Columbine

by Jeff Kass

  When the Shoels, like other victim families, met with President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary at Light of the World Catholic Church in Littleton almost three weeks after the NRA meeting, Michael noted that dropping bombs over Kosovo and Yugoslavia may have set a violent example for Harris and Klebold. (Michael Moore, who knows Riddle, later made a similar reference in his film Bowling for Columbine.)

  The Shoels did not only take on the high and mighty. On Denver’s KHOW AM, two months after Columbine, Riddle was guest-hosting when the Shoels questioned injured Columbine art teacher Patti Nielson for crawling into a side room. “She got away,’’ Michael said. “I’m not saying that to be mean. She could have had the kids to follow her, too.’’ Nielson should have been a “mother duck,’’ he added. “A duck knows you take the young with them.”

  Those and other words prompted a raft of angry calls against the Shoels. Nielson notes that she stayed in the library proper until Harris and Klebold left.

  “The Shoels had the wrong information,” she says. “They never talked to me.”

  By June the Colorado legislative audit committee was examining Riddle’s contract with Buckley. “The very fact my contract is receiving scrutiny is because we’re going around the country shedding light on the hate and racism that pulled the trigger and caused the carnage at Columbine,” Riddle told the Rocky Mountain News. “We’re making people uncomfortable.”

  The next month, on July 13, the News reported that the audit committee chair said Riddle’s contract was “legal and proper.” But that same day, Buckley suffered a massive heart attack. The next day, she died at age fifty-one.

  Almost six months after Isaiah’s death, on August 4, 1999, Michael and Vonda had not been eating well, and Michael was down to 220 pounds. But on the day Isaiah would have turned nineteen, Michael and Vonda cried, prayed, and looked at pictures. It was the first birthday they couldn’t spend with their son. Soon it would be the first Christmas.

  The Shoels juggernaut was saddened, but not stopped. By September, Michael and Vonda were in New York accompanied by Rev. Al Sharpton, presidential candidate, political activist, and for some, a race-baiter. The Shoels spoke at a Brooklyn rally and took in donations, but also urged people to boycott the United Way given its handling of the Columbine Healing Fund. “We’re calling on this nation to immediately stop giving money to the United Way until we have a complete accounting of what I refer to as the charity industry rip-off in Colorado,” Riddle added. “They raised millions of dollars in Colorado, and less than twenty percent of those millions have gone to families.”

  The papers reported that about $2.8 million of the $4.4 million raised by United Way went to the families of the slain and injured; the organization felt some $1.6 million should go to counseling and violence prevention for the community at large. The families of the dead received $50,000 each, including the Shoels. Michael said his family used the money for general living expenses and to start up an anti-violence program in Isaiah’s name, Let’s Stomp Out Hate (which never did much fighting) but added that more money was necessary for a new home, private schools for his children, and counselors who specialized in black families. Michael and Vonda said the White House failed to follow through on a promise to move the family out of Jefferson County. They said they feared for their safety, and lived in motels while their children stayed with relatives.

  The Shoels were hardly the only ones criticizing the memorial fund. “We’ve had our own disagreements with the way Mile High United Way has handled the Healing Fund set up to aid victims of the Columbine High School shootings,” the Rocky Mountain News editorialized.

  Although the paper added: “Yet somehow it never occurred to us to turn our quibbles into a nationwide boycott on giving to United Way. For a sweeping ‘solution’ like that, we had to await the inflamed imaginations of Michael Shoels and the people he lets manipulate him: political consultant Sam Riddle and the Rev. Al Sharpton, the charlatan and race-cardsharp from New York.”

  The Shoels were undaunted. When Attorney General Janet Reno visited the area in October, they handed her a letter requesting a federal grand jury to investigate the shootings. They said Isaiah was the victim “of a hate crime conspiracy” that local police could not handle. “Why would you get the home team to come in and investigate their kids?” Michael explains. “Bring the people in from out of state somewhere where they didn’t have a reason to cover up anything. Why they didn’t do that?”

