Columbine Community Riven by Bickering, Blame

Katie Beer lapsed deep into thought. The question: What had fundamentally changed in the year since the shootings at her school, Columbine?

“I used to think I had my ‘kid protective bubble’ around me,” said the cheerleader and member of the National Honor Society. “Now, I feel like that bubble’s gone.” As if, in addition to 13 murders, the crime at Columbine also encompassed the theft of youth itself.

Bubbles burst all over the nation in the days after two teenagers hurled homemade bombs in their high school and stalked the halls to gun down 12 classmates and a teacher. They also shot and injured 23 others, but the boys’ plan to kill as many as 250 of their peers was abandoned only when the pair turned their guns on themselves.

Gone were protective bubbles of suburban sanctuary, notions that children can be made safe in society and the almost-sacred tenet that the nation’s schools should be havens from whatever ugliness lurks outside.

In the yearlong pall that has settled over this well-appointed bedroom community gone, too, has been the quaint idea that Americans automatically pull together in a crisis. In the early days, donations poured in from around the world and the community seemed energized to repair itself. Now, bickering has set in, and backlash, even as ghouls in tour buses shout at students in the Columbine parking lot to point out the school library.

Tom Mauser’s life was shattered when his son Daniel, 15, was felled in the clatter of semiautomatic weapons fire in the Columbine library on April 20 last year. Mauser’s life since that day has been focused and driven. He’s undertaken work that he believes Daniel would have endorsed--lobbying for stricter gun control.

In his activism, Mauser has channeled his anger, dealt with his hopelessness and mediated his grief. He’s grown closer to his wife and daughter. Some issues have crystallized for him. Nothing has seemed to cure the loneliness.

Richard Castaldo has spent much of his year either in a hospital or rehabilitation center. He’s only alive because he played dead after being shot.

Student Learns to Get Around in Wheelchair

Doctors are still not sure how many times he was hit. Their estimates range from five to nine times. During his rehab, his fellow patients joked about his porousness and nicknamed him “Swiss cheese.”

He’s been busy learning how to navigate in a wheelchair, how to drive, and coaxing sensation back into his left arm. Trying to figure out how to retake his place in the marching band when he can no longer march. He’s been so focused on returning his life to normal, he may not have fully grasped how profoundly his “normal” has changed.

This week’s anniversary will bring renewed attention and sadness. State, county and city ceremonies are planned, the school will have a private assembly and church bells around Colorado will toll 13 times. To a town still far from understanding the tragedy, it is a remote hope that lasting lessons can be culled from so much death.

Part of the lesson for the community: Some people find solace in their faith, some find faith in their grief, and, in their grief, some lose their faith.

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Tom Mauser keeps his mind occupied now. A shy, quiet man, he has become something else in the year since his son’s death. He never wanted to be the one to stand in front and speak, but he stepped into the vacuum and many Columbine parents have since fallen in behind Mauser’s slipstream.

His journey from anonymity to political director of Colorado’s largest gun control organization was launched by a brief conversation he had with his son two weeks before the shootings. One evening Daniel looked at his father and said, “Did you know there are loopholes in the Brady bill?”

The overlooked comment returned to Mauser after Daniel was killed by gunmen who used weapons purchased at a gun show. Mauser attended the protest of the National Rifle Assn. convention in Denver little more than a week after the killings. Carrying a sign bearing a photo of his son, Mauser reluctantly spoke before 12,000 people and called for stricter gun control.

That led to his decision to take a leave of absence from his job as a public transportation expert for the state and work for a new bipartisan group called Sane Alternatives to the Firearms Epidemic.

Some might say that he is taking on this cause as a way of working through his grief. There is that, but on the other side, he is constantly reminded of the consequences of gun violence.

“I don’t want other kids to die like this and other parents to go through something like this,” Mauser, 47, said recently at the state Capitol. Intelligent, intense and not entirely comfortable as a public figure, Mauser is nonetheless patient and polite.

Daniel Mauser, a bright, sandy-haired boy, a member of the debate and track teams, often spent his lunch hour in the school library. On April 20, Daniel was in his accustomed place when a bloodied teacher burst into the quiet library and shouted a sickening warning: “They have guns! Everybody get under a desk!”

