Hate Lingers at Columbine School, Father of Black Victim Says

The father of the only black victim of the massacre at Columbine High School said Saturday that the Littleton, Colo., school was still “saturated” with hateful students.

Michael Shoels, whose family is suing the parents of the two teenage killers in the April murder rampage in which 15 people died and the two men charged with supplying a semiautomatic gun used in the attack, said Littleton and the rest of Colorado are in denial about the continued hatred at Columbine.

In Michigan to appear at an anti-hate rally with student Mark Taylor, who survived nine gunshot wounds in the attack, Shoels said three swastikas discovered at Columbine at the start of the new school year in August served as a warning.

“There are still those children in that school,” he said at the offices of his attorney, Geoffrey Fieger, in Southfield, outside Detroit. “They saturated that school and what they were doing is telling the rest of those kids that knew who they were, that you all better be quiet because we’re showing you we’re still here.”

The swastikas were immediately removed. Columbine officials deplored the Nazi emblems and said the school will have zero tolerance toward anyone who engages in intimidation, cruelty or violence.

Shoels said teenagers wearing black trench coats similar to those favored by friends of the gunmen, both of whom died in the massacre, showed up on his front lawn two days before his son’s burial. “That was enough for me to know that me and my family were not safe in that area. So therefore, they are in acute denial, that community and that state, as far as I am concerned,” he said.