Dave Cullen - Columbine

Patrick Ireland was struggling. His days at Craig Hospital that first summer were exhausting. Speech therapy, muscle therapy, testing, prodding, poking, and the endless efforts just to communicate. Retrieving the right word often eluded him. At night Patrick would lie quietly in his room, winding down before settling off to sleep. John or Kathy would stay with him. They took turns each night; one of them would sleep on a fold-out chair beside his bed. Just in case.

They would turn the lights off around eleven or twelve and just sit there in the dark with him, quietly at first; then he would begin to ask questions. He needed to know everything. What exactly happened in the library? How did he respond? What was going to happen now? Patrick wanted to know about the other victims, too, and the killers sometimes—what could make them do something like that?

“There were certainly times that I was mad,” Patrick said later. “But I think a lot of those were more for realizations of what was taken from me, rather than actually what transpired. My life was going be completely changed.” Patrick tried not to stay angry on the basketball court. Make a mistake, brush it off. “Keep your eye on the ball,” he could hear his dad say. Patrick focused on the present.

His speech was returning slowly. Short-term memory was a struggle. There were exercises for everything. A therapist would recite a list of twenty things, and he’d have to repeat them in the same order. It was hard.

Patrick shed his anger toward the killers early, but his condition could be infuriating. Outbursts are typical with head wounds. Anger and frustration commonly last several months. The blue period, they call it. His therapists were tracking that as well. When Patrick shook his fist at them, they would note it in his chart.

Patrick stayed at Craig Hospital for nine and a half weeks. He walked out on July 2, using a forearm crutch to support himself. He wore a plastic brace on his right leg. His doctors sent him home with a wheelchair for when he needed to cover long distances. A banner signed by friends welcomed him back.

The summer went quickly. Patrick wasn’t ready for school to start. He was overbooked already: occupational, physical, and speech therapy, and neuropsychology. They were exhausting days. But he was walking more steadily. His speech was pretty intelligible, and the extended pauses while he searched for words grew briefer. A sentence might be interrupted only once now, or sometimes not at all. The blue period passed.

As he continued working, Patrick thought more about the lake. He knew he couldn’t get on the water. He could hear the buzz of the boat, smell the water lapping the pier. Eventually, Patrick convinced his father to take him out to watch his sister make some practice runs. He loved waterskiing. John started the boat. As the engine sputtered, Patrick smelled the fumes, closed his eyes, and he was out there riding the surface again. He sat on the dock reliving it all. Then he began to cry. He shook violently. He swore. John rushed over to comfort him. He was inconsolable. He wasn’t angry at his parents or himself or Eric or Dylan—he was just angry. He wanted his life back. He was never going to get it. John assured him they would get through this. Then he held on to Patrick and let him cry.

Four months after the police tape went up, Columbine was set to reopen. August 16 was the target date. The atmosphere that morning would mean everything. If students came home feeling like they had made a clean break over the summer and moved on, then they would have. The first few minutes of that morning would set the tone for the entire year. Administrators had gathered students, faculty, victims, and other stakeholders and brainstormed all summer. They’d consulted psychologists and cultural anthropologists and grief experts and had come up with an elaborate ritual. It would be called Take Back the School.

For the ceremony to have impact, they needed an adversary to overcome. And the more tangible and odious the adversary, the better. It was an easy choice: the media. The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News were still running Columbine stories every day—several a day. As the fall semester beckoned, coverage shot back up: ten stories a day between the two papers. And the national outlets were back. How do you feel? everyone constantly wanted to know. Students started sporting bite me T-shirts, and quite a few faculty members did, too.

The media had made their lives hell. And reporters could be counted on to appear in record numbers. The rally would include speeches and cheers and rock music and a ribbon cutting, but the heart of the event was a public rebuke of the media and a ceremonial reclaiming of the school—from them. Thousands of parents and neighbors would be recruited to form a human shield to rebuke the press. The shield would function both symbolically and practically. It would prevent reporters from performing their despicable job. They literally would not be able to see what was going on. The rally could have easily been planned for inside—virtually every school rally was. This event would be held outside specifically to stick it to the media. No doors or locks or walls would keep out the media; they would be blocked by a human wall of shame. And the school would dare them to try to cross it.

Reporters were kept in the dark about the agenda until seven days before the rally. On August 9, the school convened a Media Guidelines Summit. Forty news organizations attended, local and national. The invitation was filled with conciliatory phrases like “exchange ideas” and “balance the interests.” The district lined up a group of trauma experts. A professor outlined bereavement: these kids were still in the early stages, and many were suffering from PTSD. Mental repetition of the trauma trapped them there. The TV stations kept recycling the same stock footage: SWAT teams, bloody victims, hugging survivors, kids running out with hands on their heads.

Reporters did not like where this was going. Then victim’s advocate Robin Finegan introduced the larger idea: kids felt as if their identities had been stolen. “Columbine” was the name of a tragedy now. Their school was a symbol of mass murder. They had been cast as bullies or snotty rich brats. “There comes a point where victims need to have ownership of their tragedy,” Finegan said. So far, the media owned the Columbine tragedy. That was about to change, the district said—or good luck getting your precious “Columbine returns” stories. Administrators outlined the gist of the ceremony.

“What’s the human chain for?” a reporter asked.

“To shield the students from you folk,” district spokesman Rick Kaufman said.

Most media would be excluded. A small pool would be escorted in. Reporters were incredulous. One print reporter? The White House didn’t limit its pool that tightly. Reporters for the big national papers huddled in the back of the room, discussing options to “lawyer up.”

The district wouldn’t back down, Kaufman said. In fact, the pool would come only with major concessions: no helicopters, no rooftop photographers, and no breach of school grounds. “If we can’t get agreement, then there’s no pool,” he said.

Try it, reporters threatened; it will backfire. “As long as parents understand that by saying no to everything, again it’s going to be a situation where we’re coming out of rocks and stuff in order to get sound and pictures,” a TV executive said. “And I wonder if the parents really understand, if they think they control us by just saying no, they’re really not; they’re forcing us to go in other directions.”