25 years after Columbine school shooting, trauma shadows its survivors
Those who were there continue to struggle a quarter of a century after the attack that played out on live TV.
DENVER — Hours after she escaped the Columbine High School shooting, 14year-old Missy Mendo slept between her parents in bed, still wearing the shoes she had on when she fled her math class. She wanted to be ready to run.
Twenty-five years later, Mendo is a mother herself. But the trauma of that day remains close on her heels.
It caught up to her when 60 people were shot dead in 2017 at a country music festival in Las Vegas. Then again in 2022, when 19 students and two teachers were fatally shot in Uvalde, Texas.
Mendo had been filling out her daughter’s prekindergarten application when news of the Texas elementary school shooting broke. She read a few lines of a news story about Uvalde, then put her head down and cried.
“It felt like nothing changed,” she recalls.
In the quarter-century since two teens at Columbine shot and killed 12 fellow students and a teacher in suburban Denver — an attack that played out on live television and ushered in the modern era of school shootings — the traumas of that day have continued to shadow Mendo and others who were there.
Some needed years to view themselves as survivors since they were not physically wounded. Yet things such as fireworks could still trigger disturbing memories. The aftershocks — often unacknowledged in the years before mental health struggles were more widely recognized — led to some survivors suffering insomnia, dropping out of school, or disengaging from their spouses or families.
Members of the community plan a candlelight vigil on the steps of the state’s Capitol on Friday night, the eve of the anniversary.
April is particularly hard for Mendo, 39, who says her “brain turns to mashed potatoes” each year. She arrives at appointments early, misplaces her keys, forgets to close the fridge door.
She leans on therapy and the understanding of an expanding group of shooting survivors she has met through the Rebels Project, a support group founded by other Columbine survivors following a 2012 shooting in which a gunman killed 12 people at a movie theater in the nearby suburb of Aurora. Mendo started seeing a therapist after her child’s first birthday, at the urging of fellow survivor moms.
After she broke down over Uvalde, Mendo, a single parent, said she talked to her mom, took a walk to get some fresh air, then finished her daughter’s prekindergarten application.
“Was I afraid of her going into the public school system? Absolutely,” Mendo said of her daughter. “I wanted her to have as normal of a life as possible.”
Researchers who’ve studied the long-term effects of gun violence in schools have quantified protracted struggles among survivors, including longterm academic effects such as absenteeism and reduced college enrollment, and lower earnings later in life.
“Just counting lives lost is kind of an incorrect way to capture the full cost of these tragedies,” said Maya Rossin-Slater, an associate professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Health Policy.
Mass killings have recurred with numbing frequency in the years since Columbine, with almost 600 attacks in which four or more people have died, not including the perpetrator, since 2006, according to data compiled by the Associated Press.
More than 80% of the 3,045 victims in those attacks were killed by a firearm.
Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of people have been exposed to school shootings that are often not mass-casualty events but still traumatic, Rossin-Slater said. The effects can last a lifetime, she added, resulting in “kind of a persistent, reduced potential” for survivors.
Those who were present at Columbine say the years since have given them time to learn more about what happened to them and how to cope with it.
Heather Martin, now 42, was a Columbine senior in 1999. In college, she began crying during a fire drill, realizing later that a fire alarm had gone off for three hours when she and 60 other students hid in a barricaded office during the high school shooting. She couldn’t return to that class and was marked absent each time, and says she failed it after refusing to write a final paper on school violence, despite telling her professor of her experience at Columbine.
It took 10 years for her to see herself as a survivor, after she was invited back with the rest of the class of 1999 for an anniversary event. She saw fellow classmates having similar struggles and almost immediately decided to go back to college to become a teacher.
Martin, a co-founder of the Rebels Project, named after Columbine’s mascot, said 25 years has given her time to struggle and figure out how to work out of those struggles.
“I just know myself so well now and know how I respond to things and what might activate me and how I can bounce back and be OK. And most importantly, I think I can recognize when I am not OK and when I do need to seek help,” she said.
Kiki Leyba, a first-year teacher at Columbine in 1999, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder soon after the shooting. He felt a strong sense of commitment to return to the school, where he threw himself into his work. But he continued to have panic attacks. To help him cope, he had sleeping pills and some Xanax for anxiety, Leyba said. One therapist recommended chamomile tea.
Things got harder for him after the 2002 graduation of Mendo’s class, the last cohort of students who lived through the shooting since they had been through so much together.
By 2005, after years of not taking care of himself and suffering from a lack of sleep, Leyba said, he would often check out from family life, sleeping in on the weekends and turning into a “blob on the couch.” Finally, his wife, Kallie, enrolled him in a oneweek trauma treatment program, arranging for him to take the time off from work without telling him.
“Thankfully, that really gave me a kind of a foothold ... to do the work to climb out of that,” said Leyba, who said breathing exercises, journaling, meditation and antidepressants have helped him.
Like Mendo and Martin, he has traveled around the country to work with survivors of shootings.
“That worst day has transformed into something I can offer to others,” said Leyba, who is in Washington, D.C., this week meeting with officials about gun violence and promoting a new film about his trauma journey.
Mendo still lives in the area, and her daughter, 5, attends school near Columbine. When her daughter’s school locked down last year during a hostage situation in the area, Mendo recalled worrying: What if my child is in danger? What if there is another school shooting like Columbine?
When she picked up her daughter, the child seemed a little scared as she hugged her mom tightly. Mendo took deep breaths to stay calm, a technique she had learned in therapy, and put on a brave face.
“If I was putting down some fear, she would pick it up,” she said of her daughter. “I didn’t want that for her.”