Feeling their fear, learning their lessons

Danette Goulet

A smile. A wave in greeting. Perhaps a “hello.”

These simple gestures of kindness are the sort of thing that four

Columbine High School students say might have prevented the tragic

shooting deaths of 12 classmates and a teacher in Littleton, Colo., last

year.

It was to help convey this message to Costa Mesa High School students

Friday that the four survivors of the killing spree, using only their

first names, related their personal accounts of that fateful day.

“All we hear is screaming and trampling,” said 17-year-old Courtney. “The

halls are just filled with students. We were in a very tiny room; it was

a storage room next to my biology room. There are 30 kids sitting and

laying on each other. We were stuck in there for three and a half hours.

“We heard Eric and Dylan, the killers, running up and down the halls

yelling ‘we got one, let’s get another.’ The first thing we had to do

when we stepped out of that room was jump over a puddle of blood.”

Each of the four students were in different areas of the school that day

and each relayed their experiences.

Evan, a 16-year-old varsity football player and wrestler, was in the

library when the shooting and explosions erupted.

The two students who went on the rampage were outcasts -- their main

targets were jocks.

“They put guns to my head and asked ‘why do you deserve to live?’ ” Evan

said. “I said ‘I don’t have a problem with you guys and I’ve always been

nice to you.’ They knew it was true and that’s why I am alive today.”

Prior to that confrontation, Evan had been shot in the back, peppered

with buckshot, and had chunks of wood lodged in his neck.

The students who survived are now wracked with guilt, they said. Each

wondered if the massacre could have been prevented, had they been just a

little kinder, a little more accepting.

“What I learned from April 20th was to accept each other, and it

shouldn’t take this to make me realize it,” said 17-year-old Elisha, who

had to jump over the body of her friend, Rachel Scotts, to escape. She

also witnessed a coach being hit by bullets that whizzed over her head

and shoulders.

Although Elisha and Evan were closest to the senseless killings, having

been in the cafeteria and library, other students were privy to another

kind of terror.

Richard, 17, remembered searching frantically for friends, pacing and

waiting helplessly as he wondered about the fate of so many.

“Parents would come up to me and ask ‘do you know my son or daughter, do

you know if they’re alive?’ ” said Richard. “That was a normal question

at the time.”

Costa Mesa students may not have been able to truly imagine the horror

described to them, but they were able to experience something they hoped

they would never know.

“I’m taking these things to heart and I just hope everyone else does,

too,” said Erin Bayes, 16.

Some students just sat and listened. Some were shocked and upset, others

moved to tears.

But for some students, the stories of Columbine struck a chord of fear.

“I just think that it could happen at my school, because they had a

better school than ours,” said Shem Gerhauser, 17. “It was all preppy.

Ours isn’t like that so much.”