Columbine Conversations from a Daughter and Father

A couple of days after the shooting ended Willie said a good friend from Columbine High School called crying really hard. Willie is a friend in my choir at Nederland High School. Our school is up the mountains outside of Denver in the district that borders Jefferson County. We were really shook up when we heard what was happening in Littleton, but it hit home even more as we listened to Willie on Friday. His friend had spent most of that tragic day in the library under a desk. While she survived one of her closest classmates, Rachel Scott, was killed. The blood from the shot spattered onto her shirt and she didn’t want to take it off because, as she told Willie, it was all she had to remember Rachel. She felt guilty that she made it out alive but had to leave friends under those library desks who never made it.

Once the news reached us, Wendy and I sat glued at the television watching the slow evolution of images in disbelief. A local high school, as the reporters kept saying, had turned into a killing ground. It suddenly felt too local…