was irrational, but years later, it still haunted him.

Kathy focused on the present: How could she help Patrick now? But no one even knew exactly what was wrong. Staff kept coming in to check on them, filling them in on the surgery, what to expect in Patrick and themselves. Dead brain cells do not regenerate, but the brain can sometimes work around them, they were told. No one really understands how the brain reroutes its neural pathways, so there's no procedure to assist it.

A projectile to the brain tends to cause two sets of damage. First, it rips away tissue that can never be restored. One path might cause blindness, another logical impairment. But the secondary impact can be just as bad or worse. The brain is saturated with blood, so gunshots tend to unleash a flood. As fluid builds, oxygen is depleted and the pool cuts off fresh supplies. Brain tissue is choked off by the very cells designed to nourish it. Patrick's doctors feared that as he'd lain on the library floor, his brain had been drowning in its own blood.

Patrick Ireland had brain damage; that was a fact. His symptoms indicated severe impairment. The only question was whether those functions could return.

The surgery was scheduled to take about an hour, but lasted more than three. It was after 7:00
P.M.
when the surgeon came out to advise John and Kathy of the results. He had cleared out buckshot fragments and debris from the surface. One pellet had penetrated Patrick's skull. It was far too perilous to dig out. That lead would be in him for life. It was hard to tell how much damage the pellet had wreaked. Swelling was the main indicator. It looked bad.

____

As one
SWAT
team rescued Patrick Ireland, another squad reached the choir room. The rumor was true: sixty students were barricaded inside. A few minutes later, sixty more were discovered in the science area. SWAT teams led them through the hallways, down the stairs, and across the commons.

At 2:47, three and a half hours into the siege, the first of those kids burst out the cafeteria doors. News choppers homed in on them instantly. The anchors and the TV audience were perplexed. Where were these kids coming from?

More followed, single file in quick succession, running down the hillside as fast as they could with their hands on the backs of their heads, elbows splayed. They kept coming and coming, dozens of them, tracing the same winding path, first away from the school, then back toward a windowless corner surrounded by squad cars and ambulances. They huddled there for several minutes, sobbing, waiting, clinging to one another. Police officers patted them down and then hugged them. Eventually, cops packed groups of three to five kids into squad cars and shuttled them to the triage area a few blocks south. The kids had to run right past two bodies on the way out, so at some point, an officer moved Rachel farther away.

The SWAT team reached the
1 BLEEDING TO DEATH
sign on the same sweep through the science area that freed all those kids. The sign was still against the window. The carpet in Science Room 3 was soaked in blood. The teacher was alive, barely.

17. The Sheriff

T
he Columbine crisis was never a hostage standoff. Eric and Dylan had no intentions of making demands. SWAT teams searched the building for over three hours, but the killers were lying dead the entire time. They had committed suicide in the library at 12:08, forty-nine minutes after beginning the attack. The killing and the terror had been real. The standoff had not.

The SWAT teams discovered the truth around 3:15. They peered into the library and saw bodies scattered around the floor. No sign of movement. They cleared the entrance and prepared to enter. They took paramedic Troy Laman in with them. The SWAT team warned Laman to be cautious. Touch as little as possible, they said; anything could be booby-trapped. Be especially suspicious of backpacks.

It was horrible. The room was a shambles; blood spattered the furniture, and enormous pools soaked into the carpet. The tabletops were oddly undisturbed: books open, calculus problems under way, a college application half-completed. A lifeless boy still held a pencil. Another had collapsed beside a PC, which was still running, undisturbed.

Laman was tasked with determining whether anyone was alive. It didn't look like it. Most of the kids had been dead for nearly four hours, and it was obvious by sight. "If I couldn't get a look at somebody, at their face, to see if they were still alive, I tried to kind of touch them," Laman said. Twelve were cold. One was not. Laman touched a girl, felt the warmth, and rolled her over to get a look at her face. Her eyes were open, tears trickling out.

Lisa Kreutz was carried down the stairs and rushed to Denver Health Medical Center. A gun blast had shattered her left shoulder. One hand and both arms were also injured. She had lost a lot of blood. She survived.

Most of the bodies lay under tables. The victims had been attempting to hide. Two bodies were different. They lay out in the open, weapons by their sides. Suicides, clearly. The SWAT team had descriptions of Eric and Dylan. These two looked like a match. It was over.

The team discovered four women hiding in back rooms attached to the library. Patti Nielson, the art teacher from the 911 call, had crept into a cupboard in the break room. She had squatted in the cupboard for three more hours, knees aching, unaware the danger had passed. Three other faculty hid farther back. An officer instructed one to put her hand on his shoulder and follow him out, staring directly at his helmet, to minimize exposure to the horror.

It had been over how long? No one knew. With the fire alarm blaring, none of the staff had been close enough to hear.

Detectives would piece it together eventually--how long the attack had lasted, and how long Eric and Dylan had killed. Those would turn out to be very different answers. Something peculiar had transpired seventeen minutes into the attack.

____

The investigation outpaced the SWAT teams. Detectives were combing the park, the library, Leawood Elementary, and the surrounding community. They interviewed hundreds of students and staff--everyone they could find. When waves of fresh survivors outnumbered police officers, they conducted thirty-to sixty-second triage interviews:
Who are you? Where were you? What did you see?
Friends of the killers and witnesses to bloodshed were identified quickly, and detectives were waved over for lengthier interviews.

Lead investigator Kate Battan performed some interviews personally; she was briefed on the rest. Battan was intent on getting every detail right--and avoiding costly errors that might come back to haunt them later. "Everyone learned a lot from hearing about the O. J. Simpson case and JonBenet Ramsey," she said later. "We didn't need another situation like those."

