Reporters quickly keyed on the darker force behind the attack: this spooky Trench Coat Mafia. It grew more bizarre by the minute. In the first two hours, witnesses on CNN described the TCM as Goths, gays, outcasts, and a street gang. “A lot of the time they’ll, like, wear makeup and paint their nails and stuff,” a Columbine senior said. “They’re kind of—I don’t know, like Goth, sort of, like, and they’re, like, associated with death and violence a lot.”
None of that would prove to be true. That student did not, in fact, know the people he was describing. But the story grew.
16. The Boy in the Window
Danny Rohrbough had been second to die. As Eric was taking aim at him on the sidewalk, Danny’s stepsister was in the building, headed toward him. Nicole Petrone had changed into her gym uniform while the bombs were being laid. It was a beautiful day, and her class was going outside to play softball. Just as Eric finished shooting at Deputy Gardner, the lead girls in Nicole’s class turned the corner toward them.
Mr. D arrived in the hallway at the same moment—at the opposite end from the killers. He had just been alerted to the shooting, and had come running to investigate. The girls had not been warned. Mr. D spotted Dylan and Eric coming in the west doors, and the girls blundering into their path.
“They were laughing and giggling and getting ready to walk right into it,” he said.
The killers fired. Bullets soared past the girls. The trophy case just behind Mr. D shattered.
“I assumed I was a dead man,” he said.
He ran straight into the gunfire, screaming at the girls to turn back. He herded them down a side hallway that dead-ended at the gym. It was locked.
Mr. D had the key, on a chain in his pocket, latched to dozens just like it. He had no idea what it looked like. “I’m thinking, He’s coming around the corner and we’re trapped,” DeAngelis said. “If I don’t get these doors open, we are trapped.” A movie image zipped through his mind: a Nazi concentration camp, with a guard shooting escapees in the back. We’re just going to get mowed down as he comes around the corner, he thought. He reached in and grabbed a random key. It fit.
He ushered the girls into the gym and scouted around for a hiding place. They could hear bombs and gunfire and he could only imagine the hell going on outside. He spotted an inconspicuous door on the far wall. There was a storage room behind it, with cages piled with gym equipment. He unlocked the door and led them in.
“You’re going to be fine,” he told them. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. But I need to get us out of here. I’m going to shut the door behind me. You don’t open that door for anyone!” Then he had an idea. Why didn’t they come up with a code word? Orange, someone suggested; no, Rebels, another girl said; no… A few started quarreling about it. Mr. D. couldn’t believe it. He burst out laughing. Girls started giggling. That broke the tension, for a moment.
He locked them in the storeroom, crossed the gym, creaked open the outside door, and poked his head out. “I saw other kids coming out and teachers,” he said. “Then a Jeffco sheriff—his car came over that embankment, flying, and I told some of the teachers, ‘I have to go back in there! There are kids in there.’ So I told the police officer after he got out and I explained. He said, ‘You go in.’”
Mr. D brought Nicole’s class back out to the same spot with the same cop, but by now he’d realized there were hundreds more still inside.
“I’m going—” he began, but a deputy cut him off.
“No one’s going back in.”
So Mr. D led the class across a field, over a series of minor obstacles. He stopped at a chain-link fence to boost them over. Other girls assisted from the far side. “Let’s go, girls,” he said. “Over the fence.”
When the last girl was over, they ran across the field until they felt safe. Mr. D found the command post and drew diagrams of the hallways for the SWAT teams. He also described what he had seen. He remembered a guy with a baseball cap turned backward. “They kept saying these guys were in trench coats,” Mr. D recalled later, “and I kept saying, ‘These guys were not in trench coats! He had a baseball cap turned backwards.’”
Eventually, Mr. D headed to Leawood to be with the kids. He met his wife there, his brother, and a close friend. Tears streamed down everyone’s cheeks, except Frank’s. That was odd. Frank had always been the emotional one. But the first symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was already taking hold. He felt nothing.
“I was like a zombie,” he said later.
John and Kathy Ireland knew Patrick had “A” lunch. But he always ate out. John went looking for Patrick’s car. He knew Patrick’s spot. If the car was gone, his boy was safe. A deputy stopped him at the perimeter. “Please!” John begged. He promised not to walk as far as the school. “If I can just get to the parking lot…” Pleading was useless. John knew the neighborhood, so he tried another approach. That one was blocked, too. He headed back to Leawood.
Kids kept pouring in there. Mostly the auditorium was filled with parents seeking kids, but there were also kids without parents. John saw several in tears. He chatted with them, and they perked up.
John and Kathy were happy to see kids find their parents. But every reunion raised the odds their boy was in trouble. Somebody’s kids were in those ambulances. John and Kathy refused to indulge in negative thoughts. “I couldn’t go to the place that Pat would have been hurt,” Kathy said later. “I absolutely felt confident that he was going to be OK. At least I wasn’t going to speculate or waste energy on that. I just needed to find him.”
John found lots of Patrick’s friends, but nobody had seen him. Who was he with? Why hadn’t they called?
Patrick had gone to the library to finish his stats homework. Four friends had joined him. None of them had called the Irelands because every one of them had been shot.
Agent Dwayne Fuselier was also having no luck locating his son. Mimi had given up on the public library and had run over to Leawood. There were many more kids there, but none had seen Brian.
Dwayne had access to a growing army of law enforcement, but it didn’t do him a lick of good. Cops kept an ear out for word of Brian, but none came. Fuselier also had the advantage of knowing a great number of kids were alive and well in the building. He had spoken to many personally, and continued picking their brains about the killers. He was one of the few parents aware of the full danger. Two bodies had been lying outside the cafeteria for hours. He didn’t know they were Danny Rohrbough and Rachel Scott, but he knew they had not been moving, and then he heard the dispatch announcements indicating they were dead. Others described the 1 BLEEDING TO DEATH sign in Science Room 3.
Mimi monitored the stage at Leawood, where talk of death and murder were verboten. She scoured the sign-in sheets and worked the crowd. Dwayne checked in every fifteen minutes by cell, but did not mention the murders. She did not inquire.
For ninety minutes of chaos, the gunmen seemed to be all over the school simultaneously. Then it quieted down. The killers still appeared to be roaming, firing at will, but the gunfire was sporadic now, and no one was staggering out wounded. The injured had reached the hospitals. It had taken an hour to get most of them out of the building, through the triage center, and into ambulances. Between 1:00 and 2:30 P.M., the injury count fluctuated between eight and eighteen, depending upon which station you were watching. The numbers varied but kept rising. A sheriff’s spokesman announced that SWAT teams had spotted more students trapped in the building, lying on the floor, apparently injured.