Dave Cullen: Columbine

Columbine High School was built in 1973 on a dirt road off a larger dirt road way out in horse country. It was named after the flower that blankets sections of the Rockies. Scraggy meadows surrounded the new building, fragrant with pine trees and horse manure. Hardly anybody lived there, but Jeffco was bracing for an influx. Court-ordered busing had spurred an avalanche of white flight out of Denver, and subdivisions were popping up all along the foothills.

Jeffco officials had debated where the arrivals would cluster. They erected three temporary structures in the wilderness to accommodate the stampede. The high schools were identical hollow shells, ready for conversion to industrial use if the population failed to materialize. Columbine resembled a factory by design. Inside, mobile accordion-wall separators were rolled out to create classrooms. Sound carried from room to room, but students could overcome such minor hardships.

Developers kept throwing up new subdivisions, each one pricier than the one before. Jeffco kept all three temporary schools. In 1995, just before Eric and Dylan arrived, Columbine High School underwent a major overhaul. Permanent interior walls were installed, and the old cafeteria on the east side was converted to classrooms. A huge west wing was added, doubling the size of the structure. It bore the signature new architectural feature: the curving green glass of the commons, with the new library above.

By April 1999, the plain was nearly filled, all the way to the foothills. But the fiercely independent residents refused to incorporate. A new town would only impose new rules and new taxes. The 100,000 new arrivals filled one continuous suburb with no town center: no main street, no town hall, town library, or town name. No one was sure what to call it. Littleton is a quiet suburb south of Denver where the massacre did not actually occur. Although the name would grow synonymous with the tragedy, Columbine lies several miles west, across the South Platte River, in a different county with separate schools and law enforcement. The postal system slapped “Littleton” onto a vast tract of seven hundred square miles, stretching way up into the foothills. The people on the plain gravitated toward the name of the nearest high school—the hub of suburban social life. For thirty thousand people clustered around the new high school, Columbine became the name of their home.

Dave Sanders taught typing, keyboarding, business, and economics. He didn’t find all the material particularly interesting, but it enabled him to coach. Dave coached seven different sports at Columbine. He started out with boys but found the girls needed him more. “He had this way of making everyone feel secure,” a friend said. He made the kids feel good about themselves.

Dave didn’t yell or berate the girls, but he was stern and insistent at practice. Again. Again. He watched quietly on the sidelines, and when he spoke, they could count on analysis or inspiration. He had taken over as head coach of girls’ basketball that semester—a team with twelve straight losing seasons. Before the first game, he bought them T-shirts with ONE IN A DOZEN printed on the back. They made it to the state championship tournament that spring.

When someone crossed Dave Sanders, he responded with “the look”: a cold, insistent stare. He used it one time on a couple of chatty girls in business class. They shut up momentarily, but went back to talking when he looked away. So he pulled up a chair right in front of them and conducted the rest of class from that spot, staring back and forth at each girl until the bell rang.

Dave spent almost every night in the gym or the field house, headed back for more on the weekends, and ran summer training camps at the University of Wyoming. Dave was a practical guy. He admired efficiency, tried to do double duty by bringing his daughter to work after school. The basketball girls knew Angela by the time she was a toddler. She hung out in the gym watching Daddy drill the girls: dribbling, tip contests, face-offs… Angela brought her toys with her in a tyke-sized suitcase. By the end of practice, they would be strewn all over the bleachers and the side of the court. The girls let out a big sigh when Dave called out for Angela to start packing up. He worked them hard, and that was the signal that they were nearly done.

Angela treasured those late afternoons. “I grew up at Columbine,” she said. Dave was widening out into a big bear of a man, and when he hugged Angela, she felt safe.

Her mom was less impressed. Kathy Sanders divorced Dave when Angela was three. Dave found a home a few blocks away, so they could stay close. Later, Angie moved in with him. It was such a happy divorce that Kathy became friends with his second wife, Linda Lou.

“Kathy’s such a sweetheart, and she and Dave got along so well,” Linda said. “I asked her one day, ‘Why did you two ever get a divorce?’ And she said, ‘He was never home. I was kind of like married to myself.’”

Linda thrived with the arrangement. Angie was seventeen when she married Dave, and her two girls were nearly raised as well. Linda had been a single working mom for many years and was used to alone time. She grew steadily more dependent on Dave, though. She had been strong when she needed to, but she liked it better with a man to lean on. Independence had been great, but that life was over now.

Linda Lou often met Dave at the Lounge after practice, and they spent the evening together there. She loved the place almost as much as Dave did. They’d met at the Lounge in 1991. They’d held their wedding reception there two years later. It felt like home. Dave felt like home to Linda.

Dave was exactly what Linda had been waiting for: caring, protective, and playfully romantic. He’d proposed on a trip to Vegas. As they’d strolled over a bridge into the Excalibur casino, he’d asked to see her “divorce ring”—which she still wore on her wedding finger. She presented her hand, and he threw the ring into the moat. He asked her to marry him. She gleefully accepted.

Linda and her two daughters moved in, and she and Dave finished raising the girls and Angela. Dave legally adopted Linda’s younger daughter, Coni. He considered all three girls his daughters, and they all called him Dad.

Dave’s lanky runner’s build filled out. His beard grew speckled, then streaked gray. His smile held constant. His blue eyes twinkled. He began to resemble a young Santa Claus. Otherwise, Dave remained remarkably consistent: coaching, laughing, and enjoying his grandkids, but not seeing them enough. He drove an aging Ford Escort, dressed in drab polyester slacks and plain button-down shirts. His hair dwindled, but he parted it neatly on the left. He wore great big oversized glasses with frames from another age. Each night ended with him in his easy chair, chuckling to Johnny Carson, with a tumbler of Diet Coke and Jack Daniel’s in hand. When Johnny retired, the Sanderses had a satellite dish and Dave could always find a game to settle down with. Linda waited for him upstairs.

Out of the blue, just a few weeks before the prom, he decided to update his image. He was forty-seven—time for a change. He surprised Linda in a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, the first big fashion statement of his life. He’d picked them out himself. “Woo-woo!” she howled. She had never seen a Dave like this before!

He was so proud of those glasses. “I finally made it to 1999,” he said.

The big debut came Easter Sunday. He showed up in the glasses at a boisterous family gathering with the grandkids. Nobody noticed.

Alone with Linda that evening, he confessed how badly it hurt.

Dave was planning more changes: No basketball camp this summer. Less coaching, more time with his own girls and his grandkids. There was still time to set it right.