Guest
Here it is
Damn, this is getting annoying. You can now look at it in my album here, though:
http://www.findadeath.com/forum/albu...pictureid=9992
Thanks for the fix, Axl! Remind me to ask you to teach me that trick.
i visited columbine about two weeks after the shootings. there was a light rain and it was terribly muddy. SO SO SO many people were there and yet it was very very quiet despite the hundreds of people milling around. people used the fences to place flowers, stuffed animals, and banners - messages for the children and one teacher that died. the thing that bother me the most were the cars. the kids that died had cars in the parking lot that were never moved. well, not for a while, anyways. people had places tents of the children's cars protecting the flowers, gifts, and candles left on them. i have a video of it somewhere. it was just heart wrenching. here i was, a mother twice over and perhaps 3 or 4 years older than some of the kids that died. i just remember holding my son and weeping. it was the one of the best and worst things i have ever done. i'll never forget.
Rachel Scott's family seems to have turned her death into a business. This makes me uncomfortable:
http://www.rachelschallenge.com/shop/httpdocs/scripts/prodList.asp?idCategory=92
I wonder why they didnt move the cars? Was it still a crime scene or maybe they keys to the cars were still in school lockers or the morgue/police dept???
I told my lawyer he's better step it up or we would both end up on an episode of "SNAPPED"
It was out of respect. It took several weeks until someone moved them. For some who knew and love those children, it was all they had left. Especially their friends.
Speaking of Rachel - hers was quite decorated. She had this little red car and it was completely encased in gifts, letters, stuffed animals, candles. It was quite a somber event to witness and be part of. Just like being at a funeral. All you heard was whispers, sobbing, and the rain....
Renowned Death Hag
a video about Cullen's book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_BUR8u8a0Q
I'm glad you went... you write about it eloquently, as well. I don't think I'd ever be able to move the car if it was my child's... kind of like the actual proof they weren't ever coming home.
Have any of you read "The Hour I First Believed" by Wally Lamb? Excellent book (fiction, by the way but very well researched) about a Columbine teacher who was married to a Columbine school nurse. Intense.
Thanks Ruby for the answer.
I told my lawyer he's better step it up or we would both end up on an episode of "SNAPPED"
i read "Nineteen Minutes" which had a storyline that was based on the Columbine shootings. I actually did not enjoy it very much. The similarities and parallels were too too similar. i actually found it a little offensive that someone would write about something SO similar to the actual event. perhaps it cut too close to the bone for me. it might be something someone who would like to know more about Columbine would like. but i hated it.
I read a review of the book just the other day and the reviewer liked it.
The review said that the two boys were not loners as the media said. That one of the boys was able to manipulate the other boy.
I have not read the book-just the review so I can't back up either statement.
The reviewer felt it was a book worth reading.
if you see some of the documentaries that have been done, this is an accepted theory. dylan was the more "normal" of the the two - having a girlfriend and a group of kids that hung out together. eric kinda started cozying up to dylan - making friends with him. i think that dylan thought eric was "cool" and was willing to do anything with and for him. i personally don't think dylan realized how deep he had gotten into until it was too late.
HOWEVER --- dylan did kill people and did not hesitate. the films prove that. eric did not walk around with his finger on the trigger of the gun dylan was holding. from all accounts, dylan was just as ruthless and murderous as eric.
i actually have a request in for that book at the library. can't wait until it comes.
I can't believe the ten year mark is coming up...wow. I was a senior when it happened, same age as Eric and Dylan. I just remember getting out of school that day and picking my gf up and watching everything live on TV in her basement. One of those "where were you" moments.
Now ten years later is almost surreal to realize I was their age when they did this.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
"I will be buried in a spring loaded casket filled with confetti, and a future archaeologist will have one awesome day at work."
i remember that so clearly. I drove to phoenix from tucson to see a concert..i cant remember which one now. But i had just gotten to the hotel room when i turned on the tv, and it was all over the news. I stayed glued to that tv, till it was time for the concert.
Sad and tragic
I just finished the book Brooks Brown wrote, thought it was interesting. I remember it happening, but didn't really follow it, so to read this thread has been very absorbing. I didn't know, for instance, that Harris probably influenced Klebold to an extent, or that Brown had been held out as a possible conspirator for so long. I'm waiting for the 2 other books I ordered; I like, whenever possible, to get more than one on a subject, to see different POV's.
Got the Dave Cullen Columbine in the mail tonight. Only 2 chapters in & seems different portrayals of the killers than the Brown book. A little confused already....
...this extended version of "The boy in the Window" rescue at Columbine, known as Patrick Ireland...
*****Warning...can be upsetting...some blood*****
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=4064826
(Allow clip to roll...may take a few seconds.)
I could barely watch this...very heartwrenching.
...but I did manage to find this one...very touching as a few survivers are interviewed and tell of the pain they are still suffering and how it never goes away....
