Remembering Columbine

Watching the rituals of learning reminds DeAngelis why he became an educator. And, he says with no small amount of pride, "the kids rallied around me." The first year, many had an extremely difficult time. Some were terrified by fire drills. Others were traumatized by the idea of eating the food the cafeteria had served that day. (DeAngelis forever banned Chinese food from the Columbine menu.) "There were students who had to go back into the same classroom where Dave Sanders died." (Sanders struggled from the hall at the top of the stairs to the science labs, where another teacher helped him into a room.) Students also had to walk up the same stairs where they saw the gunmen shoot to death freshman Daniel Rohrbough, 15.

"And every time I walked out of my office, I saw a gunman coming at me," DeAngelis says. "But I told the students, 'We can get through this together.'" Though full of purpose, the principal's 12- to 16-hour days took a toll (DeAngelis says he now recommends to other schools that suffer shootings that they hire two principals for at least a year — one to run the day-to-day operations; one to deal with the aftermath of the violence). His 17-year marriage unraveled and his wife filed for divorce. "If I had to do it over again, I would have brought my family into therapy, too. I was aloof. I didn't want to relive things by talking, and as a result we grew apart," he says. "If someone could have sat us down and said, 'This is the expected behavior as the result of tragedy,' I think it would have made things easier."

When "Why me? Poor me?" ate at him, DeAngelis battled it the way his mother taught him, by focusing on those suffering more. Every Saturday for months, he drove to Englewood, CO, to check on four students who were recovering at Craig Hospital, a major brain and spinal cord rehab center. Three of them could not walk, and one could not complete a sentence. DeAngelis told them he wanted to hand them their diplomas. One of the paralyzed boys, freshman Sean Graves, 15, told the principal he was going to get out of the wheelchair to receive it. "Those kids cured my self-pity," DeAngelis says.

When Kacey Ruegsegger was finally loaded into an ambulance, more than an hour after she'd been shot, she asked the medics if they were going to cut off her arm because, "from what I saw," Ruegsegger says, "there was no way they can fix this." Doctors at the hospital wrestled with what to do. A third of her shoulder was gone, as was the top of her arm. The only things keeping her arm attached were an artery, nerves, veins, and skin. Over the next few days, Ruegsegger's parents learned that the best option for saving Kacey's limb would be to transplant tissue — bone, joint, and tendon — from a cadaver donor. They signed on the dotted line.

Ruegsegger spent two weeks in the hospital recovering from the initial surgeries, every minute of it in the company of nurses. In those sometimes foggy, often painful, hugely frightening days and nights, she changed her career plans. Before the shooting, Ruegsegger had wanted to be a teacher.

"But [the nurses] made me want to make a difference in somebody else's life that same way," she says. So after college, she trained to become an oncology nurse.

The desire to "make a difference" would only intensify for Ruegsegger, who this past winter had an eighth surgery to remove a bone spur, transfer a muscle, lengthen a tendon, and fracture a bone to promote more healing. She also came to accept how deeply and permanently The Tragedy had affected her. To this day, she is terrified by loud noises and big crowds. And, of course, she is afraid of libraries, as well as people in overcoats. In the past, "if someone walked into the grocery store wearing a really big coat, I used to just leave my cart and walk out," she says. "Now I try to tell myself, 'He's just in here to buy food.' But when you're that one person, out of all the millions who go to school, who gets shot there, you always feel like you have a target on you."

And yet she thinks having been a gunshot victim makes her very good at helping other people through trauma. "Just like one day my life was turned completely upside down, my patients are with their Stage IV cancer diagnosis. When they are struggling with chemo or what to do with their families or just getting the diagnosis, I empathize. My favorite part of my job is when I can go sit with patients who feel so lost and discouraged and like they don't have any hope, and I say, 'Can I share my story with you?' "

For 36 hours after The Tragedy, until authorities confirmed the names of those slain, Matthew Kechter was among the students listed as missing. When his parents, Ann and Joe Kechter, were finally able to bury him on April 27, both felt as if they were going crazy. In the days after the shooting, Ann, 50, who works as an energy trader for a local utility, slept with Matt's dirty clothes in his bed and put milk away in the cupboard instead of the refrigerator. Some days, she would get up with the goal of simply breathing. Having quit smoking for 13 years, Joe, 51, a builder, started again. When Ann went to the grocery store, she felt like the whole place stopped and stared at her in pained recognition or turned away because they didn't know what to say. The occasional person who didn't rubberneck would run over, throw her arms around Ann's neck, and sob — prompting the Kechters' then-12-year-old son, Adam (a student at the local middle school), to ask, "What do they expect us to do — curl up and die?" Well, yeah, Ann felt like answering, though she knew their family was stronger than that. Anyway, with a surviving child, dying wasn't an option. After the funeral, the whole family went into counseling. What became clear right away was not only how much the Kechters missed Matthew, but how much they missed the rough-and-tumble of having two kids. Adam was desperately lonely without a sibling. Ann and Joe had untapped reserves of parental energy, of love.

"Our first thought was foster care," Joe says. "But our counselor talked us out of it because you have to give the children back, and she didn't think we could handle more loss."

So in September 2001, more than two years after Matt's death, 8-year-old Ashley — a product of four foster homes — joined the Kechters, who had moved 30 miles away from Littleton. They chose an older child because, Ann says, "we were too old to start over and too young to give up." They chose Ashley, who had been through so much for a young girl, "because considering everything, it felt like a good match."

The process, though, was far from a feel-good Frank Capra movie. "It was like trying to hug a cactus," Ann says. Ashley was quiet and withdrawn; then slowly — very slowly — she warmed up to her new father and brother. She and Ann, however, were having some trouble bonding. So, even though she felt that Ashley "completed" their family, four years after losing Matthew, Ann still found it extraordinarily difficult to "wake up and find joy" in life.

"My children motivated me to put my chin up," she says, "but inside I was struggling."

Then, in 2003, Joe saw an ad for a horse ranch near their new home. He thought riding was something Ann and Ashley could do together. Ann had ridden a little as a child but hadn't thought about it much since. When she finally ventured off to the ranch Joe found, she went alone.

She got on her horse, Chico, and, of all things, started talking. "I told him, 'I have this son Matthew...'" The chat felt so good, Ann returned to ride as soon as she could. And again. "I said, 'Thank you, God, for bringing me to the ranch and finding this. You know I love Matthew so much. I know he's here with me.'" At that moment, a hawk came flying down right over her head. Since then, Ann says, almost every time she rides and talks to Matt, a hawk flies close by. She and Joe have come to regard the hawk as emblematic of Matt's spirit.

Within weeks, Ashley accepted Ann's invitation to join her on some of her rides. Ashley, now 15, turned out to be a natural horsewoman.

"We had the best summer," Ann recalls. Often with Ashley's Girl Scout leader and her daughter, "we'd ride, eat lunch, and ride some more. We'd see bears, elk, coyotes, and wild turkeys. We'd keep the horses close. We'd camp in the ranch's barn."

Finally, the Kechter women had made a bond. "To this day," Joe says, "I can tell when Ann has been to the ranch."

"What he's trying to say," Ann laughs, "is that I'm a bitch when I don't go."