10 Years gone.

10 years gone. Where were you?
Really hard to believe 1999 was 10 years ago. Enit? If you weren’t feeling old already, this blog is guaranteed to put wrinkles on your knees. Remember when 1999 seemed so far away, but we vowed to party like Prince and the Purple Rain Paisley Revolution when it DID come around? Provided we were still alive and hadn’t succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver? I know I did.
But the reality of 1999 was a little harder to swallow. I was 28, and luckily started off the year with a long-term substitute teaching assignment in a mostly Spanish-speaking elementary school, as the Music, Drama, and Art teacher. Yes, I was supposed to do all three. Truth is, we ended up doing Art most of the time, and no matter what I assigned, the kids made everything, no matter the media, into either the Mexican bandera (flag) or a Broncos bandera. It cracked me up when the kids spelled Denver, “Denbear” because in Spanish that’s how it was pronounced. As the semester wore on, most of the kids got much better at English, and then half of them would leave, back to Mexico with no warning, and be replaced by another set of migrant workers’ kids with limited language and social skills. Many of them stayed in the bombed-out, skuzzy trailers in the park just NW of the school, which was surrounded by two major highways and the railroad tracks. One of those highways takes the migrant workers NE, almost to the very corner of our state, which is lined with farms and crops that all have to be picked by hand. Lettuce, radishes, some strawberries, cabbage, potatoes – that kind of thing. It’s backbreaking work that doesn’t do much to bolster the machismo of a Mexican man who is trying to feed his family and maintain some sort of dignity. Frequently, the frustrations of the parents were taken out on the kids.
And the kids frequently were angry. Most of my time in the classroom and on the playground, especially after the 2nd wave of pickers came in, was spent breaking up fights. Not that these were inherently bad kids, it just creates chaos when you lose half your class in the middle of the semester with no warning, and the kids you had spent 7 months “training” in the school culture and tending to are gone and replaced by a bunch of unknowns. Think about it if you were a kid, plunked into that situation and not so willingly. You’d probably be feisty too. Their regular teachers were having as many problems as I was, just getting them to do an assignment rather than tear each other apart- (all except the kindergarten and preschool teachers across the hall from me, who took no guff from their tiny charges.) At my wits’ end one day, I asked one of the oldest, most experienced teachers at the school what he was doing with the kids, and he shared with me that he was also losing his mind (and this guy was so gentle, he made Captain Kangaroo look like a blaggard) but that he always tried to remember that these kids were sleeping in broken-down trailers at night, and he knew for a fact that many of them had plastic tarps for windows and doors. As a caring teacher, he had hoofed it over to the trailer park many nights to check up on the kids, talk to their parents, praise the children in front of their families, and glance around to see if they had enough food, or heat in the middle of winter, or whatever. Then he would try to hook them up with whatever resources they needed, since often migrant families don’t know who to ask, or they don’t want to ask, for fear of deportation.
So after that, I had a lot more sympathy for the fight-y new kids, and I started to see the fights as just a symptom of a major, underlying problem. And then long about April 20th, something happened that cracked our hearts open even wider.
You may have heard of it, since we were “#1” for almost 8 years in the school-based massacre department: the Columbine High School shootings. It was a Tuesday, which meant for me that I had classes starting right at 8:50 am, but they were all over by 2 pm. It was a typical, busy, chaotic day with ups and downs- there were several kids who always made my day, and several who made me want to stab myself with a fork. As it happened, DPS had just sent out those “Emergency How-to” flip-chart booklets to post in each classroom, for dealing with everything from fire to bomb threats to crazy parents (we had a lot of those- and the neighborhood was not immune to drive-by shootings, and my classroom was on the outside of the building, with lots of windows all around it) so I was already paranoid.
At lunch I was wolfing down my food as usual in the teachers’ lounge, when someone came in and said they’d just heard there was a drive-by shooting at a school in Jefferson County. What school? We asked. She didn’t know. She checked and came back several minutes later- she said actually it was several shootings, and the sheriff’s department was there on the scene. So were they drive-bys, or what? We asked. She wasn’t sure. I gulped the rest of my food and headed out for mandatory playground duty, to break up some more fights. There was a bit of a buzz with the other playground teachers as well, but not too much. I shrugged at their questions and said I didn’t really know what was happening- that there was a shooting at a high school, way, way south of here, but it sounded like an isolated incident and they’d already caught the guy. Then I headed over to the kickball diamond to pull Little Mario off of Big Mario, again.
After recess, walking back to my class I saw that Bea, the librarian and my comrade-in-arms as another Specials Teacher (Library, Gym, Music/Art) had the TV set turned on and was watching some sort of news coverage, but I couldn’t tell what it was and didn’t have time to check. Back in the classroom vacuum, I had two more classes and then was blissfully done for the day. The shooting thing was in the back of my mind, and I thought I’d swing by the library and check out the news before I left, but overall I was in a good mood as the day had gone fairly well. Waving cheerfully at comrade Bea and smiling, I got to the library and asked “What’s up?” They just pointed to the TV screen grimly.
By then the local news was non-stop Columbine shootings. They were showing footage of kids climbing out of windows, evacuating out the back door, being shepherded by SWAT team members in black- and I, like the rest of America to follow, dropped my jaw and said out loud (in an elementary school library no less) WHAT THE FUCK??? I try not to be a gaper in life, but that day I gaped. The local news was showing the same footage over and over again, and didn’t seem to have any real information, so I decided to catch my bus, go straight to the gym and watch the rest there. As teachers, I can safely say that as well as being speechless (for once) we were already sick to our stomachs.
But I went to the gym because exercise has always helped relieve my stress, and because the Wildland Firefighter Type II Red Card test was to be held in 2 months, and I wanted to be in shape for it. Because I was young, and dumb, and broke, and wanted to go fight fires to pay off my student loans. Which brings me to the other question that immediately popped into my head when I saw the first news coverage of Columbine: Why are all those SWAT team guys on the outside of the building, if the shooters are inside? I thought about this all the way home on the bus. Everyone else on the bus spoke Spanish and was just getting off their shift at the Pepsi bottling plant, but I could tell they were talking about it too. I heard the words for “gangs” and “shootings” and of course “¿Donde?” In SouthWest Littleton no less. There was some discreet chuckling. As in, these stupid gringos think we’re the violent ones, and look what they go and do! A la ve.
I went straight to the gym as planned, just down the street from my house, and of course all the TVs in the cardio room were tuned to “the disaster” as we called it that day. I remember seeing the footage of parents gathered at the nearby elementary school, which served as an evacuation/triage point, and frantic parents literally pulling their hair out and sobbing to reporters, “Where is my son? Where is my daughter?”

