DENVER—On April 20, 1999, Columbine High School’s principal joined a fellowship created by bullets and blood.
In the moments and months after Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 people at Columbine, Frank DeAngelis heard from other schools where violence had turned classrooms into crime scenes. They offered empathy born of wounds too deep to fully heal, and he remembers how grateful he was for their compassion and insight.
For the past nine years, DeAngelis has paid it forward.
After Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people and wounded 25 others at Virginia Tech a year ago, DeAngelis reached out. After Steven Kazmierczak opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University on Feb. 14, killing five students and injuring 16 others, DeAngelis reached out again.
“It’s a club none of us wants to be in, but we’re forced into it,” said Lisa Leslie, project manager for Response and Recovery at Virginia Tech. “It’s a family of brokenhearted people, and we’re all in it together, doing what we can to help the next person.”
In the flood of calls, e-mails and offers of support that began within minutes of the Northern Illinois University shootings, the messages from Virginia Tech administrators and DeAngelis carried special weight, says Tom Krepel, assistant to the NIU president.
“He had been there, and we hadn’t,” Krepel said. “This isn’t anything you train for. It’s just thrust upon you. You hope it never is, but you deal with it when happens. And you rely on the advice and good counsel of people like Frank.”
DeAngelis does it because others did it for him, and he still feels gratitude for their empathy. Last month, he went to Virginia Tech at Leslie’s invitation and spent two days talking to people about Columbine. After each meeting, he said, “I hope I was helpful.”
He was, Leslie says.
“I know that he has walked the same footsteps I’ve been traveling. There’s a bond with him and anyone else who has been through it,” she said. “He knows what I’m talking about, even if I can’t explain it very well myself.”
Nine years later, DeAngelis deals every day with survivors who struggle with what happened at Columbine, and he still struggles with it himself. He saw his own counselor to help prepare for the Virginia Tech visit, but he still found it difficult to look at the school’s memorial to its victims, a simple semi-circle of 32 stones with names engraved on them.
DeAngelis recalls what a family friend, a Vietnam veteran, told him after Columbine: “You can’t help other people until you help yourself.” So he got help, and got it early. It is one of the reasons that he’s still here, nine years later.
“When I look back now, I don’t know how I made it through the first year,” DeAngelis said.
But the second year was worse; that’s an insight he can share with other schools. When things calm down, a fog of numbness lifts, revealing a pool of frightening emotions.
That happened to Leslie at Virginia Tech. A week before the massacre’s April 16 anniversary, she began seeing the faces of the dead: a former student pouring herself a Coke at a restaurant; a professor sitting at a window table in a bar.
It was them—except it wasn’t.
Leslie sent an e-mail about the experience to the one person she was certain would understand. “Frank said he had the same thing happen,” she said. “He was very willing to talk about that.”
Nine years later, DeAngelis openly discusses what happened at Columbine, a name usually followed by the word “tragedy,” at least outside the school’s own community. There have been at least 20 more school shootings since then, but until Virginia Tech, none more notorious.
“It’s to the point now where every shooting makes a reference to Columbine,” DeAngelis said. “People ask, was it the music? Was it the videos? What caused so much hate that they are willing to go out and kill other students?”
Nine years later, he still doesn’t have the answer.
“People say to me, ‘Frank, your school is just like our school. We would never expect it to happen here.’ Well, if you asked me nine years ago if something like Columbine could happen at Columbine, I would have said the same thing,” he said. “That’s the thing that puts so much fear in people’s hearts.”
So could Columbine happen at Columbine again?
DeAngelis pauses to think about the unthinkable.
“I think it could happen anywhere,” he finally said. “And that’s what scares me.”
After the tragedy at his school, DeAngelis was part of a group of FBI profilers, school administrators and police who looked into other shootings. When he expressed the hope that it would never happen again, DeAngelis recalls, “One of the group said, ‘I can guarantee you that there is someone out there right now planning something even more devastating.’ ”
So DeAngelis does what he can to keep the lines of communication open. There’s a tip box so students can let him know if they’re concerned about a friend, and more students are using it than ever before.
There’s a threat-assessment team to help determine if that student is at risk. There are counselors, and peer counselors, and upperclass students who help freshmen make the transition to high school.
But there’s only so much you can do before a school doesn’t feel like a school anymore, DeAngelis says. There’s only so much you can do to regain a semblance of the peace and safety that has been lost. “You have to redefine what normal is,” he said.
When it happens again, somewhere else, it’s important to let them know they’re not alone.
“Frank’s been reaching out to people for nine years now,” Leslie said. “You feel obligated to pay it forward and help. There aren’t a lot of people out there who know what this is like.”
At Virginia Tech, DeAngelis helped people make sense of their tragedy; he says some of them are bewildered about why the passage of a year has made so little difference, and they cling to the idea of a day when everything will be right with the world.
“When are things going to get back to the way they were?” That’s the question other schools always ask him.
Never, DeAngelis tells them.
Nine years later, that’s one question he can answer.
