Columbine

by Jeff Kass

  Michael and Vonda were taken aback. “I mean, you know, no kid’s supposed to be asking their parents a question like that for no reason at all,” Michael says.

  The parents said they would not seek revenge. “Because God said, ‘Let all vengeance be mine,’” Michael adds. But they said they would speak out against violence.

  The families of other Columbine dead have recounted similar premonitions: Daniel Mauser asking his father about loopholes in the Brady bill two weeks before the shootings, and Lauren Townsend writing in her diary: “Unfortunately it usually takes a huge trauma to get people to realize what is important and I feel that is what is going to happen.”

  In the mornings before school, Isaiah would turn on the stereo and every light in the house to help wake up the family. He left the house on April 20, 1999 wearing a black polo shirt, dark green corduroy pants, and black and white Air Jordans. He had two gold earrings with clear stones in his left ear. His family would later retrieve his backpack and books from the sheriff’s department. Michael cut the boys’ hair, but Vonda says Isaiah planned on telling his father he wanted to let his hair grow out when he got home from school that day.

  Michael was sleeping in after being up into the wee hours drawing up music contracts and didn’t see Isaiah that morning. Notorious Records didn’t register much on the music industry radar, but Michael, forty-two at the time, says he was scheduled to leave the next day for Los Angeles to cut a deal. Thank God he wasn’t airborne on April 20, he says. “I would have been trying to make that pilot turn around.”

  Michael was sitting at a large, dark wood desk in his basement office later that morning when the phone rang. Vonda, who was then thirty-four, picked up. It was a family friend, Patricia Metzer, calling to say there was gunfire at Columbine.

  “Mike, they done killed Isaiah,” Vonda said.

  In truth, the outside world did not yet know who had been killed at Columbine and who had pulled the trigger. Vonda had no proof Isaiah was dead. But she had a premonition because Isaiah had had run-ins at school, including a suspension for fighting the year before.

  Michael, dressed in a robe, heard Vonda. He was 280 pounds back then—as big as Isaiah was small—but jumped up on his desk. He says he leapt up the five basement stairs, flying through the air, robe flapping, and touched down on the first floor landing. He still marvels at the feat. “That was adrenaline,” he says.

  Next came a call from the Shoels’ daughter, Michelle, who also attended Columbine. She was safe. That left Isaiah and his brother Anthony, then fifteen. Vonda was already dressed and grabbed Michael’s pants; he thinks it was some “joggers.” “I got dressed in three or four seconds,” he says, and threw on his sneakers as he ran out the door. “Good I had some clothes on at all.”

  Michael and Vonda didn’t need to talk. They fixated on getting to Columbine and hopped in their brown van.

  “I gave that van everything it had,” says Michael, who estimates he hit 100 MPH on the suburban streets. “I was driving safely, of course. But I didn’t spare no speed.”

  The lukewarm air of April 20, 1999 said spring, but Michael remembers mud and snow still on the grass surrounding the school where the sun had not yet reached. When Michael arrived at Columbine, he recalls only one reporter and a handful of police officers “just browsing around.” Vonda got on her knees and started screaming, “Isaiah’s dead.”

  “That,” Michael says, “made me lose my mind.”

  He tried to enter the school and tussled with police. “Sir, you can’t go up there,” Michael says he was told by an officer.

  Vonda added, screaming, “You can’t go up there, they’ll kill you too.”

  “That,” Michael says, “brought me back.”

  The Shoels say they still heard guns and bombs going off. “It was almost like a nightmare and you couldn’t wake up,” Michael adds.

  Michael was in an anxiety-stricken holding pattern and cried as students were led out of the school. But still no Isaiah or Anthony. At 12:20 p.m., Michael couldn’t bear any more and walked up to the deputies. They told him that students who escaped were being transferred to Leawood Elementary School, just blocks away, and to the Columbine Public Library, across the park from the high school. Michael and Vonda hitched a ride to the elementary school with about eight other parents. They waited for forty-five minutes, eyeing the arriving buses for any sign of their children’s faces. But short, stocky Isaiah and tall, lanky Anthony did not shimmy off any of them.