This from acolumbinesite.com: "Students and faculty who escaped Columbine High tried desperately to come to terms with what was happening in their school. Scared and confused, they helplessly waited for those as yet unaccounted for; hearing gunfire in the library and down in the field where sheriff's deputies were exchanging shots with the killers who were inside the building. For hours and, in some cases, days many wouldn't know if their loved ones were alive, injured or dead."

They played that footage over and over again, so us consumer-vultures could vicariously feel their grief and worry I guess and like we were a part of it. But it just made me feel sicker and sicker, striding there on the Stairmaster and watching this unholy spectacle unfold, 25 miles and half a world away. I went into the bathroom and threw up.
Came back to lift weights (vomiting is par for the course in firefighting, and substitute teaching for that matter, no big whoop) and more footage of the SWAT teams, on the outside of the building rather than the inside. One reporter finally interviewed someone from the police as to why all the teams hadn’t gone in at once and “flushed out” the shooters and taken them down. The police officer (might have been the sheriff, I don’t remember) said, "because we had multiple bomb threats called in, and warnings that the whole building was wired with explosives."

I was like, AND?

I do remember some of my fellow gym-regulars openly scoffing at that, along with me. This is going to sound like 10-years-later quarterbacking, but seriously, this is the thing that has bugged me to this day, about that horrible day. What if Firefighters showed up to a fire and then said, “What? Are you kidding me? There’s flames…and and and… fire! And a roof could fall on me or something! Or I could fall in a hole and die! It’s dangerous in there! No WAY am I going in there!”

