by Dave Cullen
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Grieving Douglas students did not all respond with activism. Most supported gun reform, came out to the occasional walkout or rally, but their priority was healing. The Columbine event helped some Douglas students do both.
It began with an invitation to the MFOL kids. Emmy, Madison, and the other organizers worked with the former Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis to honor them with a leadership award. The MFOL leaders had made a prior commitment, so the organizers invited a handful of other Douglas students they met at the DC march. Abiding Hope, a local church supporting the event, agreed to pay their way out. The Douglas kids would headline the rally, but that was not the primary objective. They would come for two to three days and just relax and breathe in the mountain air.
Word of the trip spread, and more students wanted to come—mostly low-income kids who could never afford a trip like this. The congregation had been through Columbine, and was happy to support them. More signed on, and eventually about fifty came.
The Douglas and Columbine students would perform a service day together on the anniversary: making a stone garden path at a local memory care facility, and upgrading the landscaping at Dave Sanders Memorial Softball Field just outside the school. It was named for the Columbine teacher who died saving students. The weather was gorgeous, the trees just leafing out for spring. Columbine students took them up to Lookout Mountain, and scrambled around Red Rocks Amphitheater. They were having a ball.
They were still playful when they got to the Columbine Memorial. They grew somber fast. The memorial is carved out of the shallow slope of Rebel Hill, which rises in Clement Park just past Dave Sanders Field. Beyond it, the sun was sinking, drifting toward the Rocky peaks. The Wall of Healing curves around the memorial’s border to enclose the quiet space. It is built of craggy russet bricks, matching the cobblestone path and the red clay earth all around. A central ring of memorial tablets commemorates the thirteen murdered nearby. The kids wandered among the young trees, running their fingers over the wall and tablets, feeling the inscriptions as they read. Many said it felt like chilling contact with the first generation to endure this—their first connection to kindred spirits. They marveled how tranquil they had grown. Everything felt different there. They wondered aloud: Was this a glimpse of their future? Serenity? Would it take nineteen years?
Gerardo Cadagan, a Douglas senior, said the memorial had taken him by surprise. He had not expected it to affect him so deeply. He had expected that to come later in the afternoon, when they were set to meet survivors who had lived through the ordeal there. He wasn’t sure how that would affect him either, but he was so desperate to meet someone who would understand. And to get away from that campus—it just reeked of death. He had a class in building 12 before Valentine’s Day. Now it was surrounded by an ominous fence, with cops moving in and out. “The scene of the crime, being around the building every day—just kind of brings the bad memories back,” he said. He couldn’t get enough of the crisp mountain air. Such a different feel from South Florida. Aspen trees, red clay earth, air so dry and thin and cool. The Rockies still had snow on their peaks. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “Florida’s flat. All of this to me is amazing.”
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Some Douglas kids had soured on activism—or forgone it entirely, working with apolitical groups like Shine MSD, or hurling themselves into sports or arts or performing to distract from the darkness, and add joy and meaning to their lives. During a rehearsal break for Legally Blonde, four Douglas students stepped out to the boardwalk outside the studio to discuss their experience. They had all gone through lockdown in the drama room with the MFOL kids.
“I wanted to be very involved in the politics just because I’m so passionate about what I believe,” junior Melanie Weber said. She had made the Tallahassee trip, and two of the others had gone to the march. “But then I realized like how draining it was. I would rather put my time into doing something like Shine that would have raised money for a good cause and made people happy, instead of just yelling and screaming and politics and ‘You’re wrong!’ and stuff like that. I felt like it helped me more.”
Their grief had been erratic. “It comes out of nowhere,” freshman June Felman said.
“This is weird, but like the further away we get from it, the more real it seems,” Melanie said. “Now the shock is wearing off. It’s sinking in that it actually happened.”
June had gotten an emotional support dog, a Boston terrier, and that made a huge difference. “He’s four months old and he’s adorable,” she said. “Just having him around makes me happy.”
June described being irritated by random people asking prying questions: Where were they during the shooting, what did they go through, what was it like? “It’s a little invasive sometimes,” she said. It had happened earlier that day at the hair salon. It was close to the school, that was a clue, but the support dog was a total giveaway.
Most of them said they had not been to therapy.
“I went like, once,” June said.
“I’m too stubborn to go but my mom thinks I should start going,” Melanie said.
Junior Alex Athanasiou said he had conversations in his head about it. “I’m taking psychology classes. I’m trying to be my own therapist.” He was also trying to help his sister, who had been on the second floor of the freshman building, where it happened. “After a month of her being like really quiet, I kind of went to her room and I was like, ‘Hey,’ and we had this really long conversation.” After that, she began to open up about it more.
They were mostly depending on each other. “We’ve all gone through the same thing,” June said. “That will always link us forever.”
Some of them had soured on their peers. Melanie said she used to be friends with Jackie. And they were very touchy about the attention MFOL was getting. National media had been in and out of that studio for weeks, a film crew was shooting an entire documentary on Spring Awakening, Broadway stars had come down to coach that cast and then hang out with them, and no one bothered to speak to them. They had lived through the same tragedy. There were actually more survivors in their production of Legally Blonde than Spring Awakening, but their cast didn’t include Cameron.
