Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Debate over Columbine demolition
As ‘Columbiners,’ tourists flock, razing building again raised
Community discussing if it’s time to tear down building that became synonymous with school shootings.
DENVER — Two decades after the name “Columbine” became synonymous with a school shooting, the suburban Denver community surrounding the school is debating whether it’s time to tear down a building that also became a beacon for people obsessed with the killings.
School officials said the number of people trying to get close to or even inside the school reached record levels this year, the 20th anniversary of the 1999 attack that killed 13 people. People try to peek into the windows of the school library, mistaking it for the long-demolished room where most victims died.
The buses of tourists have mostly stopped, but not the visitors. This year alone, security staff contacted more than 2,400 “unauthorized” people on Columbine’s campus.
Then, a few days before the anniversary, a young woman described as obsessed with the attack flew to Colorado and bought a shotgun, killing only herself yet sparking lockdowns and new fears. School security has intercepted others with a similar infatuation with the crime and its teen perpetrators — so-called Columbiners.
District security chief John McDonald can rattle off some of the most frightening instances of people who came to the campus: An Ohio couple who was later charged with planning a domestic terror attack; a Utah teen later arrested for a bombing plot against his school; and a Texas man apprehended at the school after he said he was filled by one of the shooter’s spirits and intended to “complete his mission.”
“These people, they want the building,” McDonald said. “They want to experience it, to walk the halls. The only way we can stop that interest in the building is to move it. Otherwise they’re not going to stop coming.”
But Columbine, named after the official state flower, represents more than one day to this suburban area southeast of Denver. Boisterous call-and-response chants of “We are Columbine” dominate school pep rallies. At the nearby memorial just over a crest named “Rebel Hill” for the school’s mascot, a plaque quotes an unnamed student: “You’re a Columbine Rebel for life and no one can ever take that away from you.”
“It’s not just a building, it’s like a second home to us,” said Jenn Thompson, who as a 15-year-old huddled inside a science classroom during the attack. “It’s still standing 20 years later. It represents us, still standing 20 years later.”
The fates of mass shooting sites around the United States are varied.
In Newtown, Connecticut, voters authorized the demolