Frank DeAngelis stood in his home office, his hair graying over his ears, and pointed to each frame on the wall, telling the story behind the mementos he’s collected over the last two decades.
“It’s a little bit of history,” Frank said.
Even still, 20 years after two students stormed the Colorado campus, killing 12 students and one teacher, Frank DeAngelis is inextricably linked to Columbine — and to the event that has come to mark a horrific and ongoing chapter in America’s saga of school massacres.
At first, he was bound by a promise to stay at the helm until every student who’d been at the school that unimaginable morning had graduated. Then, he expanded that vow, remaining until every local child who’d been in class that day, down to preschoolers, had earned a diploma.
Since stepping away from the principal’s office, he has continued his commitment to collective recovery — and expanded his flock far beyond Columbine High School.
Five years after retiring, the 64-year-old is as busy as ever, traveling the country to shepherd principals and communities that have fallen victim to the scourge of school shootings. It’s the latest iteration of an evolving role, however unwelcome, he has pioneered since April 20,1999.
“Columbine offers hope,” Frank told CNN. “And that’s what I hope, 20 years later, that we’re doing, that we’re reaching out to other people — the Parklands, the Santa Fes, the Sandy Hooks, the Virginia Techs.”
“I feel I was chosen to do that.”
But he’s also given so much of himself to Columbine, several people close to him said. And with the 20th anniversary of the shooting and the publication of a new memoir, “They Call Me ‘Mr. De,'” Frank’s wife, Diane DeAngelis, hopes he soon considers slowing down.
“It always comes to a head right before the anniversary,” she said. “And I just hope that with the 20th, that maybe this is the last anniversary that is as big as it is and that we can move on a bit.”
A devoted educator faces the unthinkable
When Frank was 13, he got a job in a pizzeria. In high school, he delivered newspapers. Frank’s parents taught hard work and dedication, and when he got sick, he hardly ever missed work.
Diane, who dated Frank in high school, said he was nice but very serious. He didn’t have a sense of humor. The couple spent all their time together, and while still in high school, Frank gave her a promise ring and said he wanted to get married. Diane didn’t want that, she said, so they broke up.
“I had no spontaneity… I was so serious,” Frank admitted. “I was 15 or 16 going on 30, and I had to plan my whole life out.”
Even so, Frank was unsure what he wanted to study in college, his brother said. But they had both played sports growing up, so when Frank told his brother he’d become an educator, Anthony DeAngelis assumed it was for the sake of athletics.
“I thought, ‘He’s probably going to be pretty good at this,'” Anthony said.
As with all things, Frank dove in deep. Early in his career, Frank’s principal once forced him to fork over his keys to the school for a weekend. “He said, ‘I do not want to see you around this school. Frank, you need to get away,'” he remembered.
Frank displayed that same commitment to each of his students and the baseball players he coached, said Tom Tonelli, one of Frank’s former pupils and a Columbine High School graduate who went on to teach at the school.
“It was always: Be a good student, be a good athlete, but above all else, be a good person,” said Tonelli of Frank’s expectations.
Still today, when Frank’s brother hands over his credit card at restaurants, servers often ask if he’s related to Frank, Anthony said. A waitress last year told him Frank had been her principal.
“And she goes, ‘You could talk to any of my friends. What we appreciated was how he treated us,'” Anthony recalled.
That sentiment holds whether before or after the shooting, said Tonelli, who was on staff at Columbine the day gunfire erupted.
“Do I think the shooting transformed him? Absolutely,” the teacher said. “But to say somehow he became a totally different type of person, I don’t think so. The character he exhibited in the wake of the tragedy is just a reflection of who he was before it happened.”
When ‘the world didn’t believe in us,’ he did
Columbine High School serves a middle- and upper-middle-class community in Littleton, Colorado, where the mountains in the west rise into a wide open sky. Before the massacre, it was an “ideal” community, Frank said, with a lot of parental support and where he “could count on my two hands the number of fistfights we had in 20 years.”
After the shooting, Frank “felt this enormous burden to go rebuild that community,” he said.
