April 22, 1999
THE MEMORIES
Behind Every School Door, a Tale of Terror
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By JODI WILGOREN
ITTLETON, Colo. --
They will never forget where they
were when the alarm went off.
Josh Casey had just opened a bag
of potato chips in the lunchroom.
Steve Broden was taking a test on the
digestive system in sophomore biology. Stephanie Bresee was waiting
for her gym classmates to finish
changing so they could head out to
the baseball diamond.
They are teen-agers, and this is
high school, after all, so they groaned
and dropped their stuff and started
to line up for yet another fire drill.
But this was no false alarm.
As gunshots and explosions rocked
the campus of Columbine High
School, rocked their very world, the
students descended into their own
private nightmares. For some, it
lasted only a few minutes, as they
sprinted through hallways and
climbed over cars to the safety of a
nearby park and library. For others,
it was an hours-long siege behind
locked doors and in cramped closets,
clueless about the craziness outside
and unsure when help would come.
Michelle Alsom could not hear the
alarm. She was miles away at the
Cherry Creek Mall, running an errand. She is a 26-year-old paramedic,
long since graduated from fire drills.
But soon the buzzer went off on the
pager on her hip, and she, too, will
never forget the moment.
"It's my job and I'm proud to be
doing it," Ms. Alsom said, trembling
and sobbing as she told her story to a
priest in the park adjacent to Columbine this afternoon. Ms. Alsom does
not live anywhere near Littleton, but
she came back, she said, because "I
needed some closure."
The authorities say they still do not
have many details about the architecture of the rampage that left 15
dead, including the two presumed
gunmen, who apparently killed
themselves, and more than 20 injured at Columbine on Tuesday.
They do not know when the two died,
or how many rounds they fired, or
who they shot at first or last.
An officer assigned to the school,
Neil Gardner of the Jefferson County
Sheriff's Department, heard an explosion about 11:30 A.M. and went to
an area near the cafeteria, said Steve
Davis, a sheriff's spokesman.
Gardner "saw one of the gunmen
firing," Davis said, and "laid
down some fire." Then, two other
deputies fired at the gunmen, though
all the shots apparently missed.
Law-enforcement officers did not
encounter the suspected gunmen
again, Davis said, until their
bodies turned up in the library about
4 P.M. The rest of the time, he said,
hundreds of officers from two dozen
agencies "very slowly, quietly and
methodically swept through the
building."
In the hours before the police secured the building, a different drama
unfolded behind every door.
What people everywhere else
heard, those in the cafeteria saw. A
student in a black trench coat raced
by the windows, firing all the time. A
bomb went off in someone's trunk in
the adjacent senior parking lot.
"I looked up and looked out the
window and saw two people laying on
the ground," recalled Bo Baribeau,
15, a freshman. Wondering if there
had been a fight, he went outside to
check.
"Once we got close," he said,
"we saw the blood."
From the lunchroom, students saw
the gunman racing down the hallway. A janitor ordered them to duck
under the table. Then the janitor
exhorted them to escape. Bo raced
through the foreign language hall in
what became a stampede. "About
100 kids, bam, just hit the streets,
and went and jumped over the cars
and, bam, went into the park," he
said, almost breathless again.
But Josh Casey, also 15, could not
get to the door. He was one of about
30 students who crammed, instead,
into an elevator, seeking safety upstairs in the library. When they got
there, though, the smoke from the
bombs and the mist from the fire
sprinkler system was blinding. They
went down again -- avoiding, unknowingly, the death trap the library
was to become.
Back on the first floor, two teachers locked the students in the cafeteria and everyone sat underneath a
chair, Josh said. Then the janitor
returned, once again telling the
crowd to flee. So they ran.
"I just kept hearing all the gunshots and the pipe bombs," Josh said
today. "I didn't care to look back."
Upstairs in the science wing, there
was no place to run.
Steve Broden and his classmates
were chewing on pencils, searching
for answers about the digestive system, when William David Sanders, a
business teacher and coach, burst
through the door.
"He came in with
two shots in his back," Steve said of
the teacher, who died. "He just came
in and fell on his face and busted a
bunch of teeth."
The students quickly knocked over
the tables and crouched behind them,
as four or five other teachers
brought their classes in to the room.
One female teacher spent hours on a
cell phone getting advice for how to
care for Sanders, Steve said, and
many students took their shirts off to
help mop up the blood.
Orders to stay quiet lasted for
about an hour, Steve said, but then
emotion overcame them.
Girls
screamed. Boys cried. People with
cell phones were frantically making
calls. "We were just talking about
our families," he said, "trying to
keep ourselves happy."
It was about 3 P.M., Steve recalled,
when the teacher on the cell phone
said SWAT teams were about to rescue them. Another 30 minutes
passed. Still nothing.
Next door, another biology class
was crammed into a supply closet,
first lying down on top of one another
under sinks and scientific paraphernalia, then sitting so close they felt
each other's breath.
"Gunshots kept going off forever it
seemed," said Jessica Cave, a 16-year-old sophomore, who spoke with
her mother's arms wrapped tightly
around her sinewy figure. "I was just
hoping I'd see my mother again."
Jessica said the students at times
got noisy.
"It was just like a war zone for,
like, two and a half hours," said
Jason Baer, who was also in the
closet. "I was wondering where the
cops were."
Jason said that the teacher asked
him to peek out the closet window. He
saw SWAT officers. "They clapped
their hands and all of a sudden rifles
were pointed at me," he recalled. "I
dropped back down."
Shortly, the students in the closet
heard SWAT officers talking about
ramming down the door. They called
out. They were rescued.
"We ran down the stairs, and there
was blood everywhere," Jason said.
"We had to jump over dead bodies to
get out."
Davis, the sheriff's department spokesman, said the first officers arrived on the scene just three
minutes after the initial call to 911. A
makeshift SWAT team entered the
building 20 minutes later, he said.
Sgt. George Hinkle and his SWAT
crew from the Lakewood Police Department moved in at 1:02 P.M.
Students had said, via cell phone,
that the gunmen were exchanging
clothes with the hostages, so every
student leaving the building had to be
searched, Sergeant Hinkle said. "It
was chaos outside," he said, "It was
a different sort of chaos inside."
Ms. Alsom, the paramedic, had
shared a turkey sandwich on a park
bench with her mother, a stockbroker, and then gone into the mall to
exchange something. Moments later,
she was speeding toward Littleton,
lights blazing, sirens wailing.
"I was being briefed via my pager
and on my cell phone and on my
radio," said Ms. Alsom, a paramedic
for nine years who was the only one
from her department, North Metro,
to respond. "The word was multiple
gunshots, possible bombing."
The first victim was a young woman "who we thought was probably
the worst, at the time," Ms. Alsom
said. She had been shot several times
in the abdomen. But they kept coming.
Ms. Alsom was one of the first
emergency workers to arrive at
about 11:40 A.M. There were three
triage centers, and the students
came in waves. First, critical patients who had been shot. Then escapees with cuts and scrapes and
sprains. Then a lull. Then hundreds
more students, some struggling to
breath after hours in hiding.
"We had neighbors coming out
with blankets, with Band-aids, four
by four gauze," she said. "They were
bringing kids into their homes, giving them beverages." It was 6 P.M.
before Ms. Alsom left the scene.
"I'm just worried about these
kids," she said. "I worked in Chicago
when I was in college and I witnessed
the same thing, and I still have nightmares."
Tuesday night, she said, she did
not dare sleep.
