“Where’s Columbine High School?” my dad in Indiana asked, suddenly changing the direction of a nothing-in-particular phone call.
“Four or five miles southwest of here — why?” I asked from our west-facing back porch in Denver’s south suburbs on a beautiful spring day in 1999.
My hyperactive dad, who had been watching a cable news channel while we talked, replied: “Somebody is shooting kids there.”
Within seconds, two air ambulance helicopters thundered low and fast directly over our house and streaked southwest.
I was a copy editor at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and as I watched the helicopters race toward Columbine, I knew that I should expect to be called in early for my night shift at the newspaper. I wanted to see our young sons before getting ready for work, so I got off the phone and trotted the block and a half to their elementary school.
In those pre-smartphone, less-wired days, the staff at our sons’ school didn’t yet know about the attack a few miles away. I walked past the open door of the teachers’ lounge, where a teacher I liked was finishing his lunch break.
“What brings you here?” he asked. When I told him the little I knew about what was happening at Columbine, he responded, “That will definitely be on Channel 9 tonight.”
Word of the attack reached the school administrators about that same moment, and a lockout began. I was a familiar volunteer at the school, and I was allowed to stop by our sons’ classrooms to see them for a few minutes before I returned home to prepare for work.
I wanted to listen to breaking news about Columbine while getting ready for work, so instead of showering, I filled the bathtub and placed a radio on the bathroom floor so I could hear updates. I was sitting in the tub when the Jefferson County sheriff confirmed that several kids had been murdered, and I broke into a series of uncontrollable sobs.
Work that first night was frantic, with fluid news stories changing as reporters and editors tried to distill reliable information from the deluge of impressions, sights and interviews, plus the gut-punching images from our photographers. The ensuing nights at the newspaper were a slog through the bad non-dream of Columbine, including a night when I worked the “makeup” editing shift in the composing room, making sure through multiple editions that yearbook photos of the children who had been killed were paired with the right captions: Cassie Bernall is the girl with the wide smile and hair parted on the side; Corey DePooter is the boy with the pronounced straight eyebrows; Rachel Scott is the girl who looks like my sister as a kid …
That was the night I ate a mayonnaise-heavy sandwich that had sat atop my warm computer terminal for hours before I was able to take a break, and the resulting case of brutal food poisoning felt bizarrely welcome because I needed so badly to puke my guts out.
All that was 25 years ago. Now, low-flying helicopters still flash me right back to the moment just after my dad told me about the attack in progress. These days, I still can’t talk about the Columbine attack for more than a few seconds before my voice breaks. Our little suburb has its markers of the tragedy — the trauma center where the most grievously wounded children were flown, the pawnshop where a paralyzed girl’s mother asked to see a revolver and then hurriedly inserted a bullet that she used to kill herself at the counter — and I see those places many times each week and remember.
But I got off light. I got off easy. I’m an outgoing person who is always getting to know more people, and here in Denver’s south suburbs, that means I’ve gotten to know many people who were hit intimately by the Columbine attack, people who were there, people who helped save terribly wounded children, people who tried to save children who died, people who lost dear ones, people whose dear ones survived but were damaged in ways that can’t be undone. Every year I know more people with lifetime memberships in that undesired club.
People I trust tell me good things have been forged from the pain of that horrible day. I want to believe they’re right.
Scott Gilbert is an editor in our newsroom who worked for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver at the time of the Columbine attack.