Columbine (39 page)

It was a staggering lapse of judgment. Jeffco could have simply isolated the two explosive issues into an independent investigation. It would have been easy enough; they had nearly a hundred detectives at their disposal, few of whom worked for Jeffco.

The independent investigation didn't seem so obvious in 1999. The commanders were essentially honest men. Not one had a reputation as a dirty cop. John Kiekbusch was deeply respected inside and outside the force. They believed they were innocent, and that the public would see that. And many of them were. Stone and his undersheriff had been sworn in only three months earlier--they bore no responsibility for missing any warning signs from Eric Harris. Most of the team had no role in command decisions on April 20. Kate Battan was running the day-to-day operations; she was clean.

But some good cops made really bad decisions after April 20. Survivors were right to suspect a cover-up. Jeffco commanders were lying about the Browns' warnings about Eric, and Randy and Judy made sure everyone knew. Inside the department, someone was attempting to destroy the Browns' paper trail. Shortly after the massacre, Investigator Mike Guerra noticed that the physical copy of the file he had put together on Eric a year earlier disappeared from his desk. A few days later, it reappeared just as mysteriously. Later that summer, he tried to call up the computer record and found it had been purged.

The physical file again disappeared and has never been recovered.

Over the next several months, division chief John Kiekbusch's assistant took part in several activities she later found disturbing.

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Each day Patrick tried to lift his leg again. Concentrate, they instructed him. Each time Patrick concentrated, electrons dispersed through the gray matter of his brain. Each time, those electrons sought fresh routes through the lacerated left hemisphere. Once they established a signal--faint, almost imperceptible--they laid the mental equivalent of fresh power lines. The signal grew stronger.

People were always in and out of his room. In the first week of May, a friend from waterskiing and some aunts and uncles were visiting. Patrick lay on his bed, the useless leg up on a pillow. The brace was wrapped around it, so it was extra heavy, but he bore down anyway. Slowly, barely, the thigh rose. "Hey!" he shouted. "Check out what I can do!"

They couldn't see anything. He had raised it just enough to expand the pillow below his brace. But he could feel it. The pillow wasn't supporting it, he was.

Patrick made steady progress once he reestablished contact with his limbs. Every morning, he could feel some change. The strength returned to the center of his body first, beginning in his torso, then radiating out through his hips and his shoulders and down toward his right elbow and knee. In a few more weeks, they had him on his feet. They started him off standing between a set of hip-high parallel bars. He had sort of a towrope around his waist that a therapist held on to, to steady him and guide him the short distance through the bars. That was a good day. The bars were tough, because his right arm was as feeble as his leg. But together, he gathered the strength for each step.

Later, he progressed to a walker and then a forearm crutch with a cuff that straps over the arm below the elbow. The wheelchair was always there for long trips, or any time he grew tired. Dexterity with his fingers and his toes would be the hardest thing to regain completely. It would take him months to hold a pen without shaking. His walk would be hindered by all sorts of fine adjustments we never notice our toes making.

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Anne Marie Hochhalter progressed more slowly. She had barely made it through the attack. Her spinal cord was ruptured, causing unbearable nerve pain. She spent weeks lying delirious on morphine, with a ventilator and a feeding tube keeping her alive. She couldn't talk with the tubes, and through the fog, she didn't understand what had happened or what was ahead.

Eventually, she grew more lucid and asked whether she would walk again.

"Well, no," a nurse told her.

"I just cried," she said later. "The nurse had to go get my parents because I was crying so hard."

After six weeks, she joined Patrick at Craig. Danny Rohrbough's friend Sean Graves was there, too, partially paralyzed below the spine. He managed a few steps with braces over the summer. Lance Kirklin's face was reconstructed with titanium implants and skin grafts. Scarring was severe, but he made light of it. "It's cool being five percent metal," he said.

