911 Tapes Show Horror Sweeping Into School

Authorities Friday released 911 emergency tapes that reveal the terror-in-the-making at Columbine High School--including one frantic call from a teacher who screamed to her students to stay down as the sound of gunfire and bombs roared in the background.

At one point, four shots rang out clearly: Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom, as the teacher identified as Peggy was talking to police dispatchers. “Oh God, oh God,” she shouted. “Kids, just stay down.”

The tapes reveal the scenes of complete pandemonium and confusion that prevailed throughout the school as the two gunmen blasted their way through a building filled with nearly 2,000 students. The tapes also lay out elements of the police response to the worst high school shooting in U.S. history.

When the first officers arrived on the scene, the tapes show, they heard what they took to be hand grenades on the roof. One reported seeing smoke. A SWAT unit returned fire.

An officer who was near the school ball field said he had spotted a man wearing a dark trench coat and carrying a gun who had headed back into the building.

Then suddenly: “Shots in the building,” another officer screamed.

“High-caliber, high-caliber weapon,” another shouted.

When it was all over, 15 people lay dead--one teacher and 14 students, including two seniors identified as the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The bodies of the gunmen were up in a far nook of the library, and most of their victims lay motionless on the library floor.

With police suspicions growing that other students may have helped Harris, 18, and Klebold, 17, officials announced Friday that they had already interviewed 500 people, mostly students, and planned to go back and question many of them three and four more times.

Those being questioned include members of the so-called Trench Coat Mafia who were close to Harris and Klebold.

Some 150 officers from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department and surrounding local, state and federal agencies are assisting in the investigation. Complicating the process is the large number of items that must be inspected and inventoried to search for any sign of collaborators in the Tuesday massacre.

“There were backpacks with bombs in there everywhere,” said Colorado Gov. Bill Owens after touring the school building. “The officers in there are convinced there had to be more people involved. There’s just too much stuff in there.” Authorities have recovered more than 30 explosive devices, both inside and outside the school.

Officials acknowledged that they will have to develop strong evidence such as fingerprints on some of the unexploded pipe bombs or on a crudely made 20-pound propane tank bomb that was smuggled into the school’s kitchen area in order to make a case against any accomplices.

Although there was no video camera in the library, police are reviewing tapes from other school surveillance cameras for clues into whether Harris and Klebold did have help when they entered the school shortly before the lunch hour in their long dark coats.

“Ideally, [the surveillance tapes] would show the movement and also the actual placement perhaps of some of the explosive devices prior to the incident,” sheriff’s Lt. John Kiekbusch said. “If that’s the case, we have got just very important evidence.”

Also Friday, the first of two dozen injured students spoke publicly about the shooting.

Makai Hall, who was shot in the knee and grazed in the jaw, was released from a local hospital. He expressed surprise that Klebold played out his rage against fellow students.

“I thought he was an all right guy,” Hall said. “He wasn’t the kind of person he’s being portrayed as. I knew him in French class. He was just a nice guy. He never treated me bad.”

Other wounded teenagers remain in much more serious condition, including Patrick Ireland, who was seen on televisions around the world dragging himself out of a second-story library window and falling into the arms of SWAT officers.

Ireland was shot twice in the head, with one bullet tearing through his brain. “It must have been a heroic effort for him to get up and get out,” said one of his physicians, Dr. J. Adair Prall.

At the school, principal Frank DeAngelis described for the first time Friday how he too confronted one of the gunmen marching down a hallway and blowing out windows with a shotgun. The principal said he herded several students into a room, locked the door, and waited for the gunman to pass before shepherding the frightened teenagers outside.

When they reached the school parking lot, the first police units were arriving--all within minutes of the first 911 call. DeAngelis said he had only vaguely known Harris and Klebold among the 1,965 students at the school, and he said he was totally unfamiliar with their small Trench Coat Mafia group.

Meanwhile, as some questions lingered over whether SWAT teams and other officers moved quickly enough into the school to stop the bloodshed, local police continued to defend their rescue efforts.

