On April 20, , two students opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, gunning down 12 of their fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves. The sheer shock of 13 people losing their lives in chaos that unfolded on live TV launched the country into a new era -- and new century -- of school shooting coverage, ahead of Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Parkland and countless others.
Fifteen-year-old Columbine freshman Laura Farber was in the cafeteria when a janitor yelled for everyone to get under the tables. She was sitting by the door, so she and her classmates rushed out, running through the parking lot to a residential street, where they knocked on strangers' doors for help.
Once Farber was safely inside a home, she heard shots across the parking lot. Then-Columbine High School Principal Frank DeAngelis was in his office when his secretary ran in and said there was a report of gunfire. But as he stepped into the hall, "My worst nightmare became a reality.
And I remember thinking, 'What was it gonna feel like to have a bullet pierce my body? That's when a group of girls came out of a locker room, walking unsuspectingly down the hallway. DeAngelis herded them into a gym storage area. He peeked outside and saw a sheriff's officer, so went back for the girls and rushed them out of the building. DeAngelis tried to get back inside the school, but officers said he couldn't -- they had to secure the perimeter and wait for SWAT.
But it was the protocol of the time," DeAngelis wrote in his newly-released book. Another question of protocol concerned the school resource officer, with whom the gunmen exchanged gunfire outside before storming the school, DeAngelis said. Following protocol, the officer didn't enter the building. But if the officer had followed them inside, "there's a good chance" the gunmen wouldn't have reached the library, where so many classmates were targeted, DeAngelis said.
Instead of immediately confronting the threat and racing into the building, police secured the scene and waited for SWAT teams to arrive, which allowed the gunmen to continue to fire inside. Forty-eight minutes ticked by at Columbine before SWAT entered the building, DeAngelis said, as the officers first had to get their gear at their precincts -- leaving DeAngelis and the police at the scene feeling helpless.
Now, most police departments have rapid response officers who carry heavier assault weapons and are trained to enter immediately and "follow the firepower," said Garrett.
While gunshots rang out, Columbine teachers were forced to open classroom doors and reach around to lock them, "putting themselves in harm's way," DeAngelis said, as the doors only locked from the outside. Though schools have multiple doors, now they're commonly set up so students only use certain ones to get into the building, setting up a "choke point" that "security people can control as they come into school," Garrett said.
Drills weren't typical before Columbine, and now, active shooter scenarios are a common conversation for kids to have in school, whether they live in a rural setting or urban setting, Garrett said. Some schools teach students about the best hiding places in the classroom, how to barricade the door and how to throw objects at an intruder as a distraction, he said.
The siege ended dramatically on April 19, , when fires consumed In April , the government of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Over the next several years, Bosnian Serb forces, with the backing of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army, perpetrated atrocious crimes against Bosniak Bosnian The Monica Lewinsky scandal began in the late s, when America was rocked by a political sex scandal involving President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern in her early 20s.
In , the two began a sexual relationship that continued sporadically until On May 4, , members of the Ohio National Guard trying to disperse a crowd of student demonstrators at Kent State University opened fire, killing four students and wounding nine others. More than any other single event, the Kent State shootings would become a focal point of She wanted to create a space that would embody the loving and accepting spirit her brother had found in underground gay nightclubs.
At a. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris At approximately a. She Said 'Yes' In the days immediately following the shootings, it was speculated that Harris and Klebold purposely chose athletes, minorities and Christians as their victims.
Recommended for you. Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot. Eyewitness Account of Columbine Massacre. Capitol Shooting of March Oklahoma City bombing The Oklahoma City bombing occurred when a truck packed with explosives was detonated on April 19, , outside the Alfred P.
Then, as the rest of the school swarmed for the exits, they would open fire with semiautomatic weapons from two positions in the car park. Assuming they survived that phase - they did not expect to - they would then ram their cars, loaded with more propane explosive, into arriving rescue workers, television news teams and police for one ghastly final conflagration.
They were hoping for a death toll of at least 2,, matching the student population of the school. As it was, their homemade bombs did not detonate, and they were forced to improvise.
They were indeed wearing long black coats, not because of any campus affiliation but simply to hide their arsenal of shotguns, semiautomatic machine pistols, pipe bombs, knives and small carbon dioxide canister bombs Harris called "crickets".
They shot two students on the way in, then spent 49 terrifying minutes patrolling the hallways, the cafeteria, and the stairs before carrying out their worst carnage in the library. Bernall, it turns out, was shot and killed outright. She was a recent convert to evangelical Christianity, after a deeply troubled early adolescence, and perhaps for that reason her story became confused with that of another student.
It was Valeen Schnurr, who was asked, by Klebold, if she believed in God, and answered yes. She was then spared. If the killers hated Christians, they were distinctly uneven in how they applied that hatred. Likewise, if they hated jocks, they didn't make any special effort to target them. At one point they joked about killing anyone in a white hat; one boy cowering beneath a desk quickly pulled a white cap off his head, and lived. The question of Nazi sympathies is a little more complicated.
Harris certainly felt drawn to the Nazis' genocidal mania - at one point in his journal he quotes Himmler approvingly and comments, "Here was someone who got it! The boys had decided on 19 April - the anniversary of the botched government siege at Waco, Texas, in which 76 people perished by fire in , and also the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. As it was, the plan was pushed back 24 hours because the local drug dealer who had promised to provide the boys with their ammunition did not come through on time.
It was the first of many disappointments for a pair of killers aiming for even greater infamy than they ultimately achieved. Everything about the Columbine disaster is tinged with failure.
The county sheriff's department knew Harris and Klebold had been making pipe bombs and threatening their schoolmates. They applied at one point for a warrant to search Harris's house, but the warrant was never executed. The school, meanwhile, failed to recognise the danger, even though Harris spilled much of his venom on his publicly accessible website, and even though Klebold wrote an essay two months before the attack about a man gunning down innocents and enjoying it.
Klebold's teacher was deeply concerned, but the authorities ultimately bought his explanation that it was "just a story". On the day of the attacks, the Swat teams were so hesitant to swoop in mid-killing that they ended up compounding the disaster, allowing a PE teacher to bleed to death when early intervention would almost certainly have saved his life. The sheriff's department was dysfunctional from start to finish, preferring to cover up what it had known about the killers and doing nothing to contradict the nerds-targeting-jocks story.
The bulk of the withheld investigation documents were finally released in , the result of years of lawsuits, but not all: a deposition of the parents of the two killers, taken over several days in , remains under seal until In some ways, Columbine is unlike other school shootings because of its sheer scale. In other ways, though, it is both a reference point and even an inspiration to successive killers - in Germany, Finland and Britain as well as the US.
Seung Hui Cho, the disturbed gunman who killed more than 30 students at Virginia Tech in , called Harris and Klebold "martyrs". We can perhaps be grateful that the Columbine killers saw themselves in media-age terms as performers, who chronicled their thoughts and actions in great detail. As a result, we now know a whole lot more about how to recognise potential school shooters, and how to limit the damage once the shooting starts.
The Swat teams at Virginia Tech did not hesitate for an instant, almost certainly saving the lives of a dozen or more people.
0コメント