Keni Dooley, 16, was in the cafeteria finishing lunch when the two boys walked in and started shooting.
One was wearing a long black coat; the other, in a white shirt, was telling him, “Shoot over there. Over there.” They threw a homemade bomb on the floor, which exploded in flames.
Waves of students ran out of the building and hid between cars in the parking lot, praying, “Please help me. Please help the people here,” over and over.
Outside the school, Dooley could see a wounded girl on the ground, moaning, as SWAT teams circled and entered the modern school building.
The scene of horror they found inside shattered the sense of tranquility and security that marks this upscale suburb of Denver. Up to 25 victims were strewn about different rooms of Columbine High School, killed in a spasm of senseless violence that stunned the nation.
Afterward, scores of students said they witnessed the gunmen casually killing their classmates and setting off explosives, targeting some students and letting others go. Now they recounted their day of terror, wondering why they had lived while their friends had to die.
Craig Nason, 17, was in the choir room when he heard the screams and then the blasts. About half the students there ran through the auditorium and escaped to safety. Another 60 fled into the small choir office, where they barricaded the door with two desks and file cabinets.
“It sounded like cannons, it was that loud. We heard 20 big blasts, and then 20 smaller blasts. People were freaking out.”
The boys took off their shirts in the sweltering afternoon heat and helped lift students having asthma attacks on top of the cabinets so they could breathe fresh air coming through the vents.
When the police came, they took the students through the auditorium, filled with broken glass, and then out of the building where they ran, heads down, past as many as five bodies.
“I felt, God is my security. They can take my life away but they can’t take him away,” Nason said.
Buses carried students from the school to a nearby neighborhood of single-family houses. When one bus arrived, a science teacher ran across the lawn to a student, threw his arms around her and wept.
“Oh, you made it. We made it, didn’t we? God it was so scary,” he said, hugging the 15-year-old.
The student, Nicole Janda, was sitting with a friend, waiting for her parents outside under a soggy, gray sky after nearly four hours of terror.
In a flat voice, tugging at a silver necklace at her chest, Janda told of seeing a boy in a black trench coat jerk a gun from his coat outside the cafeteria window, and of hearing a shot.
“I got under the table. There was another shot. People started running. Then I bolted upstairs,” she said.
With 17 other students, she huddled inside the small, stifling biology class storeroom for three hours, praying in what she said was a “state of shock” as shots rang out. The science teacher, Kent Friesen, was in the class next door with another group of students.
When police finally came, the students walked in single file, hands behind their heads, out the building to a fence where they were frisked and then rushed through a nearby back yard.
“He gave his shirt to Mr. Saunders, the coach, he was bleeding so bad,” Nicole said pointing to Friesen’s colorful tie-dye shirt, not the one he had worn to school that day.
“I want to see my parents real bad,” she added, quietly.
It was nearly 5 p.m., and more than 100 parents were still on the lawn outside Leawood Elementary school here, where the radio and television stations had told people to go to find out if their children were safe.
On the front door to the school, 10 sheets of white paper listed names of children sheltered at other locations. Inside, on the tables just outside the gym, all the students who came on buses or in police vans scrawled their names so parents could check to see if they were there.
On chairs in the two-story gym, parents sat with frozen faces, clasping hands, waiting for word of the children not on the lists. Many had been here for four hours or more, trying to keep hopes alive.
Among them were Doreen and John Tomlin, who hadn’t heard any word of their son, John, a sophomore. The Tomlins were among the hundreds of people who rushed from their offices and homes to try to find their children.
“You feel you’re in a nightmare,” said Tomlin. “It seems unbelievable. It seems like it’s not really real.”
Nearby, students who had escaped the high school building stood talking, still trying to understand what had happened.
“We were sitting in math class on the second floor when some kids came running in and said someone had a gun. We thought it was a joke at first–we had a substitute teacher. But then the alarm went off, and we all just ran,” said Ryan Morrill, 15.
Just last Saturday night the senior class had held its prom, and only 18 days were left until the end of the school year. They have been good years, students said, in a place where teachers care and where even fights are uncommon.
“My senior year is something that I want to remember for the rest of my life. Now I’ll remember that some stupid kids decided to shoot up the school, and everything was ruined,” said John Behunin, 19, his arm around his crying girlfriend.
At the front door, trying to help parents, Patrick Partridge, whose three sons all escaped without harm, sighed as his blue eyes filled with tears.
“This is a really, really fine school, a place where staff are respectful of parents and students are respectful of teachers. You can walk through the halls and not see a stain on the walls, it’s that clean. Now those walls are spattered with blood.”
About 100 yards away, across from the American Red Cross disaster services van that was handing out food and drinks, a woman in blue bike shorts threw herself to the ground, sobbing and shaking uncontrollably as another woman in a black jumper told her “He’s OK. He’s OK. Just be glad he’s alive.”
Another school bus pulled in, with teens hanging out the window, searching the grounds for a sight of parents or friends. “David! David!” screamed Betty Smith, clutching her stomach as she caught sight of her 15-year-old.
“We didn’t know until now where he was,” said Smith, who works in a coffee shop across the street from Columbine High.
“I can’t find my best friend,” wailed Emma Corall, a sophomore, in tears, looking scared. I don’t know what to do.”
Brandon Martinez, 18, feared the worst for his friend, Val, who he heard had been shot. “I went to elementary school with her. She was graduating with me in 18 days.”
The neighborhood is flush with new development, with large houses going up in expensive gated and fenced communities.
Just down the road, several llamas at a small farm were looking out at the line of cars waiting to find their way to the school, and horses were meandering through a field. In the distance, the snow-capped Rocky Mountains were readily visible, their serene grandeur a backdrop to the carnage at Columbine High.