____

In the weeks just after the murders, nearly all the families of the library victims walked the crime scene with investigators. They needed to see it. It might be horrible--they had to find out. Dawn Anna stopped at the spot where her daughter Lauren Townsend had been killed. First table on the left. Nothing had been changed, except for the removal of the backpacks and personal effects, which had been photographed, inventoried, and returned to the families. "The emotional impact, I don't even know that I can adequately describe it," Anna said. But she could not avoid it. "I needed that connection, as did all of us, to get back and identify, in part, with what had happened there."

The thought of sending any schoolkid back inside was unthinkable. The library had to go. Independently, and collectively, most of the thirteen families came to that conclusion quickly.

Students reached the opposite consensus. They spent the spring battling for the
idea
of Columbine, as well as the proper noun: the name of a high school, not a tragedy. They were repulsed by phrases bandied about like "since Columbine" or "prevent another Columbine." That was one day in the life of Columbine High School, they insisted.

Then the tourists arrived. Just weeks after the tragedy, even before students returned, tour buses started rolling up to the school. Columbine High had leapt to second place, behind the Rocky Mountains, as Colorado's most famous landmark, and tour operators were quick to capitalize. The buses would pull up in front of the school, and tourists would pile out and start snapping pictures: the school, the grounds, the kids practicing on the athletic fields or milling about in the park. They captured a lot of angry expressions. The students felt like zoo specimens. Everyone still needed to know constantly,
How do you feel?

Brian Fuselier was heading into his sophomore year at Columbine. Weeks under the microscope had been miserable; the tourists were too much. "I just want to walk up and punch them in the nose!" he told his dad.

On June 2, most of the student body finally reconnected with the physical Columbine. It was an emotional day. Students had two hours to go back inside and retrieve their backpacks and cell phones and everything else they had abandoned when they ran for it. Their parents were allowed in as well. It gave everyone a chance to face their fears. Hundreds of kids stumbled out in tears. Useful tears. Most found the experience stressful but cathartic.

They were kicked out again for two months, while construction crews renovated the interior. The students had mixed feelings about anything changing, but they were taking that one on faith. The district had open enrollment, so everyone expected a big drop in Columbine's student body the next fall. Students reacted the opposite way: transfers out were minimal. Fall enrollment actually went up. Students felt they had lost so much already, that surrendering an inch of corridor or a single classroom would feel like defeat. They wanted their school back. All of it!

Mr. D and the faculty were focused on the kids: getting them into therapy and watching out for trauma symptoms. School officials formed a design review board to address the library. It included students, parents, and faculty. Consensus came readily: gut the room and rebuild it. Redesign the layout, replace and reconfigure the furniture, change the wall color, the carpet, even the ceiling tiles. It was a drastic version of the plan put together for the entire school. Trauma experts advised the board to balance two objectives: make the kids feel their school had survived and surround them with changes too subtle to identify. The library was the exception: it would feel completely different.

Renovation of the school would cost $1.2 million, and would be tough to complete before school resumed in August. The design board moved quickly, and the school board adopted its proposal in early June. The parents of the murdered kids were aghast. Rearrange the furniture? Slap on some paint and recarpet? The design team saw their plan as a complete overhaul. Their adversaries called it "cosmetic."

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Initially, the students and the victims' families assumed they were all in this together. It took them several weeks to realize they were about to battle each other. Parents of the Thirteen saw that they were outnumbered; they formed the Parents Group to fight back. On May 27, just as they were organizing, a notorious lawyer and media hound flew to Denver for a boisterous press conference. Geoffrey Fieger had become a cable news staple via splashy media trials, like that of Dr. Kevorkian, the assisted-suicide doctor. Fieger teamed with Isaiah Shoels's family to make an ostentatious demand sure to return Columbine to national headlines in the worst possible light: a wrongful death suit against the killers' parents, for a quarter of a billion dollars.

"This is not about money!" Isaiah's stepfather declared. "This lawsuit is about change! That's the only way you get change, if you go rattling their pocketbooks." He was right, but the public was skeptical about motives. Fieger insisted he would spend more money mounting the case than he could hope to recover. Colorado law limited awards from individuals to $250,000, and governmental entities were capped at $150,000. "This lawsuit is a symbol," he said. "There will be cynics who would chalk the lawsuit up to greed."