  Good question. At first, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office may have appeared honest and competent. But looking back, with the Columbine investigation laced with cover-ups, one wonders if an outside review would have brokered more answers more quickly.

  Leading up to the one-year anniversary, many families of the murdered were immersed in a fund-raising campaign to build a new school library (the school district said insurance only covered repairs). At the same time, victim families were flooded with media requests. One solution was to invite select reporters to a closed meeting with families to discuss the tragedy along with library donations. The Shoels said they were not invited and when later told about it, didn’t want to go. Michael called it “just another big gathering and hee-haw and la-dee-da.”

  But the Shoels were back in town for the one-year anniversary, still fighting. The Schoels and Martin Luther King III were prevented from speaking at the Denver Public Schools campus named for King’s father. The district said it was only abiding by the community’s wishes and did not want to relive the tragedy. In fact, the one-year anniversary was a massive remembrance. How could it be anything else?

  During that first year after Columbine, the Washington Post had published a story pivoting on the Shoels controversies, with the headline, “When Will The Healing Start?” In fact, it already had. It just would never end.

  ∞

  The Shoels, and other Columbine families, endured. Their lawsuits did not. While the court actions did bring forth information, not a one went to trial.

  Criminal cases brought by the Jefferson County District Attorney were the first to resolve. Within six month, Manes had pleaded guilty to supplying the underage Harris and Klebold with the TEC-DC9 handgun. He was sentenced at an emotional hearing attended by victim families on Nov. 12, 1999. He received six years for selling the TEC-DC9 and three for possessing an illegal, sawed off shotgun—essentially the act of firing it, as memorialized on the Rampart Range shooting video. Manes’ terms were to be served concurrently, and he was moved to a halfway house in 2001. Two years later, he was paroled. Philip Duran, who introduced Eric and Dylan to Manes, pleaded guilty to the same charges as Duran and got four and half years. Manes’ girlfriend, who also participated in the Rampart Range shooting spree, was given immunity for providing information to authorities. Yet a 2004 story in the Rocky Mountain News recounted how she and Manes continued to date and were living together once he was living outside prison bars.

  Robyn Anderson was never prosecuted because of a quirk in the law: She had purchased two rifles and a shotgun, or “long guns” for Eric and Dylan. In Colorado, it was not then illegal to transfer long guns to minors. After Columbine, the “Robyn Anderson Bill” made it illegal to do that without the consent of a juvenile’s parent or guardian. In 2000, seventy-percent of Colorado voters approved Amendment 22, requiring background checks for all gun show buyers: Anderson said she would not have purchased the guns if she had to fill out any paperwork.

  On April 19, 2001 an approximately $2.8 million lawsuit settlement was announced with thirty Columbine families. This had been civilian versus civilian or, as the lawsuits alleged, victim versus Columbine enabler. The Shoels were involved in all of them. Homeowners’ insurance would funnel the money that came from five sources, including $1.3 million from the Klebolds and $300,000 from the Harrises. The Manes family would come in at $720,000, with the Anderson and Duran family policies paying, respectively, $300,000 and $250,000.
Families of the dead were to receive about $23,000, with at least some part of the payouts being divided among thirty-six victim families. But that was a squishy number. The settlement was to be continued.

  In the meantime, it was Columbine victims versus the cops. Open Records lawsuits against the sheriff unleashed many of the documents and videos that are now public. But successfully suing police for allowing Columbine to happen was another question. Families of victims and survivors, including the Shoels, alleged that the sheriff and school district missed numerous warning signs. Then they said the law enforcement response was flawed upon arrival. But in November 2001, a federal judge dismissed eight of the nine lawsuits filed against the sheriff or school district. U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock said law enforcement officers had no duty to save the lives of the students and staff. The plaintiffs would have needed to show that police officers and teachers intended to harm the victims. Babcock made one exception in the case of a murder victim. He allowed Angela Sanders, the daughter of slain teacher Dave Sanders, to move forward with her lawsuit.

