April 20th 1999: A day never forgotten

[Josephine96]

COLUMBINE REMEMBERED: 5 years ago Tuesday, students lives were changed forever. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold unleashed an attack which killed 13 people plus themselves. Many of those names and faces can still be remembered today. Rachel Scott, Lauren Townsend, Daniel Rohrbough.

A small town of Littleton Colorado had become a record breaking carnage exhibit. 2 students who seemed so innocent or at least so unthinkable took their lives along with 13 others. There were shots fired in hallways, libraries, the cafeteria. Rachel Scott was even killed because she told 1 of the shooters "yes" when asked if she believed in God.

Dave Sanders, the CHS Girls Basketball coach was killed as he tried leading other students to safety. He was shot and slowly bled to death. He was 1 of if not the real hero that day. Because of his heroism of just standing in a hallway telling his students where to go, he may have saved 10's of 100's of lives.

Columbine has been forever changed even though there are no longer any students who were there that fateful day. The stories of Rachel Scott and others are most likely fixated in the schools' memories.

April 20th 1999. The day 2 teenagers decided to end their lives. But they took 13 others with them.

[wx247]

Domestic terrorists...possibly.

[Derek Ortt]

I consider them to be traitors. They committed this action during the time of WAR. We were fighting Serbia at the time. Anyone who comitts this act during the time of war is nothing but a traitor, making them the most worthless people to live

[Josephine96]

Traitors is a name that suited them too..

[wx247]

I consider them to be traitors. They committed this action during the time of WAR. We were fighting Serbia at the time. Anyone who comitts this act during the time of war is nothing but a traitor, making them the most worthless people to live

How are they traitors?? Is there something I am not getting?? What do they have to do with the war with Serbia?

[Josephine96]

Garrett.. Hmm.. lol.. We shall wait for an explanation..

[Guest]

How are they traitors?? Is there something I am not getting?? What do they have to do with the war with Serbia?

The two losers who committed this nasty act may have been mad with the situation with the war as well as other things... but that is my thinking on it.

[Josephine96]

That's a good thought Brian..

I'm glad I came up with this topic lol.. I would have wrote it tomorrow anyway

{slowly prays for families of CHS victims}

[wx247]

If that is the case Brian, okay. But if you just consider them traitors because of the war going on... yeesh!

[Josephine96]

LOL Garrett

[Derek Ortt]

Anyone who commits an act of this magnitude against a fellow American during the time of war can be considered nothing short of a traitor. The people should have been rallying around each other during that time, not shooting each other. Those who wish to commits these acts of war against fellow Americans during war, are traitors

[Josephine96]

Good point Derek

[vbhoutex]

I consider them COWARDS!!!

[azskyman]

I consider them misguided young boys who confused fantasy with reality. Left alone to their own thoughts and ideas for a long period of time, they crossed the line from one to the other.

[wx247]

Anyone who commits an act of this magnitude against a fellow American during the time of war can be considered nothing short of a traitor. The people should have been rallying around each other during that time, not shooting each other. Those who wish to commits these acts of war against fellow Americans during war, are traitors

I just don't buy this argument... sorry!

Popsky... I do agree with you on your point, however, their intent was to also instill fear in the people of that school district making them terrorists to an extent as well.

[TexasStooge]

Considering how severe the attack was, I'd say they're terrorists.

[Josephine96]

In about an hour or two.. we will officially be in the 5 year anniversay time frame..

Bless their souls as they shine down on us from Heaven

[GalvestonDuck]

Terrorists, yes. Traitors, no.

If harming a fellow American during a time of war makes one a traitor, then does that make mothers who abort babies or parents who abuse (torture) their children traitors also? If so, then we need to hand down several thousand sentences of punishment.

Does this mean they can get by with it if we're not at war? Does being "at war" mean having military peacekeeping troops in a country in conflict? I could have sworn we weren't at war with Serbia. I never heard about the US declaring war with Serbia. I thought it was all about the ethnic cleansing that was going on during the dissolution of the Yugoslavian republic. To this day, I'm still a little confused about the geography -- Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Croatia. It was hard enough erasing the map of the United Soviet Socialist Republic in my mind and replacing it with all those 'stans and Georgia.