Before you jump all over for getting down on brave SWAT team guys, let me say that I’m not mad at them, I’m mad at the assclowns who apparently gave the order for them to stand down and supervise the evacuation rather than go in, hunt down and kill the killers. They’re on the fricking SWAT team for Christ’s sake!! They’re combination snipers, bomb-disablers, and kidnap victim rescuers, with a touch of ninja thrown in! Why the fuck do we spend so much money training them if we won’t allow them to do their jobs????
That, and many years later I heard testimony from a SWAT team member who was crying tears of frustration over this very thing- many of them wanted to go in, very badly, but the Jefferson County Sheriff wouldn’t give the order. Not even when kids ran out screaming, “They’re in the Library! They’re in the Library!” Nope. They still wouldn’t let anyone go in the cafeteria, where Harris and Klebold started their killing spree, which was on the opposite end of the building. They stood outside and waited for two hours while a beloved teacher and coach, Dave Sanders, bled to death, just inside the cafeteria entrance way. None of his gunshot wounds hit major organs, and they wouldn’t have been fatal if he’d gotten help in time. He bled to death. A few students stayed with him and even made a sign to put in the window reading “Help- 1 Bleeding To Death In Here.” And still the law enforcement remained outside, where it was safe.
"The parents of the students of Columbine High School were directed to go to Leawood Elementary School and the Littleton Public Library, which is where the children who had escaped were being bussed to. However, the busses didn't leave immediately and parents were left waiting in agonizing limbo to find out if their children were safe. No one could tell them anything apart from "wait". And wait they did. For hours. Some had to wait for days before they found out what happened to their sons and daughters, which hospitals they had been taken to or, worse, that their children were dead."
-from AColumbineSite

You have to wonder. If some knowledgeable person out there has an explanation for this, please tell me. I would love to know. Dave Sanders’ family would also love to know. They’re still mad as hell, last I checked, and tried to sue the Sheriff’s department for negligent homicide or something like that. They didn’t win their case. Probably because it was tried in Jefferson County, and apparently everyone in the Justice Department is one tight-knit little family.

"Those who were injured during the shootings received medical attention at one of four triage centers that were set up near the school. Over 160 people were treated for injuries that day, though not all of them were due to gunfire. 24 patients were transported to six different medical centers in Denver. 10 of the students were transported in the first hour after paramedics were able to treat them. The next 10 were transported by the second hour. The last four were taken out by 3:45 PM."
- AColumbineSite- so you can see I'm not making up that lag time.

The rest of the parents who lost kids are still looking for answers too. Some have moved past anger and are merely searching for some sort of peace. And when something like this happens, it doesn’t help that the local law enforcement FUBARS the whole show instead of helping the victims. It doesn’t help that they seem more concerned about covering their own asses, after they f-ed everything up, rather than coming clean, admitting their mistakes, and expressing profound sorrow. Promising to do things differently in the future wouldn’t hurt.


I swear, you would’ve thought it was the Boulder County Sheriff’s department down there, doing the JonBenet Ramsey murder case, times 13. I’m surprised the JeffCo Sheriff didn’t evacuate the Harris and Klebold families immediately afterwards just like Bush did for his buddies, the Bin Ladens after 9-11, reasoning, “well, a lot of people are going to be angry with them, their lives are possibly in danger.”

Now that we know all that “Trenchcoat Mafia” and “Marilyn Manson’s songs did this” crap is truly horseshit, it is kind of cleansing to take a deep breath and just say out loud what we’ve known in our hearts for quite some time: 1 was a narcissistic sociopath, and 1 one was his terminally depressed, insecure follower, who was only happy when plotting a huge revenge-massacre. At first I instinctively empathized with them, as a social outcast myself who was much smarter than the “popular” kids but never got any popularity out of it, not in my family and not at school. I’ve had my share of revenge fantasies, and still do, but that’s just the thing- they’re fantasies. A lot of the transformative magic of them would be lost if I actually got blood and gore on my hands. Admit it, you have your revenge fantasies too, but hopefully you don’t act on them.

