On the west side, where the killers were active, a fire department team staged a riskier operation. Half a dozen bodies remained on or near the lawn outside the cafeteria. Several showed signs of life. Anne Marie, Lance, and Sean had been bleeding for forty minutes. Deputies along the perimeter moved in closer to provide cover while three paramedics and an EMT rushed in.
Eric appeared in the second-floor library window and fired on them. Two deputies shot back. Others laid down suppressive fire. The paramedics got three students out. Danny was pronounced dead and left behind.
Eric disappeared.
Lieutenant Manwaring’s half of the SWAT team had inched around outside the building using the fire truck for cover. They arrived at the opposite side half an hour later. They rescued Richard Castaldo from the lawn around 12:35, an hour and a quarter after he was shot. They made another approach to retrieve Rachel Scott. They brought her back as far as the fire truck. Then they determined she was dead, and aborted. They laid her there on the ground. Finally, they went for Danny Rohrbough, unaware of the prior finding. They left him on the sidewalk.
At 1:15, a second SWAT team charged the building from the senior lot, smashed a window in the teachers’ lounge, and vaulted in. The officers quickly entered the adjacent cafeteria but found it nearly deserted. Food was left half-eaten on the tables. Books, backpacks, and assorted garbage floated about the room, which had been flooded by the sprinkler system. Water was three to four inches high and rising. A fire had blackened ceiling tiles and melted down some chairs. They did not notice the duffel bags, held down by the weight of the bombs. One bag had burned away. The propane tank sat exposed, mostly above water, but it blended into the debris. Signs of panic were everywhere, but no injuries, no bodies, no blood.
There were lots of healthy people. The team was shocked to discover dozens of terrified students and staff. They were crouched in storage closets, up above the ceiling tiles, or plainly visible under cafeteria tables. One teacher had climbed into the ceiling and tried to crawl clear through the ductwork out to safety to warn police, but had fallen through and required medical care. Two men were shivering in the freezer, so cold they could barely lift their arms.
The SWAT team searched them and shuttled them out the window they came in. At first that was easy, but the farther they moved, the more officers they had to leave behind to secure the route. They brought in more manpower to assist.
Overhead, circling steadily, chopper blades beat out a steady thuch-thuch-thuch thuch-thuch-thuch.
Robyn Anderson watched it all from the parking lot. She had headed to Dairy Queen with her friends, zipped through the drive-thru, and circled back to school. There were a whole lot of cops when they got back. Officers were assembling the perimeter, but the entrance to the senior lot was still open. Robyn pulled into her space. A cop strode up with his gun drawn. Stay where you are, he warned. It was already too late to back out. Robyn and her friends would wait in her car for two and a half hours. Robyn ducked when she saw Eric appear in the library window. She couldn’t tell it was him; she was too far back. All she could make out was a guy in a white T-shirt firing a rifle in her general direction.
Who would do something like this? Robyn asked her girlfriends. Who would be this retarded?
Robyn looked over to her friends’ spaces. Eric, Dylan, and Zack had assigned spots, three in a row. Zack’s car was there. Eric’s and Dylan’s were missing.
Nate Dykeman was terrified of who might be responsible. He had called most of his close friends but had held off on Eric and Dylan. He had been hoping to hear from them. Hoping, but not really expecting. Dylan would break his heart. They had been tight for years. Nate spent a lot of time at his house, and Tom and Sue Klebold had looked after him. Nate had a lot of trouble at home, and the Klebolds had been like a second mom and dad.
Dylan did not call. Around noon, Nate dialed his house. Tom Klebold would be home—he worked from there. Hopefully Dylan was with him.
Tom picked up. No, Dylan was not there. He’s in school, Tom said.
Actually, no, he isn’t, Nate said. Dylan had not been in class. And Nate didn’t want to worry Tom, but there had been a shooting. There had been descriptions. The gunmen were in trench coats. Nate knew several kids with trench coats—he was trying to account for all of them. He hated breaking the news, but he had to say it. He thought Dylan was involved.
Tom went up to Dylan’s room, checked his closet for the coat. “Oh my God,” he said. “It’s not here.”
Tom was shocked, Nate said later. “I thought he was going to, like, drop the phone. He just could not believe that this could possibly be happening, and his son was involved.”
“Please keep me informed,” Tom told him. “Whatever you hear.”
Tom got off the phone. He turned on the TV. It was everywhere.
He called Sue. She came home. Tom called their older son. He and Sue had kicked Byron out for using drugs—they would not tolerate that behavior—but this was too important.
Tom apparently withheld his fears about Dylan. Byron told coworkers he was terrified his brother was trapped. He was also worried about younger friends still in school. “I’ve got to see if everybody’s OK,” he said.
Lots of Byron’s workmates were connected to the school. They all headed home.
Tom Klebold called 911 to warn them his son might be involved. He also called a lawyer.
The televised version of the disaster was running thirty minutes to an hour behind the cops’ view. Anchors dutifully repeated the perimeter concept. The cops had “sealed off the perimeter.” But what were all those troops doing, exactly? There were hundreds out there; everyone seemed to be milling about. Anchors started wondering aloud. Luckily, no one seemed to be seriously injured.
Around 12:30, the story took its first grisly turn. Local TV reporters gained access to the triage areas. It was awful. So much blood, it was hard to identify the injuries. Lots of kids had been loaded into ambulances; area hospitals were all on alert.
Half a dozen news choppers circled, but they withheld most of their footage. For a few minutes, stations had broadcast live from the air, but the sheriff’s team had demanded they stop. Every room in Columbine was equipped with a television. The gunmen might well be watching. Cameras would home in on the very images most useful to the killers: SWAT maneuvers and wounded kids awaiting rescue. TV stations also held back news of fatalities. Their chopper crews had seen paramedics examine Danny and leave him behind. The public remained unaware.
The stations also caught glimpses of a disturbing scene playing out in a second-story classroom in another wing of the building, far from the library, in Science Room 3. It was hard to make out exactly what was going on in there, but there was a lot of activity, and one disturbing clue. Someone had dragged a large white marker board to the window, with a message in huge block letters. The first character looked a lot like a capital I but turned out to be a numeraclass="underline" “1 BLEEDING TO DEATH.”
14. Hostage Standoff
Around one P.M., word filtered out to reporters that kids were trapped in the building. The situation had escalated into a hostage standoff. Publicly, the nature of the attack changed. No telling what the assailants might try. Where were they? The captives seemed to be held in the commons, but reports conflicted.