[streetsoldier]

These two, Klebold and Harris, were simply "thrill killers"; they couldn't have cared LESS about Serbia, but had neo-Nazi fantasies (read: power-hungry, which is why they chose Adolf Hitler's birthday to kill those children and that teacher).

They wanted "revenge" for real or imagined problems, mostly of their own making (remember, one of them was turned down by a Marine recruiter because he was on Rx for bipolar disorder?); and they hated professed Christians (that young girl was one of the people shown on their "to kill" list...and she was the only one on that list they "got".).

This relegates them to CRIMINALS, in my book. Period.

[Josephine96]

Here's a story from Denver's Rocky Mountain News about a woman now in college who was paralyzed by the tragedy
A story of healing and hope
Faith and friends helped paralyzed student overcome a 'very dark place'

By Lynn Bartels, Rocky Mountain News
April 20, 2004

She's gone now, that self-conscious, skinny girl with bad teeth who once prayed nightly for God to make her shorter so she could fit in with the other sixth-graders.

In her place is a young woman who looks a little like Meryl Streep in her Kramer vs. Kramer days, a confident, content college student who took a nightmarish detour on her journey from adolescence to adulthood.
During a recent interview, 22-year-old Anne Marie Hochhalter laughed at memories of wanting to be shorter.

"Now I'm proud of my height," she said.

A staggering statement, for, in reality, she views the world not from her 5-foot-10 frame but from a wheelchair.

Five years ago today, Hochhalter, a junior at Columbine High School, finished English class and walked outside. Those were the last steps she would ever take.

Seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attacked their school with an arsenal of weapons. A bullet hit Hochhalter in the back. The girl who played clarinet in the school marching band was paralyzed.

Everybody associated with Columbine has a story to tell. Anne Marie Hochhalter's story - mostly private until now - is one of healing and hope.

After Columbine, she found herself in a "very dark place."

Her mother killed herself. An experimental treatment aimed at helping her walk failed. The family moved to the mountains, which she found isolating.

Faith, friends and a revelation helped Hochhalter find a way out of her misery.

"I finally accepted that I was confined to a wheelchair," she said. "Once I did that, I was free to move on with my life. It was very liberating."

Anne Marie Hochhalter - the name is pronounced Hoke-halter - and her friends headed outside their suburban high school during lunch break on April 20, 1999.

She heard what sounded like balloons popping and turned to see Harris and Klebold shooting to kill. Hochhalter felt a pain in her back.

"I didn't know what was going on," she said. "I was banging my legs to try to make them work."

'Almost the 14th victim'

A second bullet ripped through Hochhalter's body as a friend dragged her from the gunmen's view. That was the first time that day that someone saved her life. It would happen twice more, by a Littleton firefighter and then an operating team.

Doctors would later tell her how close she came.

"I was almost the 14th victim," Hochhalter said.

Life these days, Hochhalter said, is "amazing."

She lives in a townhouse in Westminster with vaulted ceilings and low kitchen counters.

It is close to the nondenominational charismatic Christian church that has been her rock the past couple of years.

She's a bus ride away from the University of Colorado at Denver, where she's a full-time student majoring in business, a field she believes will offer her plenty of opportunities.

And her home, near Interstate 25 and West 120th Avenue, is just a few miles from her part-time job at a bath-and-lotion shop, where the kids who come in with their mothers are fascinated by her wheelchair.

"The boys want to play with my brakes," Hochhalter said, with a laugh. "They think it's a big toy."

She bought her 1,264-square-foot home in June 2002, and then remodeled it to make it handicap-accessible. The funds came from a trust set up after friends and strangers from around the world gave her money after the tragedy. Celine Dion and Elton John contributed.

