Frank had no idea what he might do afterward. He could not plan yet—his hands were full. He had three school years to get through. He had seriously underestimated the turmoil of the first. Nobody had foreseen that torrent of aftershocks. He would not make that mistake again. The second summer offered a respite, just like the first, but when the doors reopened in August 2000, the faculty braced for the next onslaught. It never came. There was never a year like that first one—never anything close.
The second school year got off on a high note. An addition had been constructed over the summer, with a new library. The old one was demolished, converting the commons into a two-story atrium. Most of the Parents Group attended the opening. Sue Petrone glowed. For the past sixteen months, she had felt physically weak every time she’d stepped inside the school. “Like you’re underwater and can’t breathe,” she’d said. All that was lifted away. She had been fighting for more than a year, and she was done. Nearly all the parents were.
Sue’s ex-husband was the exception. Brian Rohrbough and Frank DeAngelis dominated the ceremony, standing thirty feet apart in the cafeteria with a cluster of reporters around each, talking about each other. Mr. D was diplomatic and tried to avoid the feud altogether. But reporters kept shuttling over from Rohrbough, with fresh accusations for Mr. D to respond to. Brian was brutal and direct. The school caused these murders, he said. The administration must pay.
Mr. D developed a heart condition. It appeared the first autumn after the shootings. Stress, the doctors said. No kidding.
Frank was riddled with symptoms of PTSD: numbness, anxiety attacks, inability to concentrate, and reclusiveness. Therapy helped him sort them out. Immediately after the murders, he had trouble making eye contact. It got worse. What was that about? “Guilt,” he discovered. “I had never heard of survivor guilt. I felt guilty that Dave and the kids died and I lived.”
His wife wanted to help. It was eating him up, but he couldn’t express it to her. He was just like his students. “Don’t shut your parents out,” he begged them. He could cry in front of them. But his wife… she didn’t understand. And he didn’t particularly want her to. He just wanted solace at home.
The years after the tragedy were tumultuous. He got to Columbine at 6 A.M., left at 8 or 9 in the evening. Weekends he came in for shorter stints—quiet time to catch up. At any given time he had a dozen kids on suicide watch. Breakdowns were a daily occurrence among the students and the staff. He got tremendous satisfaction out of helping the kids, but it was a terrible drain. He had a couple of hours every night to forget it all. “I needed that time to regenerate,” he said. “The last thing I wanted to do when I got home was talk about it.”
His wife implored him to open up. His son and daughter were concerned. His parents and siblings seemed to call constantly. Are you eating? Should you be driving? “I think I know when to eat,” he would say. Everyone had to know how he was feeling. How are you doing? How are you doing? “Enough!” he would say. “Please stop!”
Mr. D struggled with some of the staff, too. A therapist complained that she spent years in his school after the tragedy and he never learned her name. He could name all two thousand students. He had a strong team of administrators who were great at heading off problems, but some of them needed support themselves. One was brilliant but chatty—she had to talk out all her pain. Frank wouldn’t do it. He confessed to his staff that he knew he wasn’t there for them. He just didn’t have the juice. He had so much in him, and it was all going to the kids. It got the kids through.
Frank sought out avenues for relaxation. He joined a Sunday night bowling league with his wife. Strangers would approach every frame. How are you doing? How are the students? “Once again, it was Columbine,” he said. Out to dinner, same thing. “People would come right up to the booth. It got to the point where I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted to stay home.”
Home was just as bad. “I would go down to my basement, to avoid my wife and kids,” he said. His golden retriever followed. That was nice.
His family resented him. “They could not understand why I was acting that way,” he said. He felt awful, too. “I wasn’t the person I wanted to be.”
He started counseling immediately after the attack, and he credits it with saving him. If he could do one thing over, it would be to include his family in the therapy. “They had no idea what PTSD was,” he said. “If they had just understood what I was going through, it would have been all right.”
His marriage didn’t make it. Early in 2002, he and his wife agreed to divorce. He said Columbine had not been the sole reason, but it was a big part.
As he prepared to move out, Frank came upon four thousand letters he’d received in 1999. Most were supportive, some angry, a few threatened his life. He had tried to read twenty-five a day; that proved traumatic. Now he was ready to face them. He read through a big stack, and one name caught him off guard. Diane Meyer had been his old high school sweetheart. They had broken up before graduation and lost touch for thirty years. He looked her up. Her mom was in the same house. He called Diane and she was so understanding. They spoke several times, never in person, but long comforting chats. She helped him through the divorce and the emotional upheaval ahead of him in May. He had one more thing he had to do.
Columbine was a cathartic experience for much of the faculty. They reevaluated their lives. Many started over on new careers. By the spring of 2002, most of them had moved on. Every other administrator but Frank was gone. As May approached, Mr. D considered what had made him happiest. How did he really want to invest his remaining years?
No compromises, he decided; he would follow his dream. He chose to remain principal at Columbine. He loved that job. Some of the families hated him; they were disgusted by his announcement. Others were pleased. His kids were ecstatic.
Rohrbough was furious. But he was having success with the cops. His Hail Mary pass had broken the dam: Judge Jackson continued releasing evidence. Eventually, Jeffco was ordered to release almost everything, except the supposedly incendiary items: the killers’ journals and the Basement Tapes. The mother lode came in November 2000: 11,000 pages of police reports, including virtually every witness account. Jeffco said that was everything.
It was still hiding more than half. Reporters and families kept chipping away, demanding known items. Jeffco acted comically in its attempts to suppress. It numbered all the pages and then eliminated thousands, releasing the documents with numbered gaps. One release indicated nearly 3,000 missing pages.
Jeffco was forced to cough up half a dozen more releases over the next year; in November 2001, officials described a huge stack as “the last batch.” More than 5,000 pages more came by the end of 2002, and 10,000 in 2003—in January, February, March, June, and three separate times in October.
Halfway through all that, in April 2001, district attorney Dave Thomas inadvertently mentioned the smoking gun: the affidavit to search Eric’s house more than a year before the massacre. Jeffco had vigorously denied its existence for two years. Judge Jackson ordered it released.
The affidavit was more damning than expected. Investigator Guerra had astutely pulled together the threads of Eric’s early plotting, and had documented mass murder threats and the bomb production to begin realizing them. The purpose of the cover-up was out in the open. Yet it continued for several more years.
Finally, in June 2003, the search warrant Kate Battan had composed on the afternoon of the massacre came out. It demonstrated conclusively that Jeffco officials had been lying about the Browns all along—that they knew about the warnings from the beginning, and the “missing” Web pages were so accessible they’d found them in the first minutes of the attack.