Diplomas of Courage at Columbine

Nine students wounded in one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, including two left partially paralyzed, graduated Saturday in Columbine High School’s class of 2000.

About 5,000 people filed into an amphitheater in this suburb south of Denver for the ceremony, which marked the end of another tragic year for the school and community.

The crowd included parents, teachers, relatives and students from other Denver-area high schools.

About 435 students received diplomas in the two-hour ceremony, which was closed to reporters and the general public at the request of students and teachers.

Richard Castaldo, one of the students paralyzed in the attack, was relieved to get his diploma.

“Man, there were a couple of good times,” Castaldo said last week. “But I’m just glad it’s over.”

Columbine seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher before committing suicide on April 20, 1999.

Several tragedies followed the massacre in the past year.

Last October, the mother of Anne-Marie Hochhalter, a student partially paralyzed in the massacre who graduated Saturday, killed herself.

In February, in a case that remains unsolved, Columbine students Nicholas Kunselman, 15, and his girlfriend, Stephanie Hart Grizzell, 16, were shot to death while on a date at a sandwich shop. And one week after the first anniversary of the shootings, the school’s star basketball player, Greg Barnes, who had watched his coach being fatally shot a year earlier, hanged himself.

Saturday’s ceremony followed an event Friday in which three Columbine students seriously wounded in the attack got to meet some of the people who donated blood to save their lives.

Hochhalter, Sean Graves and Michael Johnson met with 10 people who gave blood last April, including Mike Fernandez, who has donated 18 gallons of blood in his 46 years because he had a cousin with leukemia. His blood went to Hochhalter.

“I owe them my life,” Hochhalter said. “I feel very privileged.”