They approached the exit just as the shooters ran out of targets. There were two sets of doors there, separated by an air lock. Nielson and Brian passed the first set and reached for the second handles. Eric spotted them. He turned, raised the rifle to his shoulder, aimed at Nielson, and smiled. Then he fired. The glass shattered, but the bullet missed. Nielson still thought it was a BB gun. Then she saw the size of the hole.
“Dear God!” she screamed. “Dear God! Dear God!”
She turned to run. He fired again. Another miss, but glass and metal shards and possibly a grazing bullet tore through the back of her shoulder. It burned. Brian had turned, too. Nielson heard him grunt, saw him lurch forward. His back arched, his arms flared, and he hit the floor hard. That looked bad, but he got right up onto his hands and knees to scurry back through the first doors. It was shrapnel, just like hers.
She got down, too, and they crawled the short distance back to the first doors. They got one partially open and squeezed through. Once they had that door behind them, they rose to their feet and ran.
Nielson was desperate for a phone. The library seemed like an obvious destination. It was just around the corner, spanning most of the south hallway, behind a glass wall. Nielson saw dozens of kids milling about inside, plainly visible to the shooters she pictured on her heels. She never looked back to see.
Nielson ran into the library to warn them. “There’s a kid with a gun!” she yelled.
There were no adults. That surprised Nielson. Teacher Rich Long had rushed in moments before, yelled at everyone to get out, and then fled to warn others. Patti Nielson had the opposite instinct. She ordered them down.
Then Nielson grabbed the phone behind the counter and punched in 9-911. She concentrated on details, like the extra 9 for an outside line. Don’t waste a second!
Nielson expected the shooter to arrive any moment now. But Eric was not following. He had been distracted. Deputy Gardner had pulled into the lot with lights flashing and siren blaring. Gardner had stepped out of his car, still confused about what he was walking into.
Eric opened fire. He got off ten rounds, all misses. Dylan did nothing.
Gardner took cover behind his police car. Eric didn’t even hit that. Then his rifle jammed. Eric fought to clear the chamber. Dylan fled into the school.
Gardner saw his opening. He laid his pistol across the roof and squeezed off four shots. Eric spun around like he’d been hit. Neutralized, Gardner thought. What a relief.
Seconds later, Eric was firing again. It was a short burst; then he retreated inside.
It was 11:24. The outside ordeal lasted five minutes. Eric did most of the shooting. He fired his 9mm rifle forty-seven times in that period and did not use his shotgun. Dylan got just three shots off with the TEC-9 handgun and two with his shotgun.
They headed down the hallway toward the library.
Dave Sanders heard the shots when Eric fired on Patti Nielson. Coach Sanders ran toward the gunfire. He passed the library entrance just moments after Nielson ran in. He spotted the killers at the other end of the hallway. He wheeled around and ran for the corner.
A boy peeked out of the choir room just in time to see him flee. Sanders wasn’t just running for it, he was trying to clear students out of the line of fire. “Get down!” he yelled.
12. The Perimeter
The story took twenty-eight minutes to hit local television. The networks quickly followed. Something awful was happening at a high school near Denver. Coverage began with confused reports about a shooting in the outlying suburbs: no confirmation on injuries, but multiple shots—as many as nine—and possible explosions. Automatic weapons might be involved, possibly even grenades. A fire had been reported. SWAT teams were mobilizing.
CNN was locked in on Kosovo. NATO had gone to war over the genocide there. Night had just fallen in Belgrade, and American warplanes were massing on the horizon, about to pulverize fresh targets across the Serb capital. At 11:54 A.M. Denver time, CNN cut to Jeffco and stayed there nonstop, all afternoon. The broadcast networks began interrupting the soaps. Columbine quickly overshadowed the war. No one seemed to know what had actually happened. Was it still happening? Apparently. As the networks went live with the story, gunfire and explosions were erupting somewhere inside that school. Outside, it was mayhem: choppers circled, and police, firefighters, parents, and journalists had descended on the campus. Nobody was going inside. Fresh waves of support troops were arriving by the minute, but they just crowded around the building. Occasionally, students would scurry out.
Local stations kept surveying the area hospitals. “There are no patients yet,” a journalist reported from one. “But they are expecting one victim with an ankle wound.”
Jeffco 911 operators were overwhelmed. Hundreds of students were still inside the building. Many had cell phones and were calling with conflicting reports. Thousands of parents from all around the area were dialing the same center, demanding information. Many students gave up on 911 and called the TV stations. Local anchors began interviewing them live on the air, and the cable networks picked up their feeds.
Witnesses confirmed injuries. A girl said she watched “like three people” get shot.
“Did it look like they were shooting at specific people?” a reporter asked.
“They were just shooting. They were—they didn’t care who they shot at; they were just shooting and then they threw a grenade or they threw something that blew up.”
There seemed to be no end of “witnesses,” though most had seen chaos but no one causing it. A senior described the first moments of awareness: “OK, I was sitting in math class, and all of a sudden we look out and there’s people that are sprinting down the math hall and we open the door, we hear a shot, a loud bang, and then we hear some guy go ‘holy crap, there’s a guy with a gun!’ So everybody starts freaking out, one of my friends goes up to the door and says there’s a guy standing there. We evacuate to the corner of our classroom and my teacher just doesn’t know what to do because she’s so freaked.”
There appeared to be several shooters—all boys, all white, all Columbine students. Some were shooting in the parking lot, some in the cafeteria, some upstairs while roaming the halls. Somebody was positioned on the roof. Some of the assault team wore T-shirts; others advanced in long black trench coats. One pair included one of each. Some had hats, and one or two were hiding behind ski masks.
Some of this mix-up was standard crime-scene confusion. Contrary to popular conception, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially when witnesses were under duress. Memories get jumbled and witnesses imagine missing details without realizing they’re doing it. But much of this misunderstanding was due to specific factors. Eric discarded his trench coat at the top of the stairs almost as soon as he began shooting. Dylan kept his on until he got to the library. Each costume change created another shooter. The school’s location on a hill, with nearby entrances on both floors, allowed Eric and Dylan to be seen upstairs and downstairs almost simultaneously. The long-range weapons scattered gunfire over a shooting radius hundreds of yards wide. Distant witnesses had no idea where the shooters were; they only knew they were under attack. Some witnesses listened carefully and correctly located the source of the turbulence——but the bomb blasts often led them astray, particularly when bombs landed on the roof. Several kids were sure something was coming from up there. They spotted a frightened air-conditioner repairman and instantly identified him as the rooftop gunman.