  The Shoels then walked toward the public library, framed by the snowy Rocky Mountains—distant, yet still massive. Hundreds of police officers and a growing thicket of reporters buzzed about, although the hordes of journalists had not yet arrived on flights from Japan, Boston, and New York that sent the message, “Huge Story.” That would happen the next morning with news trucks forming an exclamation mark to the news of the day that would drag on for years.

  At the public library, Michael and Vonda began another grim Columbine ritual, reading the lists of children who had safely escaped the school. Again, they came up empty-handed. They took the next painful step and called local hospitals. They were told their children were not there either. People, it seemed, had disappeared.

  “I really started getting worried then,” Michael says. “My blood pressure going up.”

  The Shoelses’ cell phone had gone dead from so many calls to their house and to Vonda’s mother. They began crying. A woman offered her cell phone, but it also went out from being loaned too many times. The woman suggested they walk to her house across the street and use a land line. On the walk, Michael noticed that the area was continuing to fill up with police officers and FBI agents. The first SWAT entered the school just after noon, but Michael didn’t see the other officers going in.

  Once the Shoels got to the phone, Vonda called Columbine, Leawood, and the sheriff’s office. Still no information. They called home and checked messages. Nothing.

  The Shoels got a ride to their van about one-half mile south of the school. They drove back toward Leawood Elementary but cars carrying police officers and frantic parents jammed the streets and forced them to park some four blocks away.

  Parents waiting at Leawood and the library were an open mark for the media, and the reporters began to get on Michael’s nerves. He was sick of being asked if he thought his kids would get out safely.

  Around 4:00 p.m., “Things got to be lookin’ real bad,” Michael says. Then a bus pulled up with Anthony. The Shoels spotted him when he walked into the auditorium and they saw the tip of his 5' 11" head. “I was mad,” Michael says. “I was crying.”

  Yet still no Isaiah.

  Isaiah was in fact in the library, his body leaning against another dead student. The same chest that had survived heart surgery was now bruised by a shotgun blast. Around 4:45 p.m. a doctor had entered the school and declared Isaiah and the other victims inside dead, but no formal death notifications to the families had occurred. Because the school still had to be checked for bombs, the coroner would not make it inside until the next day.

  Michael and Vonda finally left Leawood around 8:30 p.m., nine hours after the shooting started. Calls to the hospital continued to draw blanks. “Our kids are trained to call us,” Michael was thinking. He had a sense of how it would end, but says, “I was still in acute denial.”

  At home with their four other children and Vonda’s mother, the Shoels went to bed at 3:30 a.m. “I heard guns and bombs in my sleep,” Michael says.

  Around 5:30 a.m., a steady stream of family, friends, and reporters began calling. Michael woke up to answer the phone. In conversation, Michael held out hope. “I told a reporter he [Isaiah] is still living. If anyone’s still alive, it’s Isaiah. He’s smart, and he’s fast.”

  But Michael really didn’t want to talk to anyone except the sheriff and the coroner. They had the answers. When the sheriff’s office did
not call, Michael called them. He called so many times, he says, he was told to stop. That puzzled him. “I don’t know how one man could interrupt their investigation,” he says. “Only way I coulda see I was interruptin’ is I was cuttin’ in on that lie they was tryin’ to get together.”

  ∞

  Dave Thomas, who was then Jefferson County District Attorney, speaks fondly of the Shoels. He calls them a “fascinating study,” and a family he respects. It would not seem an easy thing to do. His work—or lack of it—was among the many targets of the Shoels’ post-Columbine wrath.

  But Thomas easily recalls meeting the Shoels on the day after Columbine. He says he took it upon himself to give them the death notification. He did not know the family. But, he explained, “I took Isaiah Shoels because it was abundantly clear to me he was the only African-American. People had been talking about it.”

