Keith, now 30, married, a father, and still living in the Denver area, was just 15 when the nation reeled from the horror of Columbine. He escaped the cafeteria, then the hallway, then the grassy field outside the school, all to the sounds of gunfire and explosions, and the shrieking and stunned silence of his fellow students at Columbine High School. He did not escape nightmares and fear, but he is a survivor, not a victim. These are his own words.
"I still can't grasp the darkness. I'm glad I can't comprehend it, but it's frustrating. It's like staring at an alien artifact. While we were playing roller hockey he was planning to blow me up. The deeper you get it's just more dark. The void seems to get bigger and bigger."
“You go to school with these people then you go home and plan mass murdering them. I don’t have the headspace to understand it. The magnitude of what they planned – it wasn’t a crime of passion, like they were upset and decided on a whim to do this thing. They weren’t righting a wrong or standing up for some perceived injustice. Not robbing a bank to buy a Lamborghini. The very act was just intended to victimize. It’s the means, it’s the ends, it’s the act. Their suicide is similar. It was very cowardly. They chose a bunch of kids in the cafeteria. Every step of the way was cowardly. It’s just another facet of the darkness”.
“Two or three days after the incident the FBI came to the house. He was great. Very professional. He explained what he knew. It wasn’t hard to talk to him about it. He made it clear that he wanted my help. I had talked to my Mom and Dad about it, and that was very different. The agent put me at ease. “
“The rest of the school year was bizarre. We worked it out with another school to share half a day. Everyone had my best interests in mind, but when you’re living it – that you had a neighbor that tried to blow you up and killed your classmates, but your Algebra is due Friday - it was a strange world to be in. “
“There wasn’t a day that went by without seeing an article or hearing a conversation. The empathy was incredibly helpful but the outrage industry was incredibly hurtful. It has contributed to the whole overblown stranger danger mantra. The message is you have to be fearful of everyone. I think that’s incredibly damaging to a people. I don’t think society fundamentally gets it. Every time something similar happens we keep coming back to the same answers – music, guns, video games, society. A human being did this. Maybe this makes me a horrible person but I am glad they are gone. And yet there is something bitter about the fact that they killed themselves. Justice fits in somewhere. That didn’t happen. There’s just an unfairness about the whole situation. “
“For me the godsend was my school counselor. I went from an A, B student to a D student. She saw that and knew that I was in the category of sensory victimization. She reached out to me and recommended I talk to somebody. I had no idea what a psychologist would do. I saw a guy for six months. It was the first time I was able to ask specific questions. I do think that it helped me to process at that time. I didn’t want to burden others, didn’t want to relive it, but didn’t want to be alone with it. I felt very isolated in trying to find people that had made it over the mountain. I did research on how others had dealt with violence from other people, but there were always differences. It’s a very small club. There was no School Shooters Anonymous. “
“I was diagnosed with PTSD. Before about seven years ago I was trying to figure everything out. I’m so used to it, I’m not hung up on it. It’s not anxiety or worry – just a feeling of readiness – like I’m in enemy territory. It’s like living life with an entire side of the house missing. There’s relaxation and peace, but there’s this reality that at any moment safety can be compromised in a way there is no rhyme or reason. Whenever I’m in a crowded room and the decibel level reaches a certain point my brain kicks on overload and I begin processing information. It’s exhausting. (The sound of) multiple helicopters, too. There are things I’ve chosen to research to try to understand my enemy. Because I know there are people out there. I’ll probably never face a person like that again, but…”
“I definitely questioned God. I questioned my faith. I questioned the truth of the Bible. I never lost my faith, my belief in Christ – oh man, I wrestled with it though! I can say now I wasn’t wrestling with the truth of the Word or my belief in Christ as my savior. I absolutely wrestled with what people would call the Christian Church in America. There was such a huge disparity between what had happened to me and what had been preached to me. I should have been blown up, shot, and blown up again. Then on Sunday to hear a sermon on how we are not supposed to be jealous of our neighbors – it seemed so insignificant in the light of this darkness I had just lived through. I’d been through a dark valley and was going through more dark valleys. I didn’t need a self-help book, I needed a castle and a weapon to defend myself against the things I’d been besieged with. I was very angry. The Bible does talk about warfare and darkness. I hadn’t seen it there before. I realize now that they not only couldn’t provide those spiritual tools to me but they probably had not acquired them themselves because they’d never sat next to a propane bomb.”
“Victims constantly define themselves by their sadness or their anger. You can’t get through a conversation without them reliving their experience at Columbine as though it was two minutes ago. The survivor still feels these things and they understand Columbine changed them. A survivor says Columbine happened to me and I’ll carry it with me all of my life. A victim says Columbine is something I’ll never get over. The survivor can get around, over, or under the mountain. The victim says I’ll never be able to get from point A to point B. Some of my friends saw Dave Sanders die, and they are walking all over the mountain. I would like to think that is a choice.”
“For all the good things – the friendships, the camaraderie, the heart I have for others, I’m very thankful, but the other side is so dark and bitter. I don’t’ want it to define me, but I know that it does affect me. It informs everything. I know somewhere, sometime in the US, something similar is going to happen again. That’s not a prophecy or an omen, just that there are people out there and that they look exactly like us.”
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