Dave Cullen - Columbine

Patrick Ireland did not see a television or a newspaper the first week. He didn’t realize his family was protecting him or how big the Columbine tragedy was. He had no idea the whole country was watching. He didn’t even know who had died.

The first indication of what he was involved in came when friends called to check on him from Europe. He had gone on a class trip a month earlier and stayed with a family near Madrid. Now they were worried about him. Patrick was taken aback. They were hearing about this in Spain?

Seven days out, he transferred to Craig Hospital. He began rehab and was quickly scooting around the hospital in a wheelchair. He returned from therapy one day and turned on the TV. It was the news, they were listing the people killed. They showed Corey DePooter’s picture. Patrick was stunned. Corey was one of his best friends. They had started in the library together, but gotten separated when the noises first started outside and Corey went to investigate. Patrick had never seen him since.

“I started bawling,” Patrick said later. “I think that was the first time I cried.”

The staff at Craig was not pushing for a first step—just a little movement. If he could get control of that leg and lift it up off the mattress, there was hope. His leg was fine. All the neural pathways up and down his spinal cord were intact. Signals passed unimpeded to the muscles wrapped around his femur. Millions of tiny nerve endings continued transmitting sensory data along the length of his thigh.

Patrick knew, intellectually, that all that fine machinery was functional. But he couldn’t reach it. There was just the tiniest little gap in the network inside his brain. Somewhere inside his head he could feel himself issue the command. He felt it moving in there, but then it got lost. He squeezed his eyes, squeezed his brain, tried to force it. Squeezing didn’t help. The leg refused.

Something was missing. The makeshift memorials in Clement Park had grown enormous over the first few days. Hundreds of thousands of flowers were piled up with poems, drawings, and teddy bears. Letter jackets, jewelry, and wind chimes added sprinkles of individuality. The district rented several warehouses to store them.

It wasn’t enough. The survivors didn’t know what they needed, or where or why, exactly, but they needed something. They were searching for a symbol, and they knew it immediately when it came.

Seven days after the massacre, shortly before sunset, a row of fifteen wooden crosses rose up along the crest of Rebel Hill. They stood seven feet high, three feet wide, and were spaced evenly along the length of the mesa. Clement Park’s floodlights lit up the low-hanging clouds behind them, and the crosses cast an eerie silhouette against the thunderheads. The tips seemed to glow. They were startling, too, for their imperfections. The dimensions seemed a little off: the crossbeams looked far too short, and were branched too close to the top. Some were planted poorly, leaning badly to one side. Within hours, the arms dangled beads, ribbons, rosaries, placards, flags, and so many blue and white balloons.

Over the next five days, 125,000 people trekked up the hill to reach the crosses. They trudged through the mud as a vicious storm pounded the hill. They tore away the grass. Many waited two hours in the rain just to begin the climb. It felt like a pilgrimage.

The crosses had come from Chicago. A short, pudgy carpenter built them out of pine he got at Home Depot. He drove them to Colorado in a pickup, planted them on the hill, and drove back. He’d taped a black-and-white photo of one victim or killer to each cross, and he left a pen dangling from each one to encourage graffiti.

“I couldn’t believe how fast people came up and started putting stuff around them,” an onlooker said. Soon each cross had sprouted a pile covering the base and making its way up to the arms. Christian dog tags were popular, with phrases like “God Is Awesome” and “Jesus Lives.” Several crosses were wrapped head to foot in flowers, others dressed in shirts and jackets and pants.

On thirteen crosses, the messages were loving and uncontroversial. The killers’ crosses hosted a bitter debate: “HATE BREEDS HATE.” “How can anyone forgive you?”

“I forgive you,” someone responded. Half the messages were conciliatory: “Sorry we all failed you.” “No one is to blame.”

It was exactly as Tom and Sue Klebold had feared. If they had buried Dylan, his grave would look like that.

A woman told a reporter she’d been spit on for grieving for the killers, then shoved into the mud. A woman with a baby wrote “Evil Bastard” on Dylan’s cross. The crowd didn’t like it. Then she wrote it again. Two teenage girls approached her; crying, they begged her to stop. Someone began singing “Amazing Grace.” Soon much of the hillside was belting out the refrain. The woman left.

“The crosses ask an implicit question,” Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Littwin wrote. “Are you ready to forgive? When I first saw the crosses and understood what they meant, I wondered if it was too soon even to ask that question. Most people wouldn’t have defaced the cross, but many would have been tempted. Do those crosses defile what has become sacred ground?”

Hell yes, Brian Rohrbough said. Just when he thought the pain couldn’t get any worse, some jerk had raised a shrine to his son’s murderer. Who could be that cruel?

Despite the flare-ups, controversy was the exception. One woman marveled at the forgiveness in her community. “How many other places would allow this and not have taken [Eric and Dylan’s crosses] out of the ground already?” she asked.

Saturday’s edition of the Rocky led with a three-word headline: DAD DESTROYS CROSSES. A haunting photo captured thirteen remaining tributes, with two stark gaps. Eric and Dylan’s crosses had lasted three days.

“You don’t cheapen what Christ did for us by honoring murderers with crosses,” Brian said. “There’s nowhere in the Bible that says to forgive an unrepentant murderer. Most Christians don’t know that. These fools have come out saying ‘Forgive everyone.’ You don’t repent, you don’t forgive them—that’s what the Bible says.”

Rohrbough divided the community. Some people understood his anger. Others found his response a little harsh. “People need to learn to forgive,” a woman on the hill told the Rocky . But then she thought for a moment. “I can understand his rage.”

Brian’s first response was not to destroy the two crosses. He initially affixed each one with a sign saying “Murderers burn in hell.”

The park district took them down. Officials said they had also removed a teddy bear smeared with ketchup and were prohibiting anything obscene.

Brian conferred with his ex-wife, Sue, and her husband, Rich Petrone. They agreed to a united front on everything. Rich called several officials: Sheriff Stone; Dave Thomas, the DA; and the man in charge of the parks department.

“The three of them said those crosses shouldn’t be there; we’re going to take them down—give us until tomorrow at five and we promise you they’ll be gone,” Brian said. He and the Petrones went to the hill at five and nothing had happened. “So we decided, let’s just go take care of this,” Brian said. “We don’t need to put up with this stuff.”

Brian wanted those symbols out, and he wanted the world to see it. He called CNN and a crew filmed it. “It wasn’t going be done in darkness,” Brian said.

Brian and the Petrones hauled the crosses away, hacked them into little pieces, and then tossed the rubble into a Dumpster.

“We got back and we were sitting there talking about it, and the phone rings,” Brian recalled. “It was Thomas: ‘Just give us a little more time.’ And Rich says, ‘Nope, we’ve already taken care of it.’”