  He drove to the Shoels house that Wednesday, the day after Columbine, with then Denver District Attorney and fellow Democrat Bill Ritter. Thomas went to the door and met Michael Shoels. Both Michael and Thomas remember the time as around 1:30 p.m. Thomas says that in the first two to three weeks after Columbine, meeting Michael is the thing he remembers most. Michael was a man of business, Thomas says, and kept himself together. Thomas respected that.

  “Is your wife here?” Thomas asked as Michael answered the door.

  “She is,” Michael answered, but she was in bed and in no condition to come down and meet with Thomas.

  “Mr. Shoels,” Thomas said, “I’ve met with the coroner and a detective this morning. I don’t know how else to tell you this, but, your son Isaiah is in the school, he’s dead, he was killed, and I just needed you to know that.”

  “My son is a tremendous kid, very imaginative, and I’ll tell you, until two minutes ago, I thought he was alive,” Michael said, according to Thomas. “I thought he was hiding.”

  Michael remembers the moment differently.

  “I kind of lost it,” he says. “I didn’t know what to do, where to turn. Dave [Thomas] seen me getting weak, and he helped me up with the other guy. I didn’t no longer have a reason to be in denial. He [Isaiah’s] gone. Now somebody got to pay.”

  Michael sat on the stairwell and asked when the family could view Isaiah’s body, but Thomas was not sure because the school was still a crime scene.

  “Everything I was praying for and hoping for went down the tubes when that car pulled up carrying Thomas,” Michael says. “I started trying to investigate myself.”

  Vonda wondered about laying eyes on Isaiah. Her son’s friends had alternately told her Isaiah was shot in the head, face, chest, back, and back of the head.

  “I needed to know if he still had a face,” she says.

  Michael would check. It was three days after Columbine when he saw Isaiah’s body at the mortuary. “I pulled the covers off of him,” Michael recalled. “I looked at his face. That’s all I was really concerned about was his facial area because I wanted to have an open casket funeral. And I just wanted to make sure his face wasn’t messed up. But after I found out that wasn’t messed up, we just lifted the cover off, you know of course, that was my baby. I had to hug him and I kissed him and his body was just frozen; cold. I thought I was doing pretty good till I walked off. When I walked off, I passed out. That’s all I remember—walkin’ off.”

  Isaiah’s funeral was one week later, the last of the Columbine funerals, and maybe the biggest. While Cassie Bernall’s funeral drew an estimated 2,500, and Dave Sanders three thousand, some five thousand people packed the Heritage Christian Center in the suburb of Aurora for Isaiah. Televisions had to be set up in an overflow room.

  Martin Luther King III spoke, noting that he himself had been a victim of violence; he had been ten when his father was gunned down. The white Republican governor, Bill Owens, who had attended some of the other Columbine funerals, also made remarks. A video remembrance of Isaiah churned out photos and music.

  Yet the funeral hardly helped Michael’s grief. “Naw. I mean, there was so many people there to observe, I guess that was OK, but the point is that was my last time ever seeing him [Isaiah], laying eyes on him physically,” he says. “And that was hard. That was very hard.”

  A man named William Collins Jr. also wanted to lay eyes on Isaiah. He said he was Isaiah’s birth father. But security guards prevented him from entering, according to the Denver Post. The Shoels spokesman said Collins was being disruptive.

  Michael remained incensed at the last words to fall upon Isaiah’s ears. Words that still echoed in Michael’s own head. “Could you imagine those words the last words you hearin’, and you didn’t have a prejudiced bone in your body? Can you imagine lyin’, and knowin’ you getting ready to go, and hearin,’ ‘There go that nigger?’”

  Michael then adds: “You know, that’s bad, man, that’s bad. A whole lot of people going to have to talk about that.”

  Their garage in Texas, where they have moved, holds four red plastic crates with lids. The bottom one contains Isaiah’s clothes. Michael and Vonda open it up. Inside are blue T-shirts, a Chaps Ralph Lauren blue polo shirt, and the size medium football jersey with number 52 on the front. The family used to wear each others’ clothes, and Vonda at the moment I am speaking to her has on Isaiah’s white tennis shoes. “Every time I would look at my feet it would just break my heart,” she says.

