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The epicenter of the Columbine High School mass shooting was the library, where Craig Scott was studying for a biology test on April 20, 1999. Scott, then 16, said he had just sat down next to his friend, Matt Kechter, when his life turned upside down.
This week marks 25 years since two seniors at the Colorado high school committed one of the most infamous school shootings in American history, killing 12 students and a teacher. The shooting left 21 others with gunshot wounds and three with injuries suffered in the ensuing chaos.
Now, at age 41, Scott that he still vividly recalls the horror and the carnage he witnessed that day while hiding under a desk in the library „paralyzed with fear“ as the two gunmen were just inches away.
„Some people were begging for their life. And (the gunmen) treated it like it was a game and seemingly having fun doing it, and just totally disconnected with the life that they were robbing,“ Scott said.
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„They came over to where I was,“ Scott continued. „They saw my friend, Isaiah (Shoels). At my school, Isaiah was one of the very few African American students. One of them called the other one over and started to call Isaiah racial slurs. They tried to drag him out from under the table. And they shot and killed Isaiah, shot and killed my friend, Matt. They left me under there. I thought I was going to die.“
By some miracle, Scott said, he got out safely, covered in the blood of another injured classmate whom he helped escape, only to learn his own sister, 17-year-old Rachel Joy Scott, was the first victim slain in the rampage.
Also killed were Daniel Rohrbough, 15; Kyle Velasquez, 16; Steven Curnow, 14; Cassie Bernall, 17; Lauren Townsend, 18; John Tomlin, 17; Kelly Fleming, 16; Daniel Mauser, 15; Corey DePooter, 17; Dave Sanders, 47; and 16-year-old Kechter and 18-year-old Shoels.
The shooters took their own lives in the library that day, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office said.415 killed in school shootings since Columbine
At the time, the massacre in the suburban Denver suburb of Littleton was the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. There had only been a few of note before it. The 1979 shooting at Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego left two dead and nine wounded; A 1989 shooting at another Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California, left 5 dead and 32 wounded. Two were killed and 25 were injured in the 1998 Thurston High School shooting in Springfield, Oregon.
The only other tandem school shooters in U.S. history were a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old who killed four classmates and a teacher in 1998 at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The pair were tried and convicted as juveniles and were released from prison when they turned 21.
The Columbine shooting wasn’t eclipsed until nearly eight years later when on April 16, 2007, a 23-year-old student fatally shot 32 people at Virginia Tech — the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. Like the Columbine shooters, the Virginia Tech shooter died by suicide.
Since the Columbine attack, 415 people have been killed in school shootings as of April 2, 2024, and 907 have been wounded, according to an ABC News review of the Gun Violence Archive, a website that tracks all shootings in the United States. Fifty-five of the attacks were mass shootings, which the Gun Violence Archive defines as four or more people injured or killed, not including the perpetrator.
In 1999, Columbine was among six school shootings in the United States, according to the Gun Violence Archive. In 2024 alone, there have already been 47 shootings at U.S. schools as of April 2, including one on Jan. 4, 2024, that left a student dead and seven people injured, including the principal, at Perry High School in Iowa.
„I truly believe that it was the beginning of the 24/7 news cycle. And it was brought into the living rooms,“ Frank DeAngelis, who was the principal at Columbine High School at the time of the massacre, said of why that attack has left an indelible mark on the nation.
„And what really haunts me a little bit is thinking that we’re still talking about Columbine to the fact that when there is another school shooting … they make references to ‚another Columbine attack,'“ the 69-year-old DeAngelis, who retired in 2014 after 35 years as a teacher and school administrator, .
But DeAngelis said that while each new school shooting immediately brings him back to the Columbine attack, there have been an incalculable number of lives saved since the mass shooting because of a dramatic shift in training and preparedness.
„Back in 1999 … the only drills we did at Columbine were fire drills,“ DeAngelis said.
Named in honor of the retired principal, the Frank DeAngelis Center for Community Safety in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, has provided active-shooter training to more than 170,000 school resource officers, SWAT team members and other law enforcement officers, paramedics and even Navy SEALs, said DeAngelis.
„The police, at that time, had something called ’secure the perimeter‘ where they had to wait for the SWAT team to get there,“ DeAngelis said. „So now we’re training single officers to go in.