_______________________________________________
It was just after 11.20am on 20 April 1999 at Columbine high school, Colorado, and Craig Scott was about to become part of the deadliest high school shooting in American history. Rachel was the first victim. In the ensuing 45 minutes, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, would stalk the corridors of their school, shooting down classmates, lobbing home-made pipe bombs through doorways and wreaking their own particular brand of indiscriminate carnage with an arsenal of semi-automatic weaponry.
They killed 12 students and a teacher before turning the guns on themselves. In the years that followed, Columbine would become a shorthand for school massacre. Those searching for an answer would variously blame lax gun controls, violent video games and, in the case of one local evangelical minister, Satan himself. Those who survived would never be quite the same again.
But, at first, it just sounded like firecrackers. It was only when a female teacher ran into the library, screaming at everyone to hide under the tables, that Craig began to get scared. He hunkered down underneath the desk with his two friends, Matthew and Isaiah, one of the school's few black students. Then Harris and Klebold burst into the library, wielding a 9mm semi-automatic carbine, two sawn-off shotguns and a handgun.
"They were shouting profanities, mocking students, like they were in a movie or something," recalls Craig. "They laughed. They had fun doing it. They came over to my friend Isaiah and began to make racial slurs towards him. That was the last thing he heard before they shot him." He pauses. "And the last thing he said was: 'I want to see my Mum'."
Then they shot Matthew dead. Craig, miraculously uninjured, was left sandwiched between the two slumped corpses of his friends, their blood pumping on to his sweatshirt. "I was experiencing so much fear I thought my heart was going to stop beating," he says.
Across the room, Valeen Schnurr, who had turned 18 six days before, was cowering beneath another table with her best friend Lauren. They had just been preparing an English presentation on the American Civil War novel Cold Mountain and their pencil cases were still on the desk above their heads. Valeen remembers Lauren holding her hand tightly. Then, without understanding why, Valeen felt her body jerk forcefully. She noticed she was bleeding and would find out subsequently that she had been shot nine times at close range. "The force of the bullets pushed me out from under the table," says Valeen, now 27. "I was in excruciating pain. It feels like fire running through your body. I was saying 'Oh my God, oh my God' and one of them [Klebold] asked me if I believed in God. I said yes. He asked why. I said 'My parents brought me up that way'."
Then she held her breath and closed her eyes, hoping he would leave her to die. The gunman walked away. "I didn't see his face," Valeen says. "But their voices... it was like they were happy. To them it was like playing a game." It was only afterwards, when she nudged her friend so they could make their escape, that she realised Lauren was dead. The ninth bullet had sliced through Valeen's shoulder and killed her.
The bloodshed in the library was a single component of a much broader destruction. Harris and Klebold had plotted their rampage with meticulous brutality over the course of the previous year, spewing forth expletive-laden rants in their personal journals and on videos that were deemed so incendiary the police would later refuse to release them to the public.
Wearing black trenchcoats and wraparound sunglasses, Harris and Klebold shot at teenagers eating lunch in the school grounds, at students in the cafeteria and the library, at teachers running through corridors, at the police snipers who tried to stop them and, finally, fatally, shot themselves. Craig Scott managed to escape the library and run home. Valeen Schnurr was taken to hospital by ambulance with life-threatening wounds to her chest and abdomen. Astonishingly, she was discharged within a week.
Days later she returned to the school with investigators to help them piece together what had happened. Everything was as it had been in the moments before the banal became blood-soaked; before the mundane was shattered like shrapnel and became something you could no longer believe in. In the library there were untouched newspapers from 20 April, the front pages bearing stories about the birth of a pair of polar bears at a local zoo. "There were still cans of soda in the cafeteria," Valeen says. "Ammunition lay all over the floor. I walked through the halls with my family and I stood right where I was shot and my blood was on the floor. It was an awful moment."
There are some who would have you believe that these survivors are the lucky ones: the students who made it home to their parents that evening, who walked out of Columbine with their lives more or less intact. But 10 years on it is these people who bear the brunt of remembrance, who struggle with the fragmented horror of that single day.
It is noticeable in the small details. You can see it when Craig recounts his story in a blank monotone, eyes slanting downwards, focusing on some indistinct point on the floor. Or when Valeen admits that she no longer wears sleeveless tops or bathing suits because she does not want to reveal the livid scars on her arms. Or when Kristi Mohrbacher, a 16-year-old Columbine high school junior in 1999, has a recurring nightmare about crawling along the floor of the school auditorium, fleeing an unnamed sinister presence. "In the dream," she says, sipping a polystyrene cup of coffee, "I'm trying to hide, trying not to make any noise." Or when big, strapping men like former fire chief Chuck Burdick talk about what happened that day with cracked voices and trembling hands and the shimmer of tears in their eyes.
