Dave Cullen - Columbine

Brian Fuselier was heading into his sophomore year at Columbine. Weeks under the microscope had been miserable; the tourists were too much. “I just want to walk up and punch them in the nose!” he told his dad.

On June 2, most of the student body finally reconnected with the physical Columbine. It was an emotional day. Students had two hours to go back inside and retrieve their backpacks and cell phones and everything else they had abandoned when they ran for it. Their parents were allowed in as well. It gave everyone a chance to face their fears. Hundreds of kids stumbled out in tears. Useful tears. Most found the experience stressful but cathartic.

They were kicked out again for two months, while construction crews renovated the interior. The students had mixed feelings about anything changing, but they were taking that one on faith. The district had open enrollment, so everyone expected a big drop in Columbine’s student body the next fall. Students reacted the opposite way: transfers out were minimal. Fall enrollment actually went up. Students felt they had lost so much already, that surrendering an inch of corridor or a single classroom would feel like defeat. They wanted their school back. All of it!

Mr. D and the faculty were focused on the kids: getting them into therapy and watching out for trauma symptoms. School officials formed a design review board to address the library. It included students, parents, and faculty. Consensus came readily: gut the room and rebuild it. Redesign the layout, replace and reconfigure the furniture, change the wall color, the carpet, even the ceiling tiles. It was a drastic version of the plan put together for the entire school. Trauma experts advised the board to balance two objectives: make the kids feel their school had survived and surround them with changes too subtle to identify. The library was the exception: it would feel completely different.

Renovation of the school would cost $1.2 million, and would be tough to complete before school resumed in August. The design board moved quickly, and the school board adopted its proposal in early June. The parents of the murdered kids were aghast. Rearrange the furniture? Slap on some paint and recarpet? The design team saw their plan as a complete overhaul. Their adversaries called it “cosmetic.”

Initially, the students and the victims’ families assumed they were all in this together. It took them several weeks to realize they were about to battle each other. Parents of the Thirteen saw that they were outnumbered; they formed the Parents Group to fight back. On May 27, just as they were organizing, a notorious lawyer and media hound flew to Denver for a boisterous press conference. Geoffrey Fieger had become a cable news staple via splashy media trials, like that of Dr. Kevorkian, the assisted-suicide doctor. Fieger teamed with Isaiah Shoels’s family to make an ostentatious demand sure to return Columbine to national headlines in the worst possible light: a wrongful death suit against the killers’ parents, for a quarter of a billion dollars.

“This is not about money!” Isaiah’s stepfather declared. “This lawsuit is about change! That’s the only way you get change, if you go rattling their pocketbooks.” He was right, but the public was skeptical about motives. Fieger insisted he would spend more money mounting the case than he could hope to recover. Colorado law limited awards from individuals to $250,000, and governmental entities were capped at $150,000. “This lawsuit is a symbol,” he said. “There will be cynics who would chalk the lawsuit up to greed.”

Lawsuits had been anticipated, but nobody had foreseen one so garish, or so soon. Colorado law gave victims a year to file and six months to declare intent. It had only been five weeks. Families had been talking about lawsuits as means of leverage, and a last resort.

The lawsuit served as a trial balloon that sank. The survivors were particularly repulsed. Many of them had dedicated the next phase of their lives to some form of justice: anti-bullying, gun control, prayer in schools, SWAT protocols, warning signs, or just reclaiming their school or destroying the library. Lawsuits threatened to taint all that. They also shed a bad light on the next big battle, which was already developing when the Shoelses conducted their press conference. That fight revolved around money, too. The public donations had been astonishing, but the good fortune came at a price.

More than $2 million rolled in the first month. A month later, the total was $3.5 million. Forty different funds sprouted up. The local United Way set up the Healing Fund to coordinate the distribution of monies. Robin Finegan was a veteran therapist and victim’s advocate who had worked closely with Oklahoma City survivors. “It is predictable that this will become a very difficult, painful process,” she told NPR. There were too many competing interests. “We’re going to leave people, some people, not feeling great about this.” That was an understatement.

When a pair of teachers were collectively granted $5,000 for anxiety treatment, Brian Rohrbough blew his stack. “That’s criminal,” he said. He wanted the money divided equally between the families of the injured and the dead. But was equality fair? Lance Kirklin’s father estimated his medical bills at $1 to $2 million; the family was uninsured. Mark Taylor needed surgery for four gunshots to the chest; his mom couldn’t afford groceries or pay the rent. The process was humiliating, she said. She felt like a beggar. “My son’s in the hospital. I can’t work. We’re broke and they have millions of dollars in donations. I’m disgusted.”

The attorney for the Taylors and Kirklins suggested that some families needed compensation more than others. Brian Rohrbough erupted again. That implied that Danny’s life had no value, he told the Rocky Mountain News . For Brian, the money was symbolic: the ultimate valuation of each life. For others it was purely practical.

In early July, the Healing Fund announced its distribution plan: 40 percent of the $3.8 million would go to direct victims. A clever compromise was reached for that money: the four kids with critical injuries got $150,000 each; $50,000 went to each of the Thirteen. That totaled $650,000 for the dead versus $600,000 for the critically injured, giving the Thirteen the appearance of preeminence. Twenty-one injured students got $10,000 each, a fraction of the medical bills for many. Most of the remainder went to trauma counseling and tolerance programs. Roughly $750,000 was earmarked for contingencies, a compromise to cover unpaid medical bills without appearing to favor the injured over the dead.

Brian Rohrbough backed off once he felt heard.

Tom Klebold was dealing with a lot of anger. “Who gave my son these guns?” he asked Reverend Marxhausen. He also felt betrayed by the school culture that picked on kids outside the mainstream.

Tom did his best to shut out the angry world. His job allowed him to hunker down at home, and he took full advantage. Sue was not wired that way. “She has to get out,” Marxhausen said.

May 28, Kathy Harris wrote condolence letters to the Thirteen. Many of the addresses were unpublished, so she sealed each one in an envelope with the family’s name, put them all in a manila envelope, and mailed it to an address the school district had set up as a clearinghouse for correspondence to victims. A week later, Kathy sent a second batch for the families of twenty-three injured. The school district turned them all over to the sheriff’s department as potential evidence. It sat on them. Officials decided not to read them or deliver them.

In mid-July, the media discovered the snafu. “It’s really not our job” to distribute them, Sergeant Randy West said. The letters had no postage or addresses, so commanders decided to return to sender. West complained about the family’s refusal to meet without immunity, and said his team had trouble reaching their attorneys. “They’re busy, we’re busy and we can’t seem to connect with them,” Sergeant West said. “I guess if you want to make things easier you could just talk to us.”