Daniel huddled by himself under a table and, witnesses say, comforted a girl who was crying nearby. The students waited as the gunfire drew nearer. Daniel was shot once while under the table, then pushed a chair at his attacker. Perhaps for that act of defiance, he was shot again.

Hours later, when his son’s fate became clear, a chilling panic spread through Mauser. He drove home from the school, but his driving was so erratic, he was pulled over by a police officer.

Mauser doesn’t tell the story of Daniel’s death anymore. Because most Coloradans are well versed in Columbine lore, most people he meets can fill in the blanks.

He became an instant lightning rod for both sides of the polarized debate. It’s an indicator of how emotional the issue of gun control is in Colorado that even the usual modicum of decorum has been jettisoned. Mauser has been accused more than once of using his child’s death to gain political capital, most recently by a gun owners’ group in northern Colorado.

“I’ve been told I’m dancing on my son’s grave,” said Mauser, shaking his head slowly. His wife, Linda, and daughter, Christie, support his work but don’t wish to be as public. “I’ve made a conscious effort when I’m here [in the Capitol] not to make a big emotional showing. I wanted to make it clear that I’m a paid lobbyist. It’s not an altruistic thing; I’m not falling on my sword. I think it’s important for me to present things rationally.”

Mauser’s work has borne little obvious fruit. The Legislature rejected three gun control measures this session. Mauser admits to some frustration but says an aspect of his work is to create dialogue.

SAFE Colorado’s campaign to launch a ballot initiative to close the gun show loophole was aided by an appearance in Denver last week by President Clinton.

“I can’t always be the one to speak out,” Mauser said. “Part of my message eventually is going to be, ‘Hey people, get up off your asses and do something. Don’t count on the grieving father to carry the whole load. He can’t.’ ”

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After the massacre, many people hoped for healing and spoke of coming together. There has been some of that but also an unexpected ceaseless wave of criticism and controversy.

Among the early targets: Teachers at the school were blamed for not noticing signs of violence in the gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, school officials for failing to control taunting, the parents of the shooters for their ignorance of their sons’ garage bomb-making and police and SWAT team members, who only charged into the school hours after the gunmen were dead.

In the months since, the targets of criticism have multiplied.

Chief among them is John Stone, the hapless Jefferson County sheriff. Stone has angered parents of the slain by promising to keep them informed, then leaking sensitive information to news media. A fed-up electorate in Jefferson County has launched a recall drive against Stone.

Compassion Waning for Victims’ Families

Most recently, the strain of the sustained “Columbine fatigue” has found an unusual focal point: the parents of the dead and injured. Evidently, the state’s reservoir of compassion has receded.

There have been disturbing incidents of anxiety, depression and violence. The overwhelmed mother of one critically wounded student walked into a gun shop last October, loaded a pistol and took her own life. The body of a murdered boy was found in a dumpster two months ago, a few blocks from the high school. Two Columbine sweethearts were found shot to death on Valentine’s Day at a sandwich shop and at another student hangout, a man killed himself with a gun. No arrests have been made in the cases.

Littleton has not been a harmonious place in the last year. There has been backlash against parents who seem never to turn down an interview request, against schoolchildren forfeiting class time to keep appointments for talk show appearances.

There is anger at how issues seem, again and again, to turn political: Ten Commandments in the classroom, gun control, prayer in school.

There has also been bickering over money. Nearly $5 million has been given out from a victims’ compensation fund, administered by the United Way, and some have complained that much of the donated money went to pay for community counseling. Some families of injured students claimed that with continued medical costs, they should receive more than families of dead students.

Pressure from parents caused the school district to plan to tear down the library at Columbine, make it an atrium and rebuild a new facility at a cost of more than $3 million. That has set some victims’ families against other parents, who say it’s time to move on and move back into the restored library.

Lawyers for families of some of the injured this month petitioned the White House to set aside $50 million in a fund for long-term needs of Columbine victims and families of those slain. Lawyers pledged their clients would drop all plans for lawsuits against government entities. The White House last week turned down the request, causing an attorney for one family to predict, “Now there is going to be a legal war.” More than 20 families have filed an intent to sue.

