Four Columbine High School teachers were students the day of the April 20, 1999 shooting

I was in math and then we heard what it sounded like girls screaming the fire alarm rang we went one of my social studies teachers blocked traffic across Pierce to get us across to Leawood and we were there for what seemed like an eternity and then chaos kind of erupted one of my best friends came out and said Mandy we have to go they're shooting and I said who's shooting and there's a lot of rumors that they were on the roof by that time news helicopters had come and there was a rumor you know they're shooting at the helicopters like it just it went crazy so then that was the time when we saw some staff members and like Zach I was very concerned about my math test and so she said you need to go to a safe place we're like what does that mean she said find a house go to a house and so we essentially kind of got permission to go well somebody said hey go to so-and-so's house his dad's a cop so I just followed this group of kids I bet there was 50 of us we got on the like there were a couple people who had cell phones but this lady's house she gave the phone to different people and in my head it didn't occur to me to call anybody like who do I call so then I was a young life at the time and my young life leader happened to be at that house and he said maybe you need to call your mom my mom was at King Karl she was a teacher and she I couldn't get him hold of her because they were locked down apparently and now years later I was the first one to get ahold of her and so everybody that called my mom like family members knew I was safe I don't know for some reason I had this instinct that my dad would come and get me so this kid's brother said hey does anybody need a ride a Leawood and I said I do like I know my dad's gonna be there my dad worked at the King Soopers down the street we went to Leawood and it was of course chaos and it was kind of surreal my friends that I just left were in science and I knew them that they were in science their parents were there well unfortunately you know they didn't get out hours later my dad found me and I was wearing a dress that day because it was attracting we always dressed up for sports and he wouldn't let go it has a parent now I just it's hard to realize so what my dad went through that day and I didn't think anything of it until I became a parent and how how my parents must have felt that day in years later years later I went both of my parents and said I'm sorry I'm sorry the way I acted because now I get it now I get it and same you know it's surreal you don't know where you are what you're doing and you go home and you just live through it and try to get through the through it as much as you can in it it didn't affect me as much as it has until I became a mom so I was in the math department and I was in the process of taking a quiz and I just retrieved my calculator and I just sat down and I heard some raised voices out in the hall and I had assumed they were is some kids goofing around or maybe a scuffle or a fight had broken out and then the fire alarm gets pulled almost immediately and once again made the Assumption some kids were screwing around and maybe a fight had started and nobody knew how to respond to it so somebody pulled the fire alarm so the teachers would be drawn to it I didn't know so yeah we all stood up kind of lackadaisical II I remember looking down on my desk and thinking what I wanted to take outside with me as I was I mean not taking the fire drill very seriously and then a teacher from the math department throws the door open and braces the door open with his body and says get out of here and so we all realize okay this is serious and I remember the thought that occurred to me was oh it's an actual fire there's really a fire and it's very near apparently so we're all getting up and and moving towards the door and he's throwing us out the door I mean grabbing us by the scruff of the neck and pushing us out of the door and same situation we're kind of not really walking but we're kind of you know sauntering down the hall trying to get the building but not taking it very seriously until we see kids race down the main hall and at that point we realized okay yeah this this is a very serious situation we we get out here and we spent I don't know how long there are parts of my memory that make it seem like it was an hour and a half and there other parts of my memory that make it seem like it was no more than five minutes but we spend a period of time in Leawood just across the street from Columbine trying to figure out what's going on because none of us knew and so we're talking to there's thousand of us milling around out there and we're talking to our friends trying to hear what's going on and it's kind of a similar situation in terms of the story started to escalate in severity and at first it was somebody brought a gun and it accidentally went off and then somebody else said no somebody brought a gun and they used it very deliberately and then somebody said I was an automatic weapon and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse and then I've spoken to an you know number of people who were around that area at that time and I think Mandy was one of them and totally different memory of how things started I remember crystal clear and I don't know if I fabricated it but I remember telling the police the next day that we were all kind of walking around for a while trying to figure out what's going on and then I remember hearing explosions that were probably the pipe bombs going off by the library or in the library and we all just stopped his eerie silence hit the park and we all stopped and looked the building and then I remember hearing something that sounded like shots and then everybody just took off into the neighborhood everyone spilled over into the Leawood park and there were kids jumping over fences into backyards and I remember a couple friends and I were sprinting down the street and you know we take an immediate left and then a right kind of just just trying to get away from the building as soon as possible and this woman was outside tending to her garden because and just snow just before and she sees all these kids running down the street and she's like what's going on and there's a problem at the school there's there's something going on at the school so she welcomes it had to have