Santa Fe echoes the poison of Columbine
Massacre here holds similarities to killings perpetrated by Colorado students in 1999
He wasn’t even alive when two teens in Littleton, Colo., walked into Columbine High School and started mowing down their classmates.
But the poison of Columbine has seeped so deeply into popular culture that it appears to have reached into southeast Texas and the small town of Santa Fe in Galveston County.
Nineteen years and one month after the most infamous school shooting in American history, police say 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis strode into Santa Fe High School with a Remington 870 shotgun, a .38caliber pistol and a few faulty, homemade bombs, and in one awful half-hour killed 10 people and injured 13 others.
Like the two students at Columbine with similar weapons, the Santa Fe junior wore black boots and a long black trench coat that he liked to adorn with a red star featuring a hammer and sickle — a pin identical to one worn by the Colorado shooters.
For now, the accused gunman sits in the Galveston County Jail on suicide watch while his attorneys try to win his release on bail. Investigators remain tightlipped about his motive, citing efforts to build their case against him.
Amid the still-unanswered questions, however, one thread of clarity stands out: The high school junior’s clear familiarity with the April 20, 1999, Columbine shooting serves as a reminder that the Colorado massacre remains a nightmarish template for alienated, unhappy youths longing for significance.
Frank DeAngelis knew as soon as his phone started pinging with text messages from
friends offering their prayers and condolences.
There’d been another shooting.
DeAngelis pulled up his phone and started reading. The former principal at Columbine High School had seen it all before.
“It was eerie,” DeAngelis said.
Pagourtzis seemed to know the details of Columbine, beyond the bombs, trench coats and weapons. On his now-deleted Facebook page, Pagourtzis posted a photo of his black coat pinned with the red star and a German Iron Cross common in neo-Nazi imagery, mirroring the admiration one of the Columbine shooters had for Adolf Hitler.
And like the two Columbine shooters, the 17year-old Santa Fe student planned to kill himself at the end of his rampage, police said.
The two Columbine shooters spent a year preparing before they carried out their violent spree, building pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails and cricket bombs — essentially spent CO2 cartridges filled with gunpowder. They planned to blow up two bombs made from propane tanks in the school cafeteria, hoping it would cause the roof to cave in and kill hundreds — and then pick off classmates who managed to survive as they fled the building’s ruins.
When the bombs failed to detonate, the shooters walked toward the building and, at 11:19 a.m., pulled weapons out of their trench coats and started firing.
A school resource officer responded within five minutes, by which time the two gunmen had killed two people and wounded many more, and entered the school and taken shelter in the library, where the spree continued.
At approximately 12:08 p.m., 49 minutes after they began, the Columbine shooters killed themselves. The massacre stunned the nation and put a worldwide spotlight on the two killers.
Although school shootings appear to have dropped significantly since their peak in the early 1990s, Columbine’s impact has echoed again and again.
The massacre was notable for the scope of the assault that the two gunmen tried to carry out, said Peter Langman, a Pennsylvania psychologist who has spent years studying school shootings.
“More than any other school shooting, Columbine is the one subsequent school shooters have looked back to,” Langman said.
The teen who shot up an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., had a computer containing “hundreds of documents, images, (and) videos pertaining to the Columbine H.S. massacre,” Langman wrote in an article on his website, www.schoolshooters.info.
The gunman responsible for a 2006 shooting at Orange High School in North Carolina was also “obsessed” with Columbine, Langman found. A 26-year-old man who killed nine people in 2015 at an Oregon community college referred to the Columbine shooters and others as “gods” in a manifesto obtained by investigators.
In all, at least 35 school shooters directly or indirectly referenced the Columbine shooting, he said.
The shooting may have opened the door for future shooters by breaking the taboo against mass murder, he said.
“Each time that threshold is crossed may lower the threshold for people already on the path toward violence,” he wrote in a paper last year. “The phenomenon may be feeding on itself, growing with each new incident.”
Some similarities appear to thread through the shootings. Like many other shooters Langman has researched, the Santa Fe shooter appears to have had military aspirations. On his now-defunct Facebook page, Pagourtzis claimed to be joining the U.S. Marine Corps in 2019, though a USMC spokesman said his name does not appear in its database of current or former recruits.
Like the vast majority of shooters, Pagourtzis obtained his firearms from a relative — his father.
And as often happens after school shootings, some friends claimed Pagourtzis was bullied, echoing rumors — later discredited — about the two Columbine shooters.
The weekend after the shooting, the gunman’s father, Antonios Pagourtzis, said he believed his son was bullied.
“Somebody probably came and hurt him,” he said in an interview with Greece’s Antenna TV days after the shooting. “I don’t know what could have happened.”
The elder Pagourtzis could not be reached for comment.
In the days since the Santa Fe shooting, the accused shooter’s lawyer said he was investigating whether Pagourtzis’ coaches bullied him, though Santa Fe ISD issued a statement saying it had investigated the accusations and “confirmed that these reports were untrue.”
Despite the widespread belief that school shooters may be motivated by bullying, that’s not a common thread among them, said Langman. He found only 40 percent of school shooters were bullied or otherwise harassed — and even if they were, rarely targeted their tormentors.
The motive is not that simple, he said. Some shooters seek fame; others, acceptance in their own subculture, or to feel special and set apart from mainstream society, Langman wrote last year.
Nearly two decades after Columbine, it’s clear some things have changed.
Santa Fe ISD had planned for the possibility of an active shooter. Although police first responded to the Columbine shooting minutes after the massacre began, they waited before entering to confront the shooters.
On May 18, a Santa Fe ISD police officer and a Department of Public Safety trooper raced into the school and confronted Pagourtzis within minutes, police said.
The student shot 49year-old John Barnes — a retired veteran Houston police officer who had joined the SFISD force in January — in the arm, causing catastrophic blood loss. Barnes remains in the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston after undergoing multiple surgeries.
The officers contained the 17-year-old at that point, according to law enforcement officials, who disputed previous media reports of a 25-minute gunbattle.
“During the vast majority of that time, officers were not exchanging in active gunfire,” said Connor Hagan, a spokesman for the FBI’s Houston field office. “At this time, there is no evidence shots penetrated walls of the room and placed anyone but the suspect in danger.”
Other law enforcement sources said investigators are continuing to trace the purchase history of the two firearms used in the massacre — which Pagourtzis’ father said belonged to him — and to clarify whether the shotgun had been illegally shortened.
Few other details have been released.
“No one wants to jeopardize the grand jury or the trial,” said Galveston County Sheriff Henry Trochesset. “That’s why we have to be vague — until we have every bit of information for that trial.”
As law enforcement continues their investigation, Pagourtzis remains in his cell. Families have buried their dead, though not the grief left in his wake.
A community struggles to understand the cause of a senseless act, and politicians vow “this must never happen again.”
DeAngelis, the former Columbine principal, said he worried the frequency of school shootings has left people apathetic to the horror they inflict.
“It’s almost like people are accepting it,” he said. “Like it’s part of daily life. And I struggle with that.”
A week after the shooting in Santa Fe, a middle school student in Noblesville, Indiana, walked into class.
Just after 9 a.m. on Friday, he took a gun from his pocket and pulled the trigger.
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