In the year since Harris and Klebold took the lives of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High, the families of the victims have begun to emerge from the shock of their terrible grief. Many of the families have pulled together to form a quiet support network, meeting monthly for potluck dinners. They’ve united in a cause, raising $3.1 million to replace the school’s bullet-pocked library. Yet in private, each family has been left to answer the question that Daniel Mauser’s father, Tom, says ate at him in the weeks after the shooting: “How are you going to get on with your life?”
The parents of Daniel Mauser, Rachel Scott and Isaiah Shoels have each taken on very different but very public roles as activists against school violence. Like most of the parents, Tom Mauser lived in a daze for weeks after his son, Daniel, was killed. “It was a hell, a living hell,” he says, the emotion still fresh in his voice. His mind began to clear with a memory of a conversation he had with Daniel two weeks before his death. At the dinner table one night, Daniel began talking about gun control, a topic no one in the family had paid much mind to. “Did you know there are loopholes in the Brady bill?” he asked. Tom Mauser remembered his son’s question when he learned that the National Rifle Association was planning to hold its annual convention in Denver last May, just days after the shootings. Mauser attended a protest rally at the state capitol, where he spoke movingly to the crowd of 8,000.
Last January he took a leave from his job as a mass-transit planner and dedicated himself to reforming the state’s gun laws. He gives speeches, lobbies Colorado’s politicians and visited with President Clinton, who pointed him out at January’s State of the Union speech. (This week Clinton will travel to Colorado to lend support to a gun-control ballot initiative Mauser is pushing.) Mauser says he will return to his job next year, and hopes life will settle down for him and his wife, Linda, and their 14-year-old daughter, Christie. She’ll enter high school next year–but not, her dad says, at Columbine.
Rachel Scott’s family found comfort in other ways. A few weeks after her death, the family discovered a set of diaries and journals the 17-year-old had kept. Many of the diary entries described Rachel’s commitment to God. Her family knew she was a compassionate girl who tried to practice what she called “acts of kindness,” but they did not realize how spiritual she had become. “I’ve seen a whole new side of Rachel that’s absolutely precious and wonderful,” says her mother, Beth Nimmo.
Rachel’s father, Darrell Scott, left his job as a sales manager and began touring the country speaking to church groups, hoping to “help people see that this event did have a spiritual side,” he says. Though he’s not against gun control, he believes “We are slapping Band-Aids on deep gaping wounds when we simply look at the weapons that were used instead of the reason why the boys were motivated to kill.”
Like Darrell Scott and Tom Mauser, Michael Shoels is on a mission to make sense of his son’s death. But unlike them, he has yet to find much peace. Isaiah Shoels was the only black student killed at Columbine. Eyewitnesses said that Harris and Klebold came into the library looking for “that little n—-.” To Michael Shoels, his son’s murder was clearly a hate crime. In the weeks after the shooting, Shoels demanded a federal investigation and filed a $250 million lawsuit against the families of the two killers. Shoels charged that the community and the school fostered a racist environment, looking the other way when black students were harassed. Some whites in the community branded Shoels as opportunistic and greedy. He had difficulty sustaining his business as an independent music producer, and the family, feeling unwelcome, moved to Texas.
These days Shoels travels the country speaking out against violence. He says he doesn’t accept money for his appearances, though some audiences pass the hat. The lawsuit wasn’t about the money, he insists: he just wanted to get people to pay attention, to admit that the roots of the Columbine murders run deeper than a failure of gun control. Pounding the kitchen table in his suburban home in Katy, west of Houston, he says, “Everybody in Colorado is in a state of denial. We all know it was a hate crime. Why won’t people admit it?”
The coming anniversary seems to be a focal point for the families. Many will participate in memorial services to be held in the park behind the high school. Tom Mauser and his wife, Linda, hope to adopt a Chinese baby this fall. The Shoels, settled in Texas, plan to buy a home; Michael is producing a memorial CD in his son’s honor. After a painful year of looking back at tragedy, the families of Columbine are beginning to look forward with hope.