"There was no way I could have bought a house otherwise," Hochhalter said. "You have no idea how expensive it is to be in a wheelchair."

The lift that transfers her wheelchair into the back of her truck, for example, cost $10,000.

Hochhalter shares her home with her beloved MollyWog, a red golden retriever, and her roommate Ruth Leung, 18, from Hong Kong. They met at church.

"I love it here," Hochhalter said, as she played with MollyWog in her kitchen. "It's comforting."

Among the musical instruments that grace Hochhalter's living room is a top-quality harp. Professional musicians donated it after the shootings when they learned that Hochhalter loves music.

"It's a lot like the piano, so I can play songs on it, but it's hard to get the position," she said. "It needs to go between the knees and rest back on the shoulder, but the wheelchair gets in the way."

Hochhalter has adjusted. Adjusting has been her way of life for the last five years.

Tragedy on a sunny day

At one time, Anne Marie Hochhalter and her younger brother, Nathan, thought Harris and Klebold were cool. The Hochhalter kids admired the Matrix and liked the trench coats Harris and Klebold wore.

"But then I did hear them making fun of people one day and I told my brother, 'They're not cool,' " she said. "I hate it when people make catty comments to other people. I see what kind of damage it does."

A few of those remarks were directed her way over the years.

A shy girl, she sat in the back row and tried not to draw attention to herself. She was self-conscious about her height, her teeth (she wore braces for five years because her baby teeth stayed when the adult ones came in), and her nose ("How come it's so big?" a classmate once said).

"I never got bullied, thank God," Hochhalter said. "But I would see people throw food on people in the cafeteria. They would just cry. It was so sad to watch.

"I know people say Eric and Dylan were bullied, but sometimes they would sit on their car trunk and make fun of people."

On that sunny April morning, Hochhalter headed outside with her friends.

Lunch usually consisted of chips and soda, decidedly unhealthy fare for a girl who now realizes she had a decidedly unhealthy attitude about food. She weighed 113 pounds but imagined she needed to lose weight.

Hochhalter sat on a sidewalk near a patch of grass on the school's west side. That's when she heard the popping sound and turned.

She watched as Harris pointed his gun at freshman Danny Rohrbough. Blood appeared on the boy's pants leg and, as he fell, she turned toward her friends. Harris fired again. Hochhalter felt a sharp pain as a blood stain spread like a target across her gray-and-white shirt.

In the chaos, her friends fled, then realized she wasn't with them and raced back. As freshman Jayson Autenrieth dragged Hochhalter, Harris sprayed bullets from his carbine. A second bullet pierced Hochhalter's lungs, liver and diaphragm and a critical vein before exiting her body.

Autenrieth pulled Hochhalter closer to the school, near the cafeteria, which was under the library. Harris then lobbed a pipe bomb, which exploded over them. Autenrieth and her friends ran for safety, seeking shelter in a parking lot for the next 45 minutes.

Hochhalter remembers hearing shots in the library, but mercifully she didn't hear the screams from the scene where 10 of the 13 victims died that day.

"It was so hot I thought I should try to to crawl into the cafeteria, but after a while I gave up because it was useless," she said. "I was afraid to say anything. I just laid there and played dead. I felt really wrong inside my body, all wet and squishy. That's because I was bleeding internally."

At one point, she thought Harris and Klebold had come back to finish her off because she could hear a strange, subtle gun-like noise. Only later would she learn it was the sound of her moaning from the pain.

Hochhalter could feel herself fading as a big red truck pulled up. She lifted her arms in a come-get-me gesture and locked eyes with Littleton firefighter John Aylward, who had just completed paramedic training.

During the paramedics' daring rescue of Hochhalter and the other injured students, the gunmen exchanged fire with police through the library windows.

Hochhalter's friends watched as her white-as-a-ghost body was loaded into the ambulance. They thought she was dead, so when she moved her arm, a cheer went up.

Hochhalter arrived at Swedish Medical Center at 12:20 p.m. - three minutes shy of an hour after the first shots were fired.