Lawsuits had been anticipated, but nobody had foreseen one so garish, or so soon. Colorado law gave victims a year to file and six months to declare intent. It had only been five weeks. Families had been talking about lawsuits as means of leverage, and a last resort.

The lawsuit served as a trial balloon that sank. The survivors were particularly repulsed. Many of them had dedicated the next phase of their lives to some form of justice: anti-bullying, gun control, prayer in schools, SWAT protocols, warning signs, or just reclaiming their school or destroying the library. Lawsuits threatened to taint all that. They also shed a bad light on the next big battle, which was already developing when the Shoelses conducted their press conference. That fight revolved around money, too. The public donations had been astonishing, but the good fortune came at a price.

More than $2 million rolled in the first month. A month later, the total was $3.5 million. Forty different funds sprouted up. The local United Way set up the Healing Fund to coordinate the distribution of monies. Robin Finegan was a veteran therapist and victim's advocate who had worked closely with Oklahoma City survivors. "It is predictable that this will become a very difficult, painful process," she told NPR. There were too many competing interests. "We're going to leave people, some people, not feeling great about this." That was an understatement.

When a pair of teachers were collectively granted $5,000 for anxiety treatment, Brian Rohrbough blew his stack. "That's criminal," he said. He wanted the money divided equally between the families of the injured and the dead. But was equality fair? Lance Kirklin's father estimated his medical bills at $1 to $2 million; the family was uninsured. Mark Taylor needed surgery for four gunshots to the chest; his mom couldn't afford groceries or pay the rent. The process was humiliating, she said. She felt like a beggar. "My son's in the hospital. I can't work. We're broke and they have millions of dollars in donations. I'm disgusted."

The attorney for the Taylors and Kirklins suggested that some families needed compensation more than others. Brian Rohrbough erupted again. That implied that Danny's life had no value, he told the
Rocky Mountain News
. For Brian, the money was symbolic: the ultimate valuation of each life. For others it was purely practical.

In early July, the Healing Fund announced its distribution plan: 40 percent of the $3.8 million would go to direct victims. A clever compromise was reached for that money: the four kids with critical injuries got $150,000 each; $50,000 went to each of the Thirteen. That totaled $650,000 for the dead versus $600,000 for the critically injured, giving the Thirteen the appearance of preeminence. Twenty-one injured students got $10,000 each, a fraction of the medical bills for many. Most of the remainder went to trauma counseling and tolerance programs. Roughly $750,000 was earmarked for contingencies, a compromise to cover unpaid medical bills without appearing to favor the injured over the dead.

Brian Rohrbough backed off once he felt heard.

____

Tom Klebold was dealing with a lot of anger. "Who gave my son these guns?" he asked Reverend Marxhausen. He also felt betrayed by the school culture that picked on kids outside the mainstream.

Tom did his best to shut out the angry world. His job allowed him to hunker down at home, and he took full advantage. Sue was not wired that way. "She has to get out," Marxhausen said.

____

May 28, Kathy Harris wrote condolence letters to the Thirteen. Many of the addresses were unpublished, so she sealed each one in an envelope with the family's name, put them all in a manila envelope, and mailed it to an address the school district had set up as a clearinghouse for correspondence to victims. A week later, Kathy sent a second batch for the families of twenty-three injured. The school district turned them all over to the sheriff's department as potential evidence. It sat on them. Officials decided not to read them or deliver them.

In mid-July, the media discovered the snafu. "It's really not our job" to distribute them, Sergeant Randy West said. The letters had no postage or addresses, so commanders decided to return to sender. West complained about the family's refusal to meet without immunity, and said his team had trouble reaching their attorneys. "They're busy, we're busy and we can't seem to connect with them," Sergeant West said. "I guess if you want to make things easier you could just talk to us."