been about thirty kids into her house and so 30 of us spill into this woman's house and the same situation is Zakai I remember calling my mom to tell her that I was okay and to figure out what's but you know she had I tried to find out something about my brother because he was going to the school of the time and my cousin and couldn't find out anything called my mom she said she hadn't yet heard from him so she said to stay in the house stay where I know you're safe I need to stay at home in case your brother calls and so I spent I think probably the next it's probably about four or five hours in this woman's house watching TV so that we could find out what was actually happening she called me back about an hour and a half later saying that she had finally heard from Aaron that he was in the library and that he had spent the majority of what was going on in a science room and then gone to the auditoriums so she says you know I'm gonna try to get ahold of him and the second I do I'll come pick you up I gave her the address it took another three hours for her to get her way into the neighborhood because they quarantined it you couldn't get in or out unless you lived in the neighborhood so she found a cop that she knew luckily and he let her in to get me so she picked up Aaron came and got me we went to grab a couple kids from Leawood because that was kind of a congregating point for most families and then it took about 45 minutes to wind our way out of the neighborhood so that we could go home and yeah I remember getting home around dinnertime and watching news for the next 24 hours got out fairly quickly when the fire alarm went off again didn't understand the urgency I remember walking down the hallway with a friend but I remember going to we would park and the teachers were standing on the sidewalk at the front of the park so on the other side of the street from the school but it felt like they were a shield and I I can't tell you in reality exactly how they were poised but I remember I felt very protected because they were just lining up there and I think that's another piece of why I want to be back in a school working here so something happened I don't know what it was but everyone you know started something kind of erupted and I remember hearing a particular teacher yelling at us to run you got to get out of here and that was the first moment I really felt like I was in danger I felt like I was running for my life um and I was afraid to look behind me so I ran into the neighborhood and I had a friend that lived just a couple blocks in so about a probably a group of about 30 of us went to his house I don't think we were in the same houses but we just took turns calling our parents we tried to watch the news we listened to the helicopters there were lots of people praying lots of people crying and eventually word got out that we needed to go to Leawood Elementary and that was going to be our place where we defined our parents and it in my memory it was like five hours that I was just in the house that I was in it was actually the dad was a cop and he wanted us to all go down and like the lower level because he knew something significant was going on and he didn't want any of us in the line of sight of anyone outside so we were hiding taking turns making the calls then finally we went over to Lee what Elementary and I saw my dad my dad picked me up and you know he has red hair it's not the most hand ever seen him look that pale and he hugged me so tight I had to tell him to let go because I couldn't breathe and I still didn't hit me I I still didn't understand what was going on I was 16 you know how much could I understand but that was the first glimpse of how serious this was because I've never seen my dad so shaken and he you know years later he told me that when he was driving to come get me he was listening to NPR and the thing that stood out to him was a line the unthinkable has just happened at Columbine High School and he said he pushed on the gas a little harder when he heard that but I remember going home and just being in a daze for days trying to figure out which way was up I was a freshman and that day kind of unfolded like any other normal day I was in the art classroom which is about as safe and far away from any of the events of that day as you could be if you were attending school that day the fire alarm went off and I think we kind of all thought it was either alarm or a senior prank and so we were just kind of in that awkward standing up what do we do and and that type of stuff and then it wasn't until some students kind of ran by the classroom and yelled in this isn't a drill that that's when the red flag started to first you know pop up and so we walked out and we walked out like was a fire drill until we walked to the front of school and that's when we saw students kind of sprinting out and streaming out and crying and people discussing about guns and a gang fight and whatever rumors were starting to circulate right at the beginning of the day and my class just walked out to come at park and we we stood and and waited before the policeman to show up and at which point they sent us home and I can't remember thinking well you know what about class you know later that day you know that's where my head was I was still worried about like well I'm gonna be at marked absent you know like unexcused absence my parents are gonna kill me you know that's where I was so then we we went home and that's when you turned on the news I live really close you could see my house from the math the math wing and so sitting in my house you'd see the house you'd hear the helicopters and see the the news unfold and you see your house and so it really wasn't until I got home they started to understand the scope or even start to put the pieces together and then the I have an older sister that was a senior and so she was in the building for a long time and that was the that was the hardest part of the day was waiting because we didn't have any communication and you're waiting to hear from a friend from a friend there was no way to kind of know where she was and so that was the most stressful stressful kind of piece of my day was waiting for news for my sister and getting though that she was okay and kind of watching the events unfold from the news

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Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2019