“Believe me,” said Denver police Lt. Pat Phelan, with 19 years on the force and 11 with a SWAT crew, “we all had a sense of urgency. Every officer on that scene wanted this to stop. We would do anything to make it stop.”

Two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department experts on SWAT operations have come here at the invitation of local authorities to assess how police handled the assault in rescuing students and searching for the teen shooters.

Authorities also are continuing to trace the guns brought into the school, which included two sawed-off shotguns, a semi-automatic pistol and a 9-millimeter rifle.

Federal officials said that the pistol and rifle were purchased from two licensed gun dealers in Colorado about a year ago, and that the shotguns were about 20 years old. But officials said they still did not know how the weapons made their way into the hands of Harris and Klebold.

District Atty. Dave Thomas said it was simple for anyone to get firearms.

“You can buy them on the street, you can get them wherever you want,” he said. “You can steal them. You can go to the gun shows. If you’re underage, you can get older friends to get them for you.

“And the explosives were all made from household items. They were made with stick matches and duct tape.”

Thomas also took a moment Friday in front of the national press to implore this community and the country as a whole to stop the violence that he said is fed by a youth culture often besieged with movies and video games that exploit mayhem.

“Do we want metal detectors at our school doors, and bars on our windows?” he asked. “Do we want concertina wire around our high schools? I hope not.”

He said parents and others must be more vigilant.

Thomas noted that one of the juvenile counselors in his office just two months ago had determined that Harris and Klebold were intelligent youths with bright futures after completing a court-sponsored diversion program.

That counselor, he said, is heart-broken about what took place at Columbine High.

“He’s anguishing over what happened here,” Thomas said. “I’m very concerned about him. He did the best he could.”

In the 911 recordings, the horror that the two teens brought into the school was instantly clear.

A student, thought to have made the first call, told a dispatcher that she saw a girl shot in the parking lot.

“People are running out of the school like mad now,” the unidentified caller said. “There’s like smoke going off in the parking lot right now. There are loud noises.”

From within the library came a call from the frantic teacher, Peggy. She struggled to control her emotions and her students as a gunman shot his way down the hall toward her hiding place.

“I was on hall duty, I saw a gun,” Peggy screamed on the phone to the dispatcher. “I went outside to see what was going on. He turned the gun straight at us and he shot . . . blowing out a window. . . . The kid standing next to me went down.

“He’s right outside this hall,” she said of the shooter. “My God, smoke is coming into this room! I’ve got the kids under a table. I don’t know what’s happening in the rest of the building.”

Police said a school janitor notified Deputy Neil Gardner, who was assigned to guard the school, that something had exploded in a parking lot. Gardner also was told that “someone was reported to be moving toward the school building carrying what appeared to be a shotgun.”

Gardner exchanged gunfire with one of the suspects, and within three minutes the first of the SWAT teams arrived.

First units on the scene reported hearing shots fired and, as backup arrived and began deploying around the school, one officer said he was under fire.

“Got a couple of shots off with the shooter,” he radioed.

Moments later, one of the teen gunmen was seen outside the building while the other was spotted inside prowling the second floor.

When police worked their way through the school, hurrying frightened teens outside, they were stunned at the number of dead.

Saturday, the first of the victims was to be buried--Rachel Scott, a popular 17-year-old drama student.

On Friday, the community held a memorial service for John Robert Tomlin, 16, a school weightlifter killed in the library whose body will be taken to Wisconsin for burial.

Nearly a thousand people pressed into the Foothills Bible Church here on a snowy day to bid farewell to Tomlin, whose father called him a “perfect son.”

Teenagers sniffled in long pews, and Pastor Dave Burns cautioned against anger and hatred. “Do not take revenge,” he said. “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Excerpts of 911 emergency calls made as gunmen opened fire at Columbine High School are available on The Times’ Web site:

https://www.latimes.com/shootings