I also empathized for them because hell, they ended up dead too. If that was their be-all, end-all ambition in life, to kill a bunch of people and then kill themselves- that’s fucking tragic. And pathetic, in that none of their wired explosives actually went off, and, thank God, they were lousy shots. They weren’t even very good at their one, big dream, lousy, cowardly and desperate as it was.


Four years after it happened, and just a few months after I started my current job at the Colorado Historical Society, I got a tour of our storage facility out at the old Lowry Air Force base. We were searching for certain boxes of paperwork from a few years prior, but M--, my supervisor at the time wasn’t sure where they were so we wandered up and down each aisle. On one bottom shelf (and no, this place isn’t too different from the facility in that last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark) I noticed some modern-looking, plastic wreaths and things- not the kind of thing the Historical Society usually stores. I picked one up- it was a blue and silver plastic wreath, with little white teddy bears all around it, and each bear bore the name of a person who was murdered at Columbine. It was wrapped in archival plastic, labeled with an accession number and everything. I clapped my hand to my mouth to stifle an involuntary cry/sob worthy of an overly dramatic Southern woman at a funeral. Just moments prior to seeing this, I was in an exceptionally cheerful mood, produced simply by getting out of the office and bonding a little bit with a supervisor whom I respected and admired. M-- wandered back to find me and found me holding the wreath. She said, “ahh, yeah, that’s the Columbine Memorial stuff. B----, our former archivist, took the liberty of going out to Clement Park and collecting everything she could before they tore down the memorial and threw it away.” Tears were streaming down my face by then and M—patted me on the back. “Yes, it’s very sad. And it’s part of Colorado history. So we thought we should conserve it.” I nodded. It was the right thing to do. Me, I haven’t had the courage to go to Clement Park and see the permanent memorial, even.


Usually things like white teddy bears with names written on them in glitter with big, round teenage-girl handwriting don’t move me, but this did beyond anything I can explain. There were other artifacts too- cards and posters with hundreds of signatures on them, plastic flowers, plastic crosses that had been left at the park. It reminded me of what we did at Swansea Elementary (where I had been teaching) the next day. Just about every class, including the preschool and kindergartners, made huge sympathy cards or posters for Columbine and gathered up flowers, cookies, anything they could find to send down there. And let me just say again, Littleton might as well be on another planet to these kids, that’s how far away it is geographically and economically/socially. In fact, the teachers had to set a lot of kids straight that first day back- many of them thought that Columbine Elementary, a few blocks away, had been bombed. It hadn’t. Many of them thought it was a big gang-related killing or a drug deal gone bad. It wasn’t. Many of them were confused as to the motive, in that case, because what the hell do rich white kids from the suburbs have to be so angry about, if they’re not in a gang? Plenty, we tried to tell them, and you’re right, not much. We may never know.
(you can see a timeline here, as well: http://www.acolumbinesite.com/after/1999.html)

It occurred to me that scrapping and fighting all damn day, every day, might be better than keeping it all bottled up inside and plotting mass murders. We were all more forgiving with the kids after that, and they knew it, and took advantage of us, survival-minded, lizard-brained cutie pies that they are.

The rest of the semester crawled by. With the 5th graders, I was to teach them and coach them in singing a song or two for their graduation celebration. We tried a variety of songs, mostly from inspiring Disney soundtracks, and nothing seemed to fit. Then a local artist came out with a song about Columbine, and everyone bought copies as a fundraiser, but it was a little too Christian (for a public school) and too sad. http://www.cnn.com/US/9904/28/songwriters/index.html

The 5th graders had major spring-fever and even bigger attitudes by this time anyway. “Who cares about that stupid school?” scoffed one of the more popular girls. They wanted to sing Mariah Carey. I said, “good luck with that.” Ironically, they ended up choosing the theme song from “Prince of Egypt” and changed some of the words to be secular. I never got to see them perform it, as my job with the Boulder Conservation Corps started early that year. I’ve always regretted that. Those bratty 5th –graders would be 20 years old now. The Columbine kids would be 24, 25, 26, and 27.
Ten years gone. 13 promising young lives gone. And counting.