In Fragments, Voices Speak of Complete Terror

Listen to the fragments:

“He was shot twice. In the back. My brother jumped over him to get out.”

“Right in front of me. I saw him die.”

“My sister. He went back in to get my sister.”

They spit out the horror in dull, flat voices.

No hysteria. No tears. Not now, five hours after the screaming, the crying, the cowering, the running. Now they were drained. Now they were numb. Now they had only dull, flat voices, voices squeezed so dry with pain that they could scarcely convey the horror.

“A tall white guy was shooting at us with a big black gun,” sophomore Jennifer Tindall said. “I thought it was firecrackers. I thought it was a prank for morning announcements. But when I saw how big the gun was, then I knew. I knew it had to be real.”

Jennifer is 16.

No one student could piece together a complete picture of the carnage at Columbine High. The school is just too big. The shots were too many. The panic too complete. When they gathered at a prayer service Tuesday night, holding roses, holding hands, the kids could talk only of their fragments. But those fragments were enough to reconstruct the devastation.

Nick Baumgart remembers the running.

He was in science class. They were painting ceramic tiles--a project to beautify the school. They heard a boom, saw kids running down the hall. They thought it was the cut-up teacher a few classrooms over. He was always setting off explosions, always joking around. But the kids kept running, screaming now. Nick’s teacher peeked out the door.

Students Run for Their Lives

Then he turned back to the classroom.

“Run!” he barked. “Now!”

He was pale, so pale.

“That face,” Nick said. “I will never forget it.”

The class, all 30 of them, ran out the door. “As fast as we could go,” Nick said. His fragment: “A lot of running. A lot of screaming.” They ran down one hall. Their teacher opened the door. “More shots. More explosions.” Their teacher screamed to get back. They tried another corridor, opened another door. More shots. “Every second, we were going a new direction. You could hear the pop, pop, pop. And a boom now and then.”

Finally, Nick said, they found a door and ran out. Through thick mud that clogged their shoes, they ran. They smashed right into the chain link fence around the tennis courts. Crying, screaming, they clambered over, kids from all different cliques helping one another over the fence. And into safety.

Nick, a senior, 18 days from graduation, told his fragment, then added a coda. “My prom date,” he said. “Hasn’t been found yet.” The prom was last week. “I called her parents,” Nick said, blinking. “Her mother took my name and number. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We don’t know anything. We’ll call you when we do.’ She sounded like a machine. ‘We don’t know anything. We’ll call you when we do.”’

Meghan McKee remembers the noise.

She, too, was in science. A bunch of kids had ditched school Tuesday, had tried to take advantage of a nice warm day to go snowboarding or skiing while the snow still powdered the slopes. But Meghan, a freshman, was in class.

Just before lunch, two students barged into her class and yelled “They’re shooting!” Her teacher immediately locked the door and turned off the lights. Then he herded the class into a corner. And they huddled there. And huddled.

It was chaos.

The fire alarm was clanging, blaring, pounding them with noise.

People were shrieking, running, sobbing.

Then the school bell rang, as if to signal the end of class. Only it kept on ringing.

Through the noise, Meghan’s science class huddled. An hour passed, then two. They didn’t hear any more shots, but then again, they didn’t hear anyone calling the all-clear, either. The bells and the alarm were still going off. So they stayed there. The science teacher crept up and turned on the TV, on mute, as though anyone would have heard the sound anyway.

They saw their school surrounded by SWAT teams. They saw their frantic parents. They huddled, and prayed.

Finally, a SWAT team barged into the room and herded them out in groups of 10. “It was dark,” Meghan said. “It was really scary.”

‘He Was Bleeding Everywhere’

Other students, other fragments:

One boy was taking a science test. The door flew open. A teacher staggered in. “Mr. Sanders,” the boy said, numb. “He was bleeding everywhere. He fell down. He got shot right in front of me.”

A girl was in the cafeteria. A buzz swelled: Someone had gotten shot. There were fights at school, often, she said, so she thought it was possible one had gotten out of hand. She headed outside to see if she could help. But as she reached the door, she saw students running in. The janitors shouted: “Get down! Get down! Stay away from the windows.” She did. A few minutes later, though, she ran outside, to freedom. “It was like a dream,” she said.

The parents had their own fragments to tell. Word of the shooting spread fast, of course, and before anyone knew the details, moms and dads and big brothers and baby sisters were racing toward Columbine High, desperate for news, shouting out names again and again.

Cars were parked all over the street near Columbine. Not even parked, just left there while moms and dads raced forward on foot, shouting out names. Some kids who had escaped clustered, shaking, in a nearby library. They wrote their names on a legal pad and plastered it in the front window, so their parents would know where to find them. They wrote names, too, of other kids who they knew had made it to the sanctuary of a neighboring elementary school.

Parents peered at the list, trembling. And again and again, shouted out names.

“It was the most anxious hour of my life,” said Pam Grams, who couldn’t find her 17-year-old son, Ben, for an interminable stretch. “I just didn’t know. There’s nothing worse.”

The ones who could talk, who could tell their fragments, are the lucky ones. Even so, they’re not sure how they can ever return to Columbine High. How they can walk under the arch engraved with this motto: “The finest kids in America pass through these halls.”