A Survivor's Story -- AMH. Editor's note: The following article is based on an interview with Anne Marie Hochhalter. Anne Marie Hochhalter used to be a self-described "band dork. " She spent most of her time playing clarinet in Columbine High School's marching band and wind symphony, and—because she was shy—Anne Marie didn't stray far beyond the band's practice room when making friends.
Part of Anne Marie's shyness stemmed from her self-consciousness. She loathed the ugly glasses, braces, and lanky build she still sported as a high school upperclassman. Though she felt more comfortable being in the background, the national spotlight is where Anne Marie landed 10 years ago after two classmates whom she hardly knew tried to kill her outside Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., while she was eating lunch with friends. When Hochhalter first heard sounds of gunfire on April 20, 1999, she thought the pop-pop-popping was coming from a paint-ball gun.
Hochhalter's mother had a history of mental illness. Corey DePooter. Denver News -- April 21st. Echoes Of Columbine -- TIME. For Cho Seung-Hui, Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were "martyrs. " In a video Cho sent to NBC on Monday, the day he shot 32 students and professors at Virginia Tech before taking his own life, Cho glorified Klebold and Harris, leaving many to wonder if Cho was mimicking the attack at the Littleton, Colo., high school, which occurred eight years ago Friday.
Even before Cho's own words became public, the Virginia Tech killings was stirring up memories for Columbine survivors. One teacher and 12 students were killed that day, along with Klebold and Harris. Another 24 kids were injured — shot in the face, spinal column, abdomen, neck, arms, legs or hands. They have made varying degrees of recovery; some are still in wheelchairs. One mother of an injured student committed suicide six months later. Makai Hall, now 24, was in the Columbine High School library when Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, went on their shooting rampage April 20, 1999. Does he feel healed?
Five Years Later. Brian Rohrbough is wearing a wire. It’s a fancy digital rig, capable of capturing 22 hours of conversation before Rohrbough needs to fiddle with it again. He bought it, he says, when he became fed up with being lied to about the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history — April 20, 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed his son, Daniel, along with 11 other fellow students, a teacher, and themselves at Columbine High School. “I record everything,” Rohrbough says here at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds in Golden, Colo., one Thursday morning late in February; it is yet another Columbine news conference, just two months before the fifth anniversary of the tragedy. “My format is mini-disk, but I have others.” The event at the fairgrounds is billed as an unprecedented gesture of openness for Columbine and, indeed, for every criminal case anywhere that has never gone to trial.
What has been only read about can now be seen, though not touched. Brown lit another cigarette. Life After -- RC. April 22, 2009 Life after Columbine: Richard Castaldo, wounded but not broken By Roxanne King Ten years after the shootings at Columbine High School, the massacre is still fresh in Connie Michalik’s mind. Her son, Richard Castaldo, was a junior at the school on April 20, 1999, when students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed a dozen students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 other people in a rampage that ended when they took their own lives. Castaldo was eating lunch with friend Rachel Scott on the school lawn when a shooter he saw out of the corner of his eye shot Scott four times, killing her instantly, and pumped eight bullets into him, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. “Every single day I think about it,” Michalik said. “Now all these articles are popping up in Newsweek or in the newspaper,” she continued. Now 27, Castaldo lives alone in Hollywood where he’s pursuing a career as a sound engineer.
“Last year I didn’t do anything that special,” he said. Psycho-Analysis. Five years ago today, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates and teachers at Columbine High School. Most Americans have reached one of two wrong conclusions about why they did it. The first conclusion is that the pair of supposed "Trench Coat Mafia outcasts" were taking revenge against the bullies who had made school miserable for them. The second conclusion is that the massacre was inexplicable: We can never understand what drove them to such horrific violence. But the FBI and its team of psychiatrists and psychologists have reached an entirely different conclusion.
The first steps to understanding Columbine, they say, are to forget the popular narrative about the jocks, Goths, and Trenchcoat Mafia—click to read more about Columbine's myths—and to abandon the core idea that Columbine was simply a school shooting. School shooters tend to act impulsively and attack the targets of their rage: students and faculty. The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. "Shooter An Alright Guy" Susan Klebold's Letter. Taking Back 4/20 -- RC. CANNABIS CULTURE - Ten years ago on 4/20, crazed killers invaded their own school and changed his life forever.
Today, this member of the global cannabis culture has made the transition from victim to activist with dreams of making a living in the marijuana business. It was a beautiful spring morning in Jefferson County, Colorado on April 20, 1999, ‘4/20’ to marijuana smokers in the know. From what Richard Castaldo remembers, it was a normal day right up until the shooting began. He was seventeen years old and sitting on the grassy knoll where the ‘weed-loving crowd’ from Columbine High School normally gathered. 4/20 is an international day of pot smoking for members of the marijuana community, and stoners around the world were in a good mood. “The grassy knoll, where we all hung out, was unusually empty that day because it was 4/20 and everyone was off smoking weed except for me and Rachel,” Rich explains looking down thinking.
“Don’t give up", he said. Then And Now -- PI. Sunday, June 19, 2005 Posted: 2044 GMT (0444 HKT) (CNN) -- Financial planner Pat Ireland would have been happy if the rest of the country had never heard of him or his high school. But on April 20, 1999, Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, became infamous when two heavily armed students opened fire on students and faculty. Millions of TV viewers watched the aftermath and witnessed the dramatic images of Ireland, then a 17-year-old junior, hanging out of a second-floor window to escape. By the end of the day, 14 students, including shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and one teacher were dead. Twenty-three others, including Ireland, were injured. Shot twice in the head, partially paralyzing him, and once in the foot, Ireland remembers very little of the incident and his escape aided by a SWAT team. "When I first was shot in the library, I passed out and was passing in and out of consciousness," he recalled.
"I graduated valedictorian from Columbine," Ireland continued. Video Release. April 27- Beth Nimmo, squeezing a videotape and a wadded-up tissue, stood in her driveway Wednesday and expressed outrage that footage of her daughter, slain Columbine student Rachel Scott, had just been made public. Addressing reporters just a few feet from Rachel's maroon car, she described how the videotape, which includes footage from a hovering KCNC-News4 helicopter, had brought the April 20, 1999, ordeal too close for comfort.
"For the first time," she said, "I saw my daughter be dragged to the fire engine. I didn't need to see that - nobody else needs to see that. "I'm outraged. She said the release of the tape will "sabotage the community," and she felt compelled to speak out. "I'm Rachel's mom," she said. "It crushed me to think people all over the country can watch my daughter be handled. . . . She also found it offensive that the Littleton Fire Department added music to scenes on the training tape that show the school library, where 10 students were killed.