“The twelve kids in Never Again are not the entire student body,” June said. “They weren’t even near the freshman building. Not to call them out, but like—”
“Call them out!” Melanie said, and June continued:
“None of them were in the freshman building, none of them lost anyone close to them, yet they’re oh, like, survivors.”
This was making the boys uncomfortable. She was going too far, Alex said. The MFOL kids had lost friends too.
“It just bothers me how they’re getting all the attention in the world, yet there are kids who were in the freshman building that like, their voices aren’t being heard,” June said.
Junior Brian Martinez defended them too. “I know a lot of people from the freshman building that prefer not to talk about it, so they prefer having others talk for them.”
“But there also are a lot of people who do want to talk about it, but they can’t because like all the media is obsessed with these twelve kids,” June said.
The MFOL kids were well aware of this criticism. They heard it every day, and caught the silences and scowls. Cam and Alex Wind were steps away inside the studio at that moment. Much of the team had drama class with these kids every day.
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The Douglas group traveling to Columbine was supportive of the MFOL kids. Some came from undocumented families, so they were keeping a low media profile. Others just didn’t feel comfortable in the role. But they wanted gunmen to stop shooting them. Many echoed Brian’s sentiment appreciating the MFOL kids speaking up for them. They all appeared onstage at the Columbine rally that night, and a few gave rousing speeches.
The highlight of the trip was a meeting with Columbine survivors. About a dozen, plus a handful from other mass shootings, met th
em in a private session in the Columbine auditorium. Frank DeAngelis told them how pissed off he got at all the people telling him what he should feel. They were constantly trying to “help” by telling him that it was OK, pushing misguided “suggestions,” and generally telling him what to do. You’re probably feeling that right now, he said. That got a hearty laugh. They had all experienced it, endlessly. So DeAngelis said he wouldn’t push therapy on them, but he’d share what a Vietnam War vet told him: You’re a big mess, and if you don’t get help, you can’t help anyone else. DeAngelis loved the airplane oxygen mask analogy, and shared it with these kids: They always instruct you to put your own on before helping others. You’re useless if you don’t help yourself first.
It took a little while for the Parkland students to warm up. Finally one of them broached a touchy subject they had all been thinking about: prom and graduation were coming, and . . . The words caught in his throat, and he barely got them out through his sobs. What he was asking—and he thought it sounded terrible—but would it be horrible to have fun?
“Grief is not a competition,” Kiki Leyba said. He had been a new teacher when the shooting started, and he still taught English down the hall. But it took them far too long to accept that, he said. Some of the survivors admitted they had gotten mad at peers who seemed to recover “too fast,” and enjoyed life too much. They regretted that. It’s hard enough. When a good day comes, take it. When prom comes, give yourself a break. Enjoy it as much as you can.
Leyba had traveled to Sandy Hook with his fellow teacher Paula Reed to help the staff there. He recounted an exchange in which one of the teachers said she just wanted to know when she would get her life back. Leyba didn’t know how to respond, but Reed did. Never, she said. That woman is gone. You are never getting her back. You will get past this, and you will do amazing things in your life, but it will be a different you from who you once were. And you will never begin that path out of the pain until you let go of that woman and say goodbye.
Kiki Leyba told some of the most poignant stories that session, but he omitted one. He had crashed his new car a few nights earlier, just as the Parkland kids were arriving.
“I’m worried about him,” his wife confided. “He’s in an April fog.” This happened every year. It took different forms, not usually a crash, but never good. His buddy Frank DeAngelis had crashed several cars in April, she said. Nineteen years later, the trauma was still reexerting itself. Your mind might claim it’s forgotten, but your body refuses. So Columbine survivors have told me a similar story, year after year: something feels odd, they can’t put their finger on it, then they realize it’s April. Cues are everywhere: spring thaw, green returning, senioritis, prom and graduation plans. Your body remembers.
The crash was on Leyba’s mind when he saw the kids. He had to drive another car to get there. The crumpled car was still in his driveway. He was too upset to call the insurance company—how could this still be happening? Maybe it was unrelated, but . . . he didn’t really believe that. He would never be over it, but he was OK. He was healthy and happy, and successful enough to replace that car.
Leyba chose to withhold that warning from the Parkland kids. Telling them this early would just be cruel. Two months out, they needed hope.
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President Trump had proposed arming teachers. That was his big proposal to combat school shootings. The NRA loved it. Teachers were generally appalled. Paula Reed ridiculed the idea at the Columbine rally that evening. She was speaking on behalf of Columbine’s faculty survivors. Reed said a big change since 1999 was that she no longer feels completely safe at work. “Now, there are some people who think I’d feel a whole lot safer and so would my students if I were armed. Take a look at me. And imagine that I have a gun in a holster. And an angry young man, six feet tall or so, decides to wrestle that gun away from me. It’s not that hard to do. And people say to me, ‘Well, Paula, no one would require you to carry a gun.’ Well, what if I decide I want to? Does that change my stature? Does it change the ultimate outcome? Or does that just make me a five-foot-two middle-aged woman with questionable judgment and a sidearm?”
