Dave Cullen - Columbine

They talked to a lawyer that night. He related a sobering thought. “Dylan isn’t here anymore for people to hate,” he said. “So people are going to hate you.”

The buses kept arriving at Leawood Elementary, delivering discouragement as well as joy. It was great if your kid got off, but the odds kept dropping as the remaining parents dwindled. “I was getting envious of parents who were finding their kids and screaming out their names,” Doreen Tomlin recalled. She found it harder and harder to get up. Her husband kept the faith, but hers played out. Buses arrived, and she stayed in her seat, silently chastising herself. “I thought, Why aren’t you getting up and looking? All these other parents are pinned to the stage, and you’re just sitting here .”

Brian Rohrbough had given up even earlier. By 2:00 P.M., while Leawood was packed with hopeful parents, Brian had accepted Danny’s fate. “I knew he was gone,” he said. “I assume it was God telling me, preparing me. I hoped I was wrong. We waited for busloads of kids, but I knew he wasn’t going to be on it. I told Sue, ‘You know he’s gone.’”

But his ex-wife was hopeful. In the public library, Misty Bernall was, too. Her son, Chris, had turned up, but Cassie was still missing. She is alive! Misty told herself fiercely. Nothing could dampen Misty’s resolve, or her perseverance.

“Her mom came up to me every two minutes and asked if I’d seen Cassie,” a friend of her daughter said. “I told her, ‘I’m sure there are a lot of people unaccounted for.’” Not what Misty wanted to hear.

Prayer helped. “Please, God, just give me my baby back,” she prayed. “Please, God, where is she?”

Misty gave up on the public library. She made her way through Clement Park and discovered the buses being loaded. She scurried from one to the next. A friend of Cassie’s reached out to grab her hand.

“Have you seen Cass?” Misty cried.

“No.”

Misty returned to the library. Brad and Chris met her there. Then everyone was sent to Leawood. That was a huge relief for the parents waiting there: more families, better odds.

The buses kept coming, every ten to twenty minutes for a while. Then arrivals slowed. Around four o’clock, they stopped. One more bus was promised. Parents looked around. Whose kids would it be?

The wait went on endlessly. At five o’clock, it still wasn’t there. Siblings wandered out to watch for it, hoping to run inside with the news. Doreen Tomlin had not gotten up in a long time, but she was still praying her boy would be on it. “We were clinging to that hope,” she said.

At dinnertime, President Clinton held a press conference in the West Wing to discuss the attack. “Hillary and I are profoundly shocked and saddened by the tragedy today in Littleton,” he said. He passed on the hope of a Jeffco official, who had just told him: “Perhaps now America would wake up to the dimensions of this challenge, if it could happen in a place like Littleton.”

Clinton sent a federal crisis response team and urged reporters to resist jumping to conclusions. “What I would like to do is take a couple of days because we don’t know what the facts are here,” he said. “And keeping in mind, the community is an open wound right now.”

At Leawood, even the resilient families were faltering. Nothing had changed: no buses, no word, for hours on end. District attorney Dave Thomas tried to comfort the families. He knew which ones would need it. He had thirteen names in his breast pocket. Ten students had been identified in the library, and two more outside, based on their clothing and appearance. One teacher lay in Science Room 3. All deceased. It was a solid list, but not definitive. Thomas kept it to himself. He told the parents not to worry.

At eight o’clock, they were moved to another room. Sheriff Stone introduced the coroner. She handed out forms asking for descriptions of their kids’ clothing and other physical details. That’s when John Tomlin realized the truth. The coroner asked them to retrieve their kids’ dental records. That went over unevenly. Many took it gravely; others perked up. They had a task, finally, and hope for resolution.

A woman leapt up. “Where is that other bus!” she demanded.

There was no bus. “There was never another bus,” Doreen Tomlin said later. “It was like a false hope they gave you.” Many parents felt betrayed. Brian Rohrbough later accused the school officials of lying; Misty Bernall also felt deceived. “Not intentionally, perhaps, but deceived nonetheless,” she wrote. “And so bitterly that it almost choked me.”

Sheriff Stone told them that most of the dead kids had been in the library. “John always went to the library,” Doreen said. “I felt like I was going to pass out. I felt sick.”

She felt sadness but not surprise. Doreen was an Evangelical Christian, and believed the Lord had been preparing her for the news all afternoon. Most of the Evangelicals reacted differently than the other parents. The press had been cleared from the area, but Lynn Duff was assisting the families as a Red Cross volunteer. A liberal Jew from San Francisco, she was taken aback by what she saw.

“The way that those families reacted was markedly different,” she said. “It was like a hundred and eighty degrees from where everybody else was. They were singing; they were praying; they were comforting the other parents, especially the parents of Isaiah Shoels [the only African American killed]. They were thinking a lot about the other parents, the other families, and responding a lot to other people’s needs. They were definitely in pain, and you could see the pain in their eyes, but they were very confident of where their kids were. They were at peace with it. It was like they were a living example of their faith.”

But not all the Evangelicals reacted the same way. Misty Bernall was defiant. She was sure Cassie was alive.

Mr. D stayed with the families. He was doing his best to console them, and waiting for word on a close friend. He had known Dave Sanders for twenty years. They had coached three sports together, shared hundreds of beers, and Frank had attended Dave’s wedding. Frank had been hearing rumors about Dave all afternoon.

Sometime after the coroner’s announcements, a teacher and a friend of both men, Rich Long, showed up at Leawood. He saw Frank and rushed up to hug him. “All I can remember was seeing blood on his pants and his shirt,” Frank said later. “And I said, ‘Rich, tell me. Is it true? Is Dave dead?’ And he couldn’t give me an answer.”

Frank assured Rich he was strong enough to take the news. “Tell me!” he pleaded. “I need to know.”

Rich couldn’t help him. He was struggling with the same question.

Agent Fuselier had talked gunmen down and seen a few open fire right in front of him. He had struggled for weeks to release eighty-two people at Waco, then watched the gas tanks erupt and the buildings burn down. He’d known they were all dying inside Waco. Watching had been unbearable. This was worse.

Fuselier went home and gave Brian a hug. It had been a long time between hugs, and it was hard to let go. Then he sat down to watch the news reports with Mimi. He held her hand and choked back tears. “How could you go home and get dental records?” he asked. “Then what? You know your kid is lying there dead. How do you go to sleep?”

Dave Sanders was one of the few teachers unaccounted for. He was still in Science Room 3. The SWAT team had reached him still alive, but hopeless. Several minutes later, before he was evacuated, Dave Sanders bled to death.