JEFFERSON COUNTY — The “boy in the window”—rescued bloodied and paralyzed during the horrifying Columbine High shooting rampage—is doing just fine.
Now 27, Patrick Ireland has regained his mobility with few effects from gunshot wounds to his head and leg a decade ago. He is married and works in the financial services industry.
His mantra: “I choose to be a victor rather than a victim.”
Like Ireland, many Columbine survivors have moved on to careers in education, medicine, ministry, retail. Yet emotional scars still can trigger anxiety, nightmares and deeply etched recollections of gunfire, blood and bodies.
Some have written books; a few travel the world to share their experiences to help victims of violence.
“People have been able to have 10 years to reconcile what happened and see what fits in their life and who they are,” said Kristi Mohrbacher of Littleton, who fled Columbine High as the gunfire erupted. “It’s kind of a part of who I am today. I think my priorities might be a little bit different if I hadn’t had that experience.”
Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, stormed the suburban school just after 11 a.m. on April 20, 1999, killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding about two dozen. The massacre ended with the gunmen’s suicides not quite an hour later.
Sean Graves saw the pair loading weapons in a parking lot and thought they were preparing a prank with paintball guns.
Graves, Lance Kirklin and Daniel Rohrbough walked toward them for a better look when they opened fire, killing Rachel Scott and Rohrbough and critically wounding Anne Marie Hochhalter, Graves and Kirklin, among others.
In the second-floor library, Ireland was about to finish some homework when he heard pipe bombs exploding in the hallway. Debris fell from ceiling tiles and a teacher shouted for students to take cover.
Klebold and Harris strode in, shouted for students to stand up, laughing and ridiculing classmates as they sprayed bullets.
Ireland was under a table with Dan Steepleton and Makai Hall, who were shot in the knees. Ireland was shot twice in the head and once in a leg, losing consciousness.
The killers shot out a library window. A partially paralyzed Graves, lying on a sidewalk below, worried that perhaps they would return. He rubbed his hand in blood from his neck wound and smeared it on his face and the ground to make it appear he was dead.
Harris and Klebold killed 10 students in the library before they left to reload, which gave some survivors a chance to flee. Steepleton and Hall tried to pull Ireland out but couldn’t move him far and fled for safety.
The gunmen returned to the library and committed suicide.
Ireland awoke some time later, his vision blurred. With fire alarms sounding and strobe lights flashing, the partially paralyzed teen began to push himself toward the bullet-shattered window.
Over the next three hours, he pulled his body along, lost and regained consciousness, then moved again through tables and chairs and past classmates’ bodies. He figures he traveled about 50 feet to the window.
“I thought how much easier it would be just to give up, stay there and let somebody come get you or whatever would happen to you,” Ireland said.
“But every time those thoughts came in my mind, I thought about all the people that I would be giving up on. … It was really the friends and family I would be letting down that kept me going.”
Ireland pushed himself up to the window and got the attention of SWAT teams below. He doesn’t recall flopping over the sill and dropping into the arms of rescuers, an image that captured TV viewers nationwide.
Now 25, Graves moved into a suburb near the mountains, where he recently purchased a home with his fiancee, Kara DeHart, 22. He walks with a limp and still feels pain but keeps a positive attitude. He plans to return to college to pursue a career in forensics science, a path that began to interest him after Columbine.
On Monday’s anniversary, he will go to Columbine, find the spot where he was shot, smoke a cigar and leave another on the ground for Rohrbough, something he does every year.
With two children at Columbine, Ted Hochhalter watched the drama unfold while waiting in a Seattle airport for a plane back to Denver. He arrived to find his daughter, Anne Marie, paralyzed and in critical condition, and that his son Nathan had been trapped, but unhurt, in the science wing for four hours.
He took a leave of absence from his job as a government emergency management coordinator. Six months later his wife, Carla, who had a history of mental illness, walked into a pawn shop, picked up a gun and committed suicide.
Hochhalter believes the aftermath of the shootings exacerbated his wife’s illness. “It got to a point where she made a choice,” he said.
He moved the family into the mountain community of Bailey and soon married Katherine Zocco, a massage therapist specializing in neuromuscular, spinal cord and brain injuries. She had worked with Anne Marie and other Columbine survivors.
Anne Marie, now 27, graduated from Columbine in 2000 and lives in suburban Denver, where she works as a retail store manager and a child advocate. Her father retired with a medical disability for post traumatic stress disorder.
Today, the elder Hochhalters are working with John-Michael and Ellen Keyes, whose daughter Emily was killed in a 2006 school shooting in Bailey, to get parents involved in school emergency management programs.
Patrick Ireland, the boy in the window, endured grueling therapy to regain the use of his legs. He had to relearn how to read, write and talk.
With a control-your-destiny mind-set, he graduated as valedictorian from Columbine and magna cum laude from Colorado State University. Today, he is a field director for Northwestern Mutual Finance Network in the Denver area and has been married to Kacie for nearly four years.
Ireland recognizes he’ll long be remembered as the face of Columbine because of his dramatic rescue. He accepts it as a way to emphasize that Columbine should be another word for “hope and courage.”
And how does he want to be remembered?
“A triumphant recovery and success story.”