"The doctors told me if I had laid there two more minutes I would have died," Hochhalter said.

Major hospitals metrowide had canceled surgeries that day after hearing of the shootings, so a team of doctors and nurses was ready. They moved so quickly to save the dying girl that she could see the scalpel coming to cut open her chest before everything went black from the anesthesia.

Hochhalter's father, Ted, worked for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. He was in Seattle on a business trip, and flew back to Denver on a United Airlines flight that had received top air and runway clearance to get him home as quickly as possible.

Hochhalter's mother, Carla, rushed to Swedish and waited in agony. Her daughter was near death. Her son, Nathan, a freshman, hadn't been found.

"A long time later, my mom told me she was sitting alone in the hospital and praying to God, 'I can handle one kid gone, but not two,' " Anne Marie said.

Nathan was trapped in a science room for more than four hours. He was in one of the last groups of students to be rescued and run from Columbine, hands over their heads in a surrender pose that frightened a watching world.

Students told him his sister had been shot.

"I asked, 'How bad?' " Nathan recounted. "Everybody said it was an ankle wound."

The waiting began to see whether Anne Marie Hochhalter would make it.

For weeks, she lived in a morphine-induced fog, dreaming of red splotches and black spiderwebs. She couldn't speak because of a ventilator in her throat, and her scrawled responses to questions were barely legible. A feeding tube that began in her nose and snaked into her stomach caused an unusual gag reflex, and she vomited regularly.

Hochhalter had no idea of the magnitude of what had happened.

'Why did they do this?'

She asked a visitor about the marching band's trip to Missouri. When her classmate told her it had been canceled because of Columbine, Hochhalter didn't know what she meant.

"I kept asking what happened, but they didn't want to upset me," Hochhalter said. "When they finally told me, I asked, 'Why did they do this?' "

No one had an answer.

One night as Hochhalter got ready for bed, she asked a nurse if she would ever walk again.

"She said, 'Well, no,' " Hochhalter recounted. "I cried. I just cried. The nurse had to go get my parents because I was crying so hard.

"I was thinking of all the things I couldn't do, march in band, walk upstairs. I thought, 'How will I get dressed? How will I ever do stuff?' I'll never be normal again.' I was just so sad."

Hochhalter still has the bullet from the 9 mm-carbine that broke her vertebrae and made her a paraplegic. She keeps it in a urine sample cup in her bedroom drawer.

After Swedish, she was transferred to Craig Hospital, which treats patients with spinal-cord and brain injuries. She joined three other wounded Columbine students, Richard Castaldo, Sean Graves and Patrick Ireland.

In August, nearly four months after the shootings, Hochhalter left the hospital. That month, she started her senior year at Columbine.

Two months later, on Oct. 22, 1999, a police officer and a victim's advocate who had worked with the Hochhalters showed up at their house. They asked to speak to her dad.

"I started to breathe really fast. I just had an ominous feeling," Anne Marie recounted.

"(The advocate) said, 'I hate to be the bearer of bad news - Carla's dead.' Dad crumpled up on the floor, and he hugged me. I kept saying, 'NO! NO! NO!' I didn't want to believe she was really gone."

A few minutes later, Ted Hochhalter was able to ask what happened.

His 48-year-old wife had gone to a pawn shop in Englewood and inquired about a .38-caliber weapon for sale. When the clerk turned away, she loaded it with bullets she brought with her and killed herself. Carla Hochhalter was pronounced dead at the same hospital where doctors had saved her daughter's life.

"We just broke down again," Anne Marie said. "The look on my dad's face will be etched in my memory forever. It was just a look of sorrow and horror."

Carla Hochhalter, who was bipolar and already suffered from depression, deteriorated after Columbine. Her family couldn't convince her that she wasn't a burden.

"It was just very chaotic and sad and stressful," Anne Marie said. "My dad was under the most stress. He had to focus on taking care of my healing and taking care of my mom. We could see the steady decline. She was just an empty shell. By the time she killed herself, the mom I knew was gone already."