  In the midst of appealing their dismissals, the Shoels and other victim families who lost a child settled with the sheriff and the school district in June 2002. Each family, it was reported, would receive about $15,000 from each agency. Then in August, Angela Sanders, negotiating with a different set of circumstances, settled for $1.5 million.

  There were other legal battles—such as those against the drug company and video games—but the longest-running was parent versus parent. In 2003, five victim families who had refused to participate in the original agreement with the Harrises and Klebolds settled with the killers’ families. They were the parents of Kelly Fleming, Matthew Kechter, Daniel Rohrbough, Lauren Townsend, and Kyle Velasquez. All died at Columbine.

  “I did not take a penny from either one of those families,’’ Lauren Townsend’s mother, Dawn Anna, told the Rocky Mountain News as she discussed the settlement.

  Victim parents were, however, privy to depositions with the Harrises and Klebolds. But they were to remain sealed, despite a lawsuit that would continue to twist nearly ten years after the shootings.

  Then there were the Shoels. The Klebolds and Harrises said the Shoels had settled per the 2001 agreement. There was a letter from Fieger in the court file saying as much. Fieger countered that there was a mix-up and he was “falsely” told all the other families had originally agreed to settle. The Shoels took it to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined the case in 2005.

  Fieger had seen a trial as an event of historical proportions. “It was important to have the Nuremberg trial, the Scopes trial, the Kevorkian trials,” he said. But now all the Shoels had to depend on were small accounts, like the slightly personalized victim letter they received from the Klebolds. “We read that Isaiah brought so much joy to those who knew him,” according to the three paragraphs that appear handwritten by a female and signed by Tom and Sue. “He was a young man with self-respect, courage and love who was taken from you in a moment of madness.” But they said they still didn’t know why their son killed Isaiah.

  ∞

  Roanoke Regional Airport is the easiest way to fly into Blacksburg, Virginia. April 19, 2007 is three days after the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, and one day before Columbine’s eighth anniversary. The clock is about to strike midnight as a bouquet of flowers sits on an airport table and Red Cross volunteers dot the halls offering assistance and comfort to those whose final destination is the Virginia Tech campus, about a half-hour’s drive away. Thirty-three have just died there, including the killer. Since the world media has descended on Virginia Tech, it seems residents would have built up immunity to reporters right quick.

  But at the airport a lumbering figure still rustles up attention and turns heads: Michael Shoels. On their own dimes, Michael and Sam Riddle have flown into Roanoke to bring the traveling Shoels gospel of civics lesson and grief counseling to the site of another school shooting. The dynamic duo wants to remind Blacksburg and the world about the lessons of Columbine: That secrecy hides information that can help stop school shooters. That schools must prepare for school shootings the same way they deal with tornadoes or fire drills. That the grief never ends.

  But first, Michael moves through the airport dressed in a Hugo Boss anorak that reads BOSS in bold black letters across the front. Sam’s son, twenty-eight-year-old Craig Riddle, films Michael for a DVD on how to prepare for violence in schools.

  There is also the question of a hotel room. Sam, Craig, and Michael do not have a reservation in the small town of Blacksburg, which is now sold out given the crush of the shootings. Sam calls the Ramada Limited and feigns a reservation. Of course, they don’t have one for him. “You have Kass, right?” Sam says. “Well, we’re with Kass.” The Ramada finds the “second room” for team Shoels. That’s what you learn doing political advance work, Sam explains.

  Michael says he doesn’t want to be here. “Going to that college is like going back to Clement Park,” he says, and adds, “The worst part of it is knowing what the families are going through. It’s just like cutting a wound open and putting salt in it.”

  But this is also the place to seek answers. “Dylan and Eric is the same way” as the Virginia Tech killer, Michael says. “Something caused them to do that, and this is what we need to find.” And if Michael himself cannot find it, at least he can give directions.

  The next day is Friday, and reporters who have been covering Virginia Tech since Monday are on the downswing. They can only file so many stories of gunshots and mourning. The day’s big event will be a noontime moment of silence, both powerful and canned, like a predictable Hollywood tearjerker.