Burdick, who co-ordinated the emergency response as Operations Chief of the Littleton Fire Department, had never seen anything like it. The scale of the disaster was overwhelming: at one point there were 250 students unaccounted for, eyewitness reports of six to eight shooters and a telephone network jammed by a 2,000 per cent increase in the average call volume. There were helicopters, ambulances and TV crews as far as the eye could see. Parents had started rushing to the perimeters of the school, begging for information that Burdick simply did not have.
Inside the building, Swat teams had their progress slowed by the home-made explosives and Molotov cocktails that littered the corridors. Panicked students had barricaded themselves into classrooms - upstairs, around 35 of them had squeezed into a 12 by 10ft music room. They were there for three hours. An asthmatic had to be lifted through a ceiling tile to gasp for air.
Four ad-hoc triage areas were set up in the school grounds. As injured students ran out of the building into nearby front lawns and garages, people came out of their houses to help them, mopping up blood with old T-shirts and towels. Burdick saw paramedics attend to a boy who had been shot in the face. "His whole jaw was hanging off, all the way down to his chest," he says. "That's when it became real. Working in this profession, we see death and destruction all the time. It's a terrific job but you can only do it for so long. You take a little bit of it home with you each day. Columbine turned out to take a big chunk."
A decade on, and talk of "closure", and "getting over it" is anathema to these people. Yes, they survived. But survival was not a question of forgetting: it was choosing how best to live with remembering.
Columbine was not the first campus shooting nor, despite its awful repercussions, was it the most lethal. Three years earlier, Thomas Hamilton walked into Dunblane primary school in Scotland and opened fire, killing 16 children, one teacher and himself. In 2007 a 23-year-old Virginia Tech undergraduate killed 32 people with two semi-automatic weapons before committing suicide.
The article conitinues here (to long to post it all)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009...ar-anniversary
Last edited by Cangirl58; 04-16-2009 at 08:11 PM.
Eric Harris live in Beavercreek, Ohio which is in the same county I live in. Then for a while he lived right up the street from where my parents lived. That tragedy could have easily been here, had his family stayed here. It makes me shiver!
Last edited by In a Sea of Sorrow; 04-16-2009 at 10:04 PM.
It's hard to believe nobody had an inkling as to what these guys were capable of. It sounds like this incident was minimal compared to what they wanted to do. They could have killed thousands. By reading some of the info, I wonder if they really planned to commit suicide, or if it was an afterthought. Kind of like..... oh shit the bombs didn't blow.... so we go for plan B...... then people actually survive, and can ID them as the shooters, so they ended their lives to avoid punishment. If they really planned to commit suicide, wouldn't they have blown themselves up in the school, if the bombs had worked? It said that they set the bombs, and waited outside to pick off fleeing survivors. I don't think they had planned to kill themselves... in a way.....I think they had to. I think their well thought out plan went terribly wrong.
If this doesn't say it than nothing does, from Eric Harris's own writings:
http://acolumbinesite.com/eric/writing/plans2.gif
Looking back, the media pretty much did everything Harris didn't want, blame the parents, blame gun stores....
and how creepy is the part when he wants to fly a plane into NYC, 2 years before 9/11...wow.
Last edited by mustang93; 04-16-2009 at 11:43 PM.
I cannot believe it has been ten years since Columbine.....and now Harris and Klebold are viewed as martyrs by those that have followed.....I think Columbine was the beginning of the end of innocence of life in my America--9/11, Virginia Tech, and every other instance of hate manifested in death....
I agree... it seems like quite a few things went downhill after Columbine. It seems like there were so many copycat school shootings. It was like setting off a row of dominos. They did become martyrs to some very sad individuls, that think it's OK to kill somebody that didn't accept them. I totally get that they were left out of things, and may have been bullied (the jury's still out on that one) but still, you don't kill innocent people over it. It's my understanding that the kids who were shot, for the most part were good kids, who never caused those 2 guys any harm. They were just warped and evil. I don't have any sympathy whatsoever for the dirty rats.
At 4pm EST MSNBC is showing "City in Fear-Columbine"
It's getting ready to come on.... I'm gonna check it out !!!
I'm watching, It's pretty strong with all the kids talking about their friends or what they were doing that day
This show is giving me the chills.... All I've done is read about it really, since it actually happened. I worked 3rd shift then, and I missed a lot. Seeing these people, then and now is interesting. The cafeteria footage is freaking me out!
Will MSNBC rerun the special and if they do, would someone please tell me when it's on? I'm studying for three tests tommorow (taking a small break) so TV viewing is out of the question for today.
"What if the Hokey Pokey is what it's really all about?" Jimmy Buffett
I thought is was sad. I had never heard about the bombs set off in the field as a diversion before so, I learned something new about it.
I also checked here (Time Warner ShaftFest) and it's not on for the next 6 days. However, the title was City in Fear: Columbine if you want to check elsewhere or online. I thought it was very moving; I haven't seen anything in years, so a lot of it was new to me. I believe Oprah is doing something on Columbine tomorrow, as well.