Columbine (16 page)

Sometime after the coroner's announcements, a teacher and a friend of both men, Rich Long, showed up at Leawood. He saw Frank and rushed up to hug him. "All I can remember was seeing blood on his pants and his shirt," Frank said later. "And I said, 'Rich, tell me. Is it true? Is Dave dead?' And he couldn't give me an answer."

Frank assured Rich he was strong enough to take the news. "Tell me!" he pleaded. "I need to know."

Rich couldn't help him. He was struggling with the same question.

____

Agent Fuselier had talked gunmen down and seen a few open fire right in front of him. He had struggled for weeks to release eighty-two people at Waco, then watched the gas tanks erupt and the buildings burn down. He'd known they were all dying inside Waco. Watching had been unbearable. This was worse.

Fuselier went home and gave Brian a hug. It had been a long time between hugs, and it was hard to let go. Then he sat down to watch the news reports with Mimi. He held her hand and choked back tears. "How could you go home and get dental records?" he asked. "Then what? You know your kid is lying there dead. How do you go to sleep?"

19. Vacuuming

D
ave Sanders was one of the few teachers unaccounted for. He was still in Science Room 3. The SWAT team had reached him still alive, but hopeless. Several minutes later, before he was evacuated, Dave Sanders bled to death.

His family was not notified. Late in the afternoon, they got word he was injured and taken to Swedish Medical Center.

"I don't know who drove me," Linda Lou said. "I don't know how I got there. I don't remember the ride, I don't remember walking in there. I remember when we got there. They took us in a room. There was food, there was coffee, there were the sisters--the nuns." It was like a greeting committee, awaiting their arrival but, curiously, waiting for Dave, too. Linda found the head nurse reassuring. "She said, 'As soon as he gets here, you get to see him.' And he never got there. He never got there."

Eventually, they gave up and went to Leawood. They waited there awhile and then headed back home. Relief agencies dispatched victim's advocates. Several showed up at the house--a helpful but ominous sign. The phones rang constantly--five separate cells, laid out on the coffee table--but never with the call they wanted.

Linda retreated to her room. Every time someone used the bathroom downstairs, the exhaust fan clicked on, and Linda jumped up, believing it was the garage door opening.

"Finally, about ten-thirty, Mom and I got sick of waiting," Angie said. "We knew there had been a couple teachers with him, teachers who've known him for--since before I was born. And so we called them to find out what happened. And they informed us." Dave had been the teacher bleeding to death.

But had he bled out? Dave was alive when the SWAT team evacuated all the civilians. After that, no one seemed to know. Only the cops had seen it end, and they weren't ready to say.

"We still didn't know whether he was taken out of the school or not," Angie said. "But at least we knew a little more about what happened inside."

Linda tried to sleep. That was useless. She curled up with a pair of Dave's socks.

____

Linda spent the evening trying to blank out her mind. Odd thoughts slipped through. "All those people in my living room," she thought, "and I didn't have time to vacuum."

It was a common response. Survivors focused on mundane tasks--tiny victories they could still accomplish. Many were horrified by their thoughts.

Marjorie Lindholm had spent much of the afternoon with Dave Sanders. He kept getting whiter. Explosions kept erupting. When the SWAT team finally freed her, Marjorie ran past two bodies on the way out. She worried about how she had dressed. Her parents would find her in a tank top that suddenly felt sleazy. She borrowed a friend's shirt to cover herself up. A cop drove her to safety in Clement Park, and a paramedic stepped up to examine her. God, he was hot, she thought. "I felt ashamed," she wrote later. "I was thinking how this paramedic looked and people died."

A sophomore reproached herself for her survival instincts. She saw the killers and she took off running. Another girl was right by her side. The other girl went down. "Blood was everywhere," the sophomore said. "It was just terrible." She kept running. Later that day, she confessed her story to a
Rocky Mountain News
reporter. "Why didn't I stop to help that girl?" she asked. Her voice grew very soft. "I'm so mad," she said. "I was so selfish."

____

Brad and Misty Bernall got home around ten
P.M.
Brad climbed on top of the garden shed with a pair of binoculars to peer across the field. The library windows were blown out, and he could see men milling about inside. They were in blue jackets with big yellow letters: ATF. They had their heads down, but Brad couldn't quite make out what they were up to. "I guess they were stepping over bodies, looking for explosives," he said.

They were searching for live explosives and live gunmen. SWAT teams searched every broom closet. If third, fourth, or fifth shooters were still hiding out, they would be flushed out by morning.

Brad came back into the house. At 10:30, an explosion shook the neighborhood. Brad and Misty ran upstairs. They looked out Cassie's window, but nothing moved. Whatever it was, it had passed. Cassie's bed was empty. Misty feared she was still in the school. Had she been injured by the blast?