Chuck Green, a columnist for the Denver Post, broached the unspeakable topic in a recent column: “Thousands of people have emptied their hearts and souls, opened their pocketbooks, volunteered their time, their sweat and their talents to salve the suffering of the victims.

“It has been an avalanche of anguish never before witnessed here or anywhere. Yet the Columbine victims still have their hands out for more.

“When is enough enough?”

He reported receiving a sheaf of letters from readers who thanked him for finally saying in public what had long been discussed behind closed doors.

Kathryn Batchelder, who has sent six children to Columbine, said many families are fed up.

“It gets to be a little old,” she said. “I think the community has become fragmented in the last year. We get inundated with mail every day offering counseling services for my sons, for a fee of course. Then you have the families always asking for more, and now the library. I think it has become a way of life for some of them.”

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As awful as it’s been for Richard Castaldo, it’s never quite gotten as bad as when the Rocky Mountain News published his funeral notice a few days after the shooting. The paper ran a correction.

Richard, 18, chose to attend Columbine. After suffering through the suffocation of a parochial school, the skinny, curly-haired teen transferred last year.

“I thought it would be a great school,” he said. And until last spring, it was.

Last April, he was having lunch with Rachel Scott when the attack began. Both students were shot and as she lay dying, he attempted in vain to crawl to her assistance.

Castaldo lapsed in and out of consciousness. When he finally came to, SWAT teams were moving among the fallen students outside the cafeteria. Castaldo managed to raise his arm for a moment. The movement was noticed by an officer, who dragged him to safety.

One bullet tore a chunk out of a vertebra between his shoulder blades, doing the damage that alters Castaldo’s life today. Another remains lodged near his spine. His lungs were punctured, vertebrae fractured, kidney and spleen damaged and he has nerve and tissue damage in his left arm.

The wreckage required seven surgeries. Castaldo has never publicly blamed the two shooters or even said he was angry. His mother, Connie Michalik, admits that her son “keeps things bottled up; I guess that’s not too good.” She said he has hidden strength, and rarely speaks of the shooting. Except once.

“One night he wanted to talk,” she said, sitting in the family’s art-filled home. “It was midnight and we talked until 1:30. It was the first time he ever talked about them. He said the boys [Harris and Klebold] didn’t want to make friends. He has some guilt over Rachel’s death. He tried to help her, he could hear her crying.”

He says his rehab was difficult but easier than he expected. He says that his friends don’t treat him any differently and that school is the same. He’s not sure if he’ll go to college next year. In the corner of his room is a new music keyboard, on which he plinks a few notes. He can no longer play the saxophone, as he did before. He’s got no time for band, another activity in which he used to participate. Mostly he’s spending time with his friends.

There have also been unlooked-for kindnesses. Within days of the shooting, an avalanche of stuffed animals enveloped the house. Women in church groups across the country organized quilting circles and soon the handmade gifts arrived with prayerful sentiments stitched in. Castaldo’s insurance company waived the policy’s deductible. However, the cost of his rehabilitation was not covered. The teen’s physical therapists and rehab physicians took up his case and the company agreed to cover those costs.

Once he was released from the hospital, after five months, Castaldo faced the literal obstacle of returning to a home--with its staircases and split levels--that no longer welcomed him. A home builders’ association donated materials and labor and within four months added on a 400-square-foot high-tech bedroom.

Because neighborhood covenants prohibit building a wheelchair ramp to the home’s front door, Castaldo enters through the garage. Inside the round room, a voice-activated computer accepts his commands to turn on lights, electronic equipment and the shower.

To make matters worse, his father, Rick, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease last year. Rick Castaldo lives in Virginia but visits regularly. He, too, is recovering.

Connie Michalik is determined to maintain her son’s fragile sense of normalcy. Her own routine now includes spells of furious housecleaning--a way, she says, to handle her nerves. She’s taken antidepressants. It’s been better in the past few months, she said.

Young Castaldo insists he’s fine, too, and stop making a big deal out of him. The lanky young man, sitting hunched over in his wheelchair, is agonizingly attempting to get to the point where he can begin to think about what’s happened.

He believes he’ll regain use of his legs sometime in the future. When he received the disabled parking placard for his van, Castaldo turned to his mother and said, “How come it says, ‘Permanent’?”

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Times researcher Belen Rodriguez contributed to this story.