The family, which had been among the most private after the shootings, struggled to cope with the latest round of media hounding.

Meanwhile, Anne Marie worried about her brother, who got lost in the shuffle, just like so many other kids whose brothers and sisters were injured or killed at Columbine.

"I felt left out," Nathan said. "Everything going on was not good. I was over at my friends all the time, and I think that came close to breaking up our family. I was leaving my dad out to dry because I was gone all the time."

Anne Marie remembers little of her senior year, and still wonders how she was able to graduate with the Class of 2000.

"I lost time," she said.

The next year or two weren't much easier.

Anne Marie went to North Carolina for a week to participate in electrical-stimulation therapy, which was intended to help her take some steps eventually. It didn't work.

In the summer of 2001, the Hochhalters moved to Bailey in Park County, partly to get away from the Columbine craziness. But Nathan, a senior at Columbine, hated being so far from his friends. His sister wasn't much happier.

Anne Marie had decided against going back to Arapahoe Community College that year, and without classes or a job, the days dragged. Sometimes she felt like Lucy, the lonely character played by actress Sandra Bullock in While You Were Sleeping, a movie she watched a number of times.

"That was probably one of my lowest points," she said.

But her attitude would change.

"I wish I could tell you I had an epiphany, but it was gradual. Thing after thing after thing hadn't worked with me walking and I finally said, 'You just have to accept being in a wheelchair and move on with your life.' That felt amazing."

One witness to the transformation was Sue Townsend, the stepmother of senior Lauren Townsend, who had been killed in the Columbine library. A year after the shootings, Sue Townsend volunteered to assist Anne Marie on Thursdays.

"That year she spent in the mountains may have been a good thing," Townsend said. "It forced her to take charge of her life, to start driving, to find a place to live, to enroll in college. Anne Marie's living the life a 22-year-old should be, and she did it on her own."

They still meet on Thursdays.

"We're gifts to each other," Townsend said. "You start out thinking you're going to help someone out, and you get so much more in return. Anne Marie said to me once, 'Do you think my mom and Lauren were behind this?' "

Anne Marie said, "She's not replacing my mom, and I'm not replacing Lauren, but we're a comfort to each other."

'I think it's a story of hope'

They feel more like a family now.

Ted Hochhalter, who declined to be interviewed, retired from the federal government and remarried in 2002.

"I'm glad for him," Nathan said, adding that his stepmom is "awesome."

Nathan and Anne Marie, who were best friends before the shootings but who drifted apart afterward, have grown closer now that they are on their own.

He enlisted in the Navy after he graduated from Columbine in 2002, a member of the last class to witness the shootings. He is stationed in Hawaii.

He returned to Colorado last October while on leave, and was heartened to see his sister's progress.

"She seemed really happy," Nathan said. "She seemed free."

Anne Marie, who once shunned smiles because of her teeth and later because of the shootings, grins a lot these days.

A boyfriend? No time, she said, with a laugh. Kids? Yes, she can have them, and that may be what God has planned for her future. How's the job at Bath & Body Works? She regaled visitors about a customer dressed in drag who asked her to take his picture as part of a bet he lost.

Of course, some days are worse than others. She still battles pain. And Mother's Day, well, that's a hard one, although she isn't angry at her mom.

"No, no!" Anne Marie said, shocked to be asked.

"She was so sick. I can't hold it against her because mental illness is a terrible thing," she said. "In her mind, she thought it was the best thing she could have done."

Anne Marie also holds no grudges against the killers, who committed suicide that day, or against their parents, who still live in Jefferson County.

"I can't feel anger. That's counterproductive, and it doesn't solve anything in my life," she said. "If you don't forgive, you can't move on."

For the first time, Anne Marie Hochhalter will participate in a memorial for the anniversary of the shootings. At tonight's events, she will talk about moving forward.

"For a while, I was in a very dark place," she said. "I can say that now because I'm in a place where I can share my story.

"I think it's a story of hope."