Columbine Victim’s Father Admits Mistake

The father of Columbine High School victim Daniel Rohrbough says he was wrong to name a Denver police officer as his son’s killer.

“I accept the responsibility for being wrong,” Brian Rohrbough said Thursday, a day after an independent investigation concluded that his son was shot and killed by Columbine gunman Eric Harris--not by Sgt. Daniel O’Shea, as Rohrbough had claimed.

Daniel Rohrbough was among 12 students and a teacher killed by Harris and Dylan Klebold during the rampage at the school in suburban Littleton on April 20, 1999. Harris and Klebold then killed themselves in the school library.

The Rohrbough family had alleged in a lawsuit that O’Shea mistakenly killed Daniel, something that investigators had denied all along.

The Jefferson County sheriff’s office, the lead agency in charge of responding to the Columbine attack, asked El Paso County authorities to investigate the Rohrboughs’ claims because that agency’s deputies were not involved in the initial response.

“There are a great deal of things I regret,” Rohrbough said Thursday.

But he stopped short of apologizing to O’Shea. O’Shea’s lawyer, David Bruno, said anything less than an apology was insufficient.

“My personal feeling is that when you accuse someone publicly of committing murder, of being a liar and of covering up a killing, maybe you can erase some of the damage by publicly apologizing,” Bruno said.

O’Shea could not immediately be reached for comment.

Rohrbough said he would like to meet with O’Shea privately rather than express his feelings publicly.

“If O’Shea doesn’t want to talk to me, I fully understand that. But I’d certainly like the opportunity to talk to him face to face,” Rohrbough said.

Rohrbough said he met with El Paso County investigators for more than three hours Wednesday and left believing neither O’Shea nor any other officer killed his son.

He said he will drop O’Shea’s name from a lawsuit now on appeal in the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He said he had not decided whether to drop the entire suit, which accuses the Jefferson County sheriff’s office and other agencies of not doing enough to prevent the shootings and of botching the response.