Her team also ran a simple search on Jeffco computer files and found something stunning. The shooters were already in the system. Eric and Dylan had been arrested junior year. They got caught breaking into a van to steal electronic equipment. They had entered a twelve-month juvenile Diversion program, performing community service and attending counseling. They'd completed the program with glowing reviews exactly ten weeks before the massacre.

More disturbing was a complaint filed thirteen months earlier by Randy and Judy Brown, the parents of the shooters' friend Brooks. Eric had made death threats toward Brooks. Ten pages of murderous rants printed from his Web site had been compiled. Someone in Battan's department had known about this kid.

Battan organized the information and composed a single-spaced six-page search warrant for Eric's home and a duplicate for Dylan's. She dictated them over the phone. The warrants were typed up in Golden, the county seat, delivered to a judge, signed, driven out to the killers' homes, and exercised within four hours of the first shots--before the SWAT team reached the library and discovered the attack was over.

The warrants cited seven witnesses who'd identified Harris and/or Klebold as the gunmen.

____

Agent Fuselier heard about the bodies on the police radio at 3:20. He had just gotten word that his son Brian was OK. Mass murder meant a massive investigation. "How can I help?" Fuselier asked the Jeffco commanders. "Do you want federal agents?" Definitely, they said. Jeffco had a small detective team--there was no way it could handle the task. An hour later, eighteen evidence specialists began arriving. A dozen special agents would follow, along with half a dozen support staff.

At 4:00
P.M.
, Jeffco went public about the fatalities. Chief spokesman Steve Davis called a press conference in Clement Park, with Sheriff Stone by his side. The pair had been briefing reporters all afternoon. Most of the press had never heard of either man, but consensus about them emerged quickly. Sheriff Stone was a straight shooter; he had a deep, gruff voice and classic western mentality: no hedging, no bluster, no bullshit. What a contrast to the blow-dried spokesman affixed to his side. Steve Davis began the conference by reiterating warnings about rumors. Above all, he stressed caution on two subjects: the number of fatalities and the status of the suspects.

Davis opened the floor to questions. The first was directed to him by name. Sheriff Stone stepped forward, brushing Davis and his cautions aside. He held custody of the microphone through most of the press conference. The sheriff answered nearly every question directly, despite later evidence that he had little or no information on many of them. He winged it. The death count nearly doubled. "I've heard numbers as high as twenty-five," he said. He pronounced the killers unequivocally dead. He fed the myth of a third shooter. "Three--two dead [suspects] in the library," he said.

"Well, where is the third?"

"We're not sure if there is a third yet or not, or how many. The SWAT operation is still going on in there."

Stone repeated the erroneous death count several times. It led newscasts around the world. Newspaper headlines proclaimed it the next morning:
TWENTYFIVE DEAD IN COLORADO.

Stone said the three kids detained in the park appeared to be "associates of these gentlemen or good friends." He was wrong; they had never met the killers, and were soon cleared.

Stone made the first of an infamous string of accusations. "What are these parents doing that are letting their kids have automatic weapons?" he asked.

Reporters were surprised to hear the rumors about automatic weapons confirmed. They rushed in with follow-ups. "I don't know anything about the weapons," Stone admitted. "I assume there were probably automatic weapons just because of the mass casualties."

A reporter asked about motive. "Craziness," Stone said. Wrong again.

____

By now dozens of kids had fled the school with their friends. School officials herded them across Clement Park to meet school buses that would drive past police barricades to Leawood. The buses parked directly beside the site of the press conferences.

The kids trudged meekly toward the media throng. Many sobbed quietly. Others helped distraught students along, holding their hands or slinging an arm over their shoulders. Most of the kids stared at the ground. The crowd of reporters parted. These were not the faces of interview subjects.

But the students were eager to speak. Teachers hurried the kids, chiding them to keep quiet. They were having none of that. The bus windows started coming down, heads popped out, and kids recounted their ordeals. Kids piled off the buses.

The teachers tried to coax them back on. Not a chance. A tough-looking senior described his terror in the choir room with a sense of bravado and chivalry. But his voice cracked when a reporter asked how he felt. "Horrible," he said. "There were two kids lying on the pavement. I just--I started crying. I haven't cried for years, I just--I don't know what I'm going to do."

____

Attention focused on the students. Endless reunions with their parents played out on TV. A different group weathered the crisis in seclusion. More than a hundred teachers worked at Columbine, along with dozens of support staff. A hundred and fifty families feared for their husbands, wives, and parents. There was no rendezvous point where they could gather. Most drove home and waited by their phones. That's where Linda Lou Sanders kept vigil.

She had celebrated her mom's seventieth birthday with the family; then they'd headed up into the mountains for a pleasure drive. On the way, Linda's brother-in-law called her sister, Melody, on her cell.

"Where does Dave teach?"

"Columbine."

"You better head back down here."

Everyone gathered at Linda's house. Most of the news was good. Only one adult was reported injured, and it was a science teacher, which ruled out Dave. So why hadn't he called?

Those reports were nearly accurate. Only one adult had been hit, and Dave was still bleeding at that moment. The sense that afternoon was that gunfire had erupted all over the place. In fact, it had mostly been limited to the library and the west steps outside. Teachers had not been studying for tests or strolling outside to enjoy their lunch in the sunshine. If the bombs had gone off as planned, it would have wiped out a quarter of the faculty in the teachers' longue. But they had been spared by dumb luck. All but one.