  There is another place the Shoels can view Isaiah’s football jersey. When Michael goes to Isaiah’s grave in Denver, his football photo, imprinted into the gravestone, stares back. It is a signal for Michael to begin his graveside ritual. He checks for weeds, gets down on his left knee, and tidies up flowers on the grave. He straightens a set of rocks and places a coin under one of them. Michael’s hat falls off as he kisses the ground. “That’s just a deal we have,” he explains. “Let him know I’m still thinkin’ about him.”

  ∞

  The path from victim to crusader is well-trodden, as if the individual and community response to school shootings has been scripted into human DNA. A public execution such as Columbine grants a public platform to a victim’s family. They are asked to show their grief, and are given the bully pulpit. Their opinions, politics, and culture are now newsworthy. They turn the dead, the injured, and the disappeared into lawsuits, foundations, and speeches to head off future tragedies. Charitable payouts are questioned, and authorities are taken to task for withholding information. It is painful, messy, controversial, intrusive, and long-lasting. It can also be good. Public policy improves—SWAT across America changed after Columbine to charge after gunmen rather than try to contain them. It’s called the active shooter policy. Lawsuits unlock information—box loads, in the case of Columbine.

  Among the shootings before Columbine was West Paducah, Kentucky, where fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal killed three and wounded five on December 1, 1997 at Heath High School. The lawsuits that followed both predicted the Columbine lawsuits and went beyond them. Those who were sued included “students who had seen Carneal with a gun at school before the shooting; students who had heard that something was going to happen . . . [and] students who may have been involved in a conspiracy,” along with the producers of the movie The Basketball Diaries and the Internet pornography sites Carneal visited, according to a study of that shooting.

  Community backlash to the West Paducah lawsuits also forecast the post-Columbine reaction. According to the study called “No Exit,” West Paducah victim families who brought suit “reported receiving some hate mail, being stared at in public, and being avoided by some of their old acquaintances. One of the teachers sued was still in his teacher training program at a local university at the time of the shooting and successfully counter-sued. This story was brought up by many as an example of the excess and carelessness of the handling of the suits. Some thought that the [victim] families were not actually interested in discovering the truth and were simply trying to wi
n a large monetary judgment. Others felt betrayed because they felt they had reached out to the victims in their time of need, only to have them turn around and bring suit. A large majority felt that the suits were inhibiting the already very difficult healing process, making it impossible for the community to move forward. Although a fair number supported the entertainment industry suits, they thought that pointing fingers at others in the community was inappropriate.

  “Michael Breen, the lawyer for the [victim] families, countered that it was exactly this unwillingness to pay attention to problems that had caused the tragedy in the first place. In Breen’s view, ‘accountability is always painful,’ but by bringing attention to those at fault, schools, parents, and the entertainment industry will become aware of their responsibilities, which may help prevent future shootings.”

  “No Exit” said it was all part of the healing process: “Those who are farther removed from the epicenter heal more quickly and want to put the incident behind them faster. Not recognizing the differential rates of healing that people in the community go through, each side thinks the other is wrong. Those closer to the center feel that others are repressing their feelings and will never get through their trauma if they do not talk about it. Those on the periphery think those in the center are dwelling on the past and need to stop.”

  In his book Gone Boy: A Walkabout, author Gregory Gibson tracks how his son Galen died at the Simon’s Rock College shooting in 1992. Gibson filed a lawsuit, but he also became a reporter—at least in his own mind—traveling the country and asking the fundamental questions that seem to arise after school shootings: What did school officials know? How were the guns obtained? What made the killer tick? “[My wife] Annie and I had a deep-seated need to learn all the facts surrounding Galen’s murder,” Gibson wrote. “Although we were very different people in many ways, we shared the same basic values. One of these was a belief in the redemptive power of truth. If the truth didn’t always set us free, at least it kept us clean and made our lives less complicated.