Speech was a problem. Only one side of his mouth moved, and his brain was inconsistent in retrieving information. Sometimes it got stuck. He gave them all ten digits of his phone number, but his first name was nearly impossible. Paaaaaaaaaaaaaah… Paaaaaaaaaah… He could not form that second syllable. It sounded like a droning stream of nonsense and then the second syllable spat out suddenly, clear and distinctive: rick. Great. Rick Ireland. That caused considerable confusion later.
Just before Patrick’s rescue, President Clinton addressed the nation. He asked all Americans to pray for students and teachers in that school. As CNN cut back from the White House, an anchor spotted Patrick: “Look, there’s a bloody student right there in the window!” she gasped.
It played out live on television. Patrick’s eighth-grade sister Maggie watched. He was so bloody, she didn’t recognize him.
Viewers were stunned, but it didn’t make much of an impression at the rendezvous points. News of a kid falling out the window never reached most parents, including John and Kathy. They might have gone on searching for hours if Kathy hadn’t asked a neighbor to run by the house to check the answering machine. The neighbor found endless messages from Kathy checking for Patrick, plus a recent one from St. Anthony’s: We have your son. Please call.
Kathy was conflicted: My son’s alive! My son is hurt! “It was scary,” Kathy said later. “But I was relieved to have something to deal with.”
She felt much better once she got a nurse on the phone. It was a head wound, but Patrick was awake and alert; he had provided his name and phone number. Oh, good, it was just a graze, Kathy thought. “I just went straight to the assumption that it was just the scalp,” she said later. “If he was able to talk, then it was just the scalp.”
John felt grave danger, no relief. “I just figured anybody shot in the head, it can’t be good,” he said.
John drove the couple to the hospital. He was a computer programmer, who prided himself on his navigational skill. He was too upset to find the hospital. He knew exactly how to get to St. Anthony’s, he said. “And I’m driving down Wadsworth and I can’t remember where the hell it is!”
They sat side by side, presuming they shared the same basic assumptions. It was seven years before they discovered that they arrived at St. Anthony’s in completely different mind-sets.
John was racked with guilt. “There should have been something I was able to do to protect him,” he said. John knew it was irrational, but years later, it still haunted him.
Kathy focused on the present: How could she help Patrick now? But no one even knew exactly what was wrong. Staff kept coming in to check on them, filling them in on the surgery, what to expect in Patrick and themselves. Dead brain cells do not regenerate, but the brain can sometimes work around them, they were told. No one really understands how the brain reroutes its neural pathways, so there’s no procedure to assist it.
A projectile to the brain tends to cause two sets of damage. First, it rips away tissue that can never be restored. One path might cause blindness, another logical impairment. But the secondary impact can be just as bad or worse. The brain is saturated with blood, so gunshots tend to unleash a flood. As fluid builds, oxygen is depleted and the pool cuts off fresh supplies. Brain tissue is choked off by the very cells designed to nourish it. Patrick’s doctors feared that as he’d lain on the library floor, his brain had been drowning in its own blood.
Patrick Ireland had brain damage; that was a fact. His symptoms indicated severe impairment. The only question was whether those functions could return.
The surgery was scheduled to take about an hour, but lasted more than three. It was after 7:00 P.M. when the surgeon came out to advise John and Kathy of the results. He had cleared out buckshot fragments and debris from the surface. One pellet had penetrated Patrick’s skull. It was far too perilous to dig out. That lead would be in him for life. It was hard to tell how much damage the pellet had wreaked. Swelling was the main indicator. It looked bad.
As one SWAT team rescued Patrick Ireland, another squad reached the choir room. The rumor was true: sixty students were barricaded inside. A few minutes later, sixty more were discovered in the science area. SWAT teams led them through the hallways, down the stairs, and across the commons.
At 2:47, three and a half hours into the siege, the first of those kids burst out the cafeteria doors. News choppers homed in on them instantly. The anchors and the TV audience were perplexed. Where were these kids coming from?
More followed, single file in quick succession, running down the hillside as fast as they could with their hands on the backs of their heads, elbows splayed. They kept coming and coming, dozens of them, tracing the same winding path, first away from the school, then back toward a windowless corner surrounded by squad cars and ambulances. They huddled there for several minutes, sobbing, waiting, clinging to one another. Police officers patted them down and then hugged them. Eventually, cops packed groups of three to five kids into squad cars and shuttled them to the triage area a few blocks south. The kids had to run right past two bodies on the way out, so at some point, an officer moved Rachel farther away.
The SWAT team reached the 1 BLEEDING TO DEATH sign on the same sweep through the science area that freed all those kids. The sign was still against the window. The carpet in Science Room 3 was soaked in blood. The teacher was alive, barely.
17. The Sheriff
The Columbine crisis was never a hostage standoff. Eric and Dylan had no intentions of making demands. SWAT teams searched the building for over three hours, but the killers were lying dead the entire time. They had committed suicide in the library at 12:08, forty-nine minutes after beginning the attack. The killing and the terror had been real. The standoff had not.
The SWAT teams discovered the truth around 3:15. They peered into the library and saw bodies scattered around the floor. No sign of movement. They cleared the entrance and prepared to enter. They took paramedic Troy Laman in with them. The SWAT team warned Laman to be cautious. Touch as little as possible, they said; anything could be booby-trapped. Be especially suspicious of backpacks.
It was horrible. The room was a shambles; blood spattered the furniture, and enormous pools soaked into the carpet. The tabletops were oddly undisturbed: books open, calculus problems under way, a college application half-completed. A lifeless boy still held a pencil. Another had collapsed beside a PC, which was still running, undisturbed.
Laman was tasked with determining whether anyone was alive. It didn’t look like it. Most of the kids had been dead for nearly four hours, and it was obvious by sight. “If I couldn’t get a look at somebody, at their face, to see if they were still alive, I tried to kind of touch them,” Laman said. Twelve were cold. One was not. Laman touched a girl, felt the warmth, and rolled her over to get a look at her face. Her eyes were open, tears trickling out.
Lisa Kreutz was carried down the stairs and rushed to Denver Health Medical Center. A gun blast had shattered her left shoulder. One hand and both arms were also injured. She had lost a lot of blood. She survived.