  But at 8:00 a.m. on the central, grassy quad known as Drillfield, Michael Shoels appears. He is wearing a black double-breasted suit and black Stetson hat. Black is his favorite color. “Him and Johnny Cash,” Riddle quips. Only his cowboy boots are brown. Three fingers of each hand carry heavy gold rings, and Michael’s necklace is a $10 Liberty gold coin. His beard is braided and threaded into black and clear beads. On most anyone else, it would be a heavy metal look.

  Drillfield takes notice. And the media have their story: As if a dubious torch is being handed off from the once deadliest school shooting to the deadliest, the father of a Columbine victim is making a pilgrimage to Virginia Tech.

  Like Columbine, and other American tragedies, a memorial has sprung up at Virginia Tech. Sam and Michael walk among the thirty-three square stones (including a potentially controversial one for the killer) set in a semi-circle on a sloping hill of Drillfield. The stones surround hundreds of flower bouquets and a clump of votive candles. It is an orderly rectangle of grief that contrasts with war-torn Clement Park and the massive, impromptu piles of teddy bears, candles, clothes, signs, and flowers that snaked across the grass at Columbine. But this grassy rise is Michael’s new pulpit.

  Some recognize him as “the Columbine guy” (maybe from the television moment with Katie Couric). Those who don’t recognize him figure they should. Reporters sense it is their job to approach Michael and ask who he is. But first, Riddle has a question. “Ma’am, who are you with?” he asks, as he does of all the media who approach.

  Associated Press, she answers, and five photographers suddenly surround Michael.

  “This is Michael Shoels,” Riddle explains. “S-H-O-E-L-S. His son Isaiah was killed at Columbine.”

  Click, click, click as the photographers get their fill.

  Riddle tells reporters he and Michael will be meeting with the Virginia Tech administration, although they do not yet have an appointment confirmed. They have “messaged,” in Riddle’s parlance, with Blacksburg police about the lessons of Columbine, although that was by phone.

  Michael takes a more emotional tack. “It’s sad, it’s really sad,” he says to the small, assembling crowd. “All of these children dying so early for nothing. My heart is just bleeding righ
t now.”

  In one hour, Michael and Sam will deal with more media than most people experience in a lifetime.

  Michael walks to the center of Drillfield. Beneath white and maroon striped tent tops, plywood boards the size of refrigerator doors have been painted white and propped against each other to form an inverted ‘V’. Felt pens are available for mourners to write messages on the boards, and many invoke the school nickname, Hokie, in their written messages: Much Hokie Love. Never Forget and Feel the love of a community and a nation in your hearts as you descend forth into heaven. Tissue boxes sit atop the boards.

  Michael writes on a board as he bends his thick frame down: Hearts goes out to you and we know the way and feeling. We Love You. God Bless and all of this is in memory of Isaiah E. Shoels 1980-1999.Sam reminds Michael to date it, and Michael adds 4/20/2007.

  “Instead of vigils and candles, we’re making this a working anniversary,” Michael says.

  Sam issues a caution, to no one in particular, about “media intoxication,” when people “can be consumed with the lure of the cameras and microphones rather than real problem-solving.”

  The massive Drillfield is surrounded by school buildings made of the same pale stones laid out to commemorate the dead. It is called “Hokie stone,” and makes even the newest buildings look aged and dignified. The reporters continue to throng, while Sam and Michael continue to move across the quad and “message.” Sam and Michael attack the police for failing to shut down the Virginia Tech campus after the first report of shots fired. Reporters ask Michael what kind of boy Isaiah was. “Any man in America would have loved to call him his son,” Michael says.

  Michael walks up to a line of police tape. Eight years ago he was fifteen hundred miles away, but in the same place.

  “I can’t say it’s going to get better, but I can say it’s going to ease up,” Michael says of the grieving process. “Just pray. No medicine, no doctors is going to pull this off because you lost your loved ones.”