Deer Creek Middle School teachers and staff, in new white T-shirts inscribed “Place of Many Heroes,” greeted parents and students Friday morning outside their school entrance, open for the first time since Tuesday’s shooting.
Determined cheerfulness soon relaxed into warm hugs, streaming tears and friendly chatter as kids, parents and staff reconnected in bright sunshine just outside the school, where three days earlier two students were injured.
The turnout, about 525 parents and students, was enough to make movement difficult down the long halls. School enrollment is 527.
Reagan Weber, 13, was there smiling — a bulky long bandage still obscuring a thin little arm peppered with bullet fragments.
Her mother Deborah embraced the teacher, Jacqueline Adkins, whose classroom was Reagan’s refuge immediately after the shooting.
“She took care of my daughter after … ,” Deborah Weber began, but didn’t finish.
School walls – inside and out – were plastered with posters, some offering advice for coping with trauma (“Keep your family routines” and “Play a favorite song”). Giant placards bore warm wishes from other schools: “Deer Creek, You’re in Our Hearts – Love, Columbine.”
The common area held table after table of giant banners covered with Deer Creek students’ own scribbled thoughts to teachers, staff, first responders and law enforcement, among them: “Thanks for protecting us.”
Posters were in progress wishing speedy recoveries for Reagan and Matthew Thieu, 14, still hospitalized but recovering from serious wounds to his lung and ribs.
Everywhere, people were reconnecting, including two gray-haired math teachers, David Benke and Norm Hanne, who talked together for the first time since they tackled the man with the gun, Bruco “Bo” Strong Eagle Eastwood.
Hanne said they had joked that perhaps it was lucky the math department was on outside duty that day, given their size. Both men are 6-foot-5.
Hanne, who had declined to talk to media until Friday, said nobody really has the whole story yet. Still, he wants to help the school by letting people know this school is as safe as any.
Hanne and Benke pieced together their imperfect recollections. Benke said he believes now there were three shots but initially he had only been aware of two.
“You seemed pretty ticked off,” Benke said to Hanne of the immediate aftermath of their wrestling match with Eastwood.
“I was scared as hell,” Hanne said.
“I didn’t have time to be scared. He was looking at me, with the gun at the ready,” Benke said, who added that later, when it was over, he would wander around inside the school, crying.
Hanne said, when a girl announced: ‘He’s got a gun,’ that he was glad she saw it, too.
“I thought I was hallucinating,” Hanne said.
Eastwood just stood there for at least several seconds, the two men recalled.
“He was drinking in the terror,” Benke said.
“He was enjoying the effect he was having on the kids,” Hanne said.
After the shots were fired, Benke tackled Eastwood, not yet knowing who, if anyone, had been hit. He tried to calm Eastwood down by asking his name and whether he had any children who were students at Deer Creek.
Assistant principal Becky Brown grabbed the rifle. Eastwood continued to flail.
Hanne, after all the students were safely inside, went back outside where Benke was on the ground with Eastwood.
“He was just hanging on. I had passed Becky with the gun,” Hanne said. Next he jumped on Eastwood and Benke.
“‘Look, Bud, I’m 6-foot-5 and Norm is 6-foot-8. You’re not going anywhere,'” Benke said he thinks he remembers saying. Eastwood struggled the whole time, demanding to be let go.
“‘No, bud, you’re done,'” Benke said.
Hanne said the gunman had said something like: “‘They took away my freedom.’ I have no idea what he meant.”
A school maintenance worker and two bus drivers soon would arrive to help subdue Eastwood.
“Everybody did something,” Hanne said.
Hanne said he didn’t know if publicly talking about what happened would help any other teacher anywhere. It’s impossible to know what you’ll do until a killer comes to your school.
“Maybe teachers will go out to duty more,” Benke said. “Maybe they’ll have more dinners together as a faculty.”
Brown had told Benke she made herself go grab the gun because she thought of the two math teachers as family.
And Friday, in the school’s common areas, Joe Sorenson’s wife looked around at the smiling students, talking quietly, and said to him: “It’s funny to see them socialize this way. They’re not being as loud or silly like usual. They’re subdued.”
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