Reed recounted incidents in which armed teachers had injured students. In one case, a teacher had left the weapon in a school bathroom, where it was found by several elementary school kids. Several more troubling incidents had occurred just the prior month. A Georgia teacher was arrested after barricading himself in a classroom and firing a handgun out the window. A teacher in Seaside, California, had mistakenly fired his pistol during a gun safety class and injured a student. He was also a reserve police officer and Seaside’s mayor pro tem. And a resource officer in Alexandria, Virginia, had accidentally discharged his weapon in a middle school. Luckily, no one was hit. “As far as I can tell, more guns in school have not amounted to greater safety,” Reed said. “Quite the opposite.”
Reed described a former student lovingly, and read a letter she had written before she died. Rachel Scott was the first person murdered at Columbine. Following her tribute, Reed broke a Columbine taboo: discussing victim and attacker in the same speech. Survivors still found it offensive for their memories to cross. But Reed had taught both Rachel and Dylan Klebold, she said. “I cared about both of them, because I care about all of my students. I know that many people have terrifying memories of Dylan, and I am genuinely sorry for what they went through. But the only Dylan I ever knew was a sweet, shy sophomore. I think it’s important to understand that when we talk about arming teachers you’re not just asking me to protect the Rachels of this world. You’re asking me to kill the Dylans. Maybe that sounds easy to you, and I’m not saying I wouldn’t have protected Rachel if I could have, but I really can’t imagine shooting Dylan either. Not the Dylan I knew, anyway. I suppose I would have if I could have, and if I had to, but do you understand what you’re asking of me? You’re asking me to kill one of my students. It’s too much to ask. And so instead, I’m asking my elected leaders to make sure that no teacher ever has to lose a student to a school shooting again. Not any student at anyone’s hands, each other’s or mine. I’m asking our elected leaders to pass meaningful legislation to keep guns out of the hands of children and teenagers, and I hope that everyone here will do the same.”
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Setbacks
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The most exciting phase of this movement was watching seven hundred semiautonomous groups take off. Self-propulsion, amazing to behold. The downside was lack of control. The second National School Walkout caused some blowback. It was timed to commemorate the nineteenth anniversary of the Columbine massacre, and Columbine refused to participate. The victims it sought to revere were furious. The national media never got wind of the controversy, but it happened at the scene of the original crime. Columbine is part of the Jefferson County School District, with 86,000 students in 155 schools. All boycotted the walkout.
The problem was the date. The failure to grasp the solemnity of the Combine anniversary was generational. The Parkland generation had no idea that the lockdown drills, now ubiquitous, barely predated them. They were sick of hiding as a strategy, and tragedy meant response, anniversaries demanded action.
The Columbine survivors had never been trained in lockdown drills. They had never heard the term. They didn’t rise up against the epidemic of school shooters, because they had no idea it had begun. The surviving students were in their late thirties now. The faculty were retired or approaching it. A great number of them supported the Parkland uprising. But their emotional response to April 20 was conditioned by a different experience, and that would never change.
“April twentieth is a sacred day,” Emmy Adams said. “It is the most horrible day of the year.” She was a senior at Golden High, and now the copresident of two of the groups organizing the Columbine rally for April 19. Adams got wind of the walkout in mid-February, and sensed it would horrify the Columbine community. So she checked in with prominent survivors, including Frank DeAngelis. Pick any other date, they said—t
he eve of the anniversary was fine. “When the people who were in that building nineteen years ago say ‘Please don’t do this,’ you should listen to them,” Adams said. Many of the survivors battle PTSD symptoms that day. The community has turned it into a day of service and kindness, and reserve politics to the other 364 days of the year.
DeAngelis and the current Columbine principal, Scott Christy, quietly lobbied for the Connecticut organizers to change the date. About a week before the event, the principals released a gently worded statement to the media. It did not name the organizers or denounce the walkout, but explained why they would not participate, and it extended an invitation to join them in service projects. All the schools in Jefferson County revamped or rescheduled their events.
Adams herself met the organizers at the march in DC and pleaded with them. She sent a letter from the Columbine principals. Columbine’s lead student organizer, Kaylee Tyner, reached out repeatedly.
No one wanted the dispute to erupt in public. Adams, Tyner, and DeAngelis were all energetic MFOL supporters. They didn’t want to undermine the walkout, just shift it a day. The MFOL kids learned of the controversy late in the game. They were aghast, but caught in the middle. “When we first heard about the National School Walkout, and we knew it was the day of Columbine, we figured that they had talked—that Columbine was all for it,” the memes man Dylan Baierlein said. “And then we found out Columbine wasn’t for it, and we were like, ‘What do we do?’”
The train had left the station. So much was riding on it. So MFOL tried to rally groups toward acts of service as well. They promoted the idea online. “But we didn’t want to shut down this incredible project that the National School Walkout kids tried to organize,” Dylan said.
