Rampage Through the Victims’ Eyes

Cody Thunder was sitting in the front row of his biology class at Red Lake High School on Monday, staring at the clock and itching to leave, when he first heard the gunshots down the hall.

Seconds later, the 15-year-old turned to look through a window. On the other side of the glass stood student Jeffrey Weise, 16, pointing a handgun at Thunder’s head.

“He started shooting,” said Thunder, who ran for cover after being wounded in the right hip. “I thought he was messing around. I thought it was a paintball gun or something.”

Sitting in a wheelchair, in the shadow of a Red Lake Nation flag at North Country Regional Hospital, Thunder spoke quietly Thursday about the few horrifying minutes that left 10 people dead. The attack has devastated this remote Native American community.

Weise killed his grandfather -- a veteran sergeant with the Red Lake Police Department -- and his grandfather’s female companion before heading to the school, where he fatally shot a security guard, a teacher and five students, then himself.

Seven others, including Thunder, were wounded.

What sparked the troubled teen’s killing spree is still under investigation, and Thursday, Thunder became the first of the injured students to talk about the deadliest school shooting since the carnage six years ago at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

Thunder’s cousin Lance Crowe, also 15, sat in a wheelchair beside him, swimming in a white-and-blue hospital gown and gripping a stuffed bunny rabbit doll so hard his knuckles turned white. Crowe’s chin was scraped and bruised. During the shooting, he had thrown his hand in front of his face, deflecting a bullet.

Eyes gleaming with tears, Crowe seemed to curl into himself as reporters and camera crews crammed around the two boys. He refused to speak, and repeatedly glanced toward his mother, Janet, who sat nearby.

Earlier in the week, Crowe told his family he had been inside his English classroom when he was shot. He had described lying on the ground, confused and in shock, as a classmate warned him that she could hear Weise’s footsteps approaching. She urged Crowe to pretend he was dead.

“Lance said as she was crawling under her desk to hide, [Weise] shot and killed her,” said Dan Crowe, Lance’s uncle. “Lance shut his eyes and pretended.”

Upstairs in the hospital, 14-year-old Ryan Auginash lay wan and quiet as he watched the news conference on TV. He had been shot in the chest, and his health took a troubling turn Thursday morning when fluid began to build up in his lungs.

Family members paced outside his room, their faces haggard as hospital staff used tubes to drain the fluid. Often, the youth couldn’t get a deep enough breath to speak.

“None of us have slept,” said Andrew Auginash, his brother. “He could have died.”

Weise -- who had a mean look on his face, according to Thunder -- fired at least twice at Thunder, shattering a door-sized window and spraying bullets and glass across the classroom. Students began screaming, and Thunder said he got up and tried to run.

He had made it a few feet when teacher Rae Rowell herded him and about 20 other students into an office. There they hid, waiting for the shooting to stop. Thunder slumped to the ground, bleeding. Weise continued along the hallway, seeming to fire at random.

“I didn’t know I was shot,” Thunder said. “I didn’t know until I looked. I thought it would hurt more.”

Now, as he replays those deadly 10 minutes, he wonders if he could have saved some of his friends: “I could have gotten all the students out of the classroom,” he said.

It’s a sense of guilt felt by many of the survivors from Columbine, said 21-year-old Lauren Beyer Bohn. Bohn was a freshman at Columbine when students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold burst into the cafeteria and began shooting.

Bohn and Holly Pardue, another Columbine survivor, said they felt compelled to come to the reservation this week and speak with students about their own experiences. Earlier Thursday, the two Minnesota women said, they met and prayed with Thunder, Crowe and other victims at the hospital.

“They wanted to know about how long it takes to get over something like this,” Bohn said. She said she told them she struggled with nightmares for a long time.

“What they’re going through now, I know,” Bohn said. “It was like talking to someone I had known my whole life. There’s anger there, and other emotions -- but definitely anger.”

Thunder said he had known Weise, who often sported different hairstyles at school, once sculpting his black hair into horns on top of his head.

Weise apparently posted onto the Internet dark short stories about monsters, identified himself as a Nazi, and created drawings and animated short films involving school shootings.

“He looked like a cool guy, and then I talked to him a few times,” Thunder said Thursday. “He talked about guns and shooting people.”

Family members say that Weise, who had been treated for depression, had shown a need for help amid a lifetime of turmoil.

His father, Daryl Lussier Jr., committed suicide on the Red Lake Reservation after an extended standoff with police in the summer of 1997.

And his mother, Joanne, was severely injured in a highway crash in Minneapolis in 1999. The driver died in the accident; Joanne remains in a coma in a Minneapolis-area medical facility.

Weise, who had spent time with his mother in the Twin Cities, moved to Red Lake to live with his grandparents and other family. At school, family members said, he had few friends.

Thunder and some other students said they didn’t want to return to their classrooms. The school is to remain closed until at least next month, because of student trauma and extensive bullet damage.

Supt. Stuart Desjarlait defended the school’s security, which included unarmed guards, cameras, a metal detector and semiregular disaster-plan drills.

“You don’t want armed guards in your schools,” Desjarlait said. “It goes to show that if something is going to happen, it’s going to happen no matter what you do.”

Hours after Thunder spoke, Red Lake residents held the community’s first wave of memorial services. On this night, they honored Chase Lussier, 15; Weise’s grandfather, Daryl Lussier Sr., 58; and Daryl Lussier’s girlfriend, Michelle Sigana, 32.

A team of men gathered a pile of chopped wood -- high enough to reach their waists -- in front of the community center, and dug a fire pit more than 10 feet across. Carefully, quietly, they lighted a small pile of wood chips, standing around the fire to protect it from an icy wind. Soon, the kindling grew to a roaring blaze. A thick column of smoke swirled over the parking lot and arched into the sky.

Inside the community center, women and men pulled tables together for a potluck. Some men brought out drums, while others set aside bundles of sage and other dried herbs.

The families of three other victims are expected to hold a traditional Native American service. It can involve several days of ceremonies, song and centuries-old rituals.