It was the bomb squad's one major mistake. They were moving bombs out of the area for controlled explosions. As they loaded one into a trailer, the strike-anywhere match Eric used for a detonator brushed the trailer wall and it blew. Bomb technicians fell backward as trained, and the blast shot straight up. No one was hurt, but it threw a big scare into the team. Everyone was exhausted. This was getting dangerous. They called it a night. Commanders instructed them to return at 6:30
A.M.

Brad and Misty kept watching. "I knew Cassie was in there somewhere," Brad said. "It was terrible to know that she was on the other side of the fence, and there was nothing we could do."

PART II

AFTER AND BEFORE

20. Vacant

T
here is a photograph. A blond girl lets out a wail. Her head is thrown back, caught in her own hands: palms against her temples, fingers burrowing into her scalp. Her mouth is wide open, eyes squeezed shut. She became the image of Columbine. Throughout Clement Park Tuesday afternoon, and in the photos that captured the experience, the pattern repeated: boy or girl, adult or child, nearly everyone was clenching something--a hand, her knees, his head, each other.

Before those pictures hit the newsstands, the survivors had changed. Kids drifted into Clement Park on Wednesday morning unclenched. Their eyes were dry, their faces slack. Their expressions had gone vacant.

Most of the parents were crying, but almost none of their kids were. They were so quiet it was unsettling. Hundreds of teenagers and not a whiff of nervous energy. Here and there a girl would sob and a boy would rush over to hug her--boys practically fought over who would provide the hugs--but those were brief exceptions.

They were aware of the blankness. Acutely. They didn't understand it, but they saw it and discussed it candidly. A vast number said they felt they were watching a movie.

The lack of bodies contributed to the problem--they were still inside the perimeter. None of the names had been released. The school was effectively gone. Nobody but police could get near it. It wasn't even visible from the line of police tape where everyone gathered.

Students had a pretty good idea of who had been killed. All the murders had been witnessed, and word spread quickly. But so many stories had turned out to be wrong. Doubt persisted. Everyone seemed to have at least a few people unaccounted for. "How can we cry when we don't know who we are crying for?" one girl asked. And yet she had cried. She had cried most of the night, she said. By morning, she had run out of tears.

____

No one from the sheriff's department called Brian Rohrbough. No officer appeared on the doorstep to inform him that his son had been killed. The phone woke Brian Wednesday. It was a friend calling to warn him, before he picked up the
Rocky Mountain News
. There was a picture.

Brian flipped past the huge
HEARTBREAK HEADLINE
, the dozens of stories and diagrams and pictures of clenched survivors, none of whom were his boy. He stopped at page 13. It was an overhead shot from a news chopper, but the photo filled half the page, so the subjects were large and unmistakable. Half a dozen students huddled behind a car in the parking lot with a policeman squeezed in beside them, squatting behind the wheel for cover, his rifle mounted across the trunk, eyes to the gun sight, finger on the trigger. A boy lay unprotected on the sidewalk nearby. He was out in the open, collapsed on his side, one knee curled up toward his chest, both arms splayed. "Motionless," the caption read. An enormous pool of blood, nearly the size of his body, stained the concrete a foot away and trickled down the crevice between two sidewalk squares. The victim was unidentified, his face blurry and almost completely obscured by the angle. But Brian Rohrbough knew. He never turned to page 14.

Brian was a tall man with the heavy build of a laborer. He had a long, puffy face with receding silver hair that accentuated his clenched brow: deep grooves stacked up across his forehead, over a pair of vertical gashes above the bridge of his nose. Danny looked remarkably similar, though he had yet to grow into all his features or develop the worry lines.

Danny was all Brian had. He and Sue had divorced when their son was four. Sue had remarried, but Brian had not. He had his custom audio business. It was successful, and he loved it, but the best part was that Danny did, too. He had been toddling around the workshop since he could walk. By seven, he was building wiring harnesses and running speaker wire. In junior high he started working for real weekdays after school. Brian and Sue had a friendly divorce and lived only a few blocks apart, but Danny could never get enough time with his father.

The shop was such a cool hangout for a high school boy: a big, greasy garage filled with power tools and hundred-thousand-dollar vintage cars up on blocks. Danny helped fit them with opera-caliber sound systems worth more than his wealthier friends' cars. Depending on the project, the place might reek of burnt rubber or prickly epoxy fumes. When Brian manned the buzz saw, the sweet smell of fresh-cut cherrywood wafted into the street.

Danny was a natural. He loved cars and he loved sound. He was great with the PC and had an ear for pitch. He liked to mess around with computer programs and was promising to take the business in a new direction. And he knew how to behave. Brian catered to some of the oldest and richest families in Colorado. Danny had grown up in their houses. He knew the drill. He was a charmer, and Brian reveled in showing him off.

A few months ago, Danny had come to a decision: college was not for him. He would go straight into the business from Columbine, make a career of it. Brian was ecstatic. In three years, he would make his son a partner. In four weeks, Danny was going to spend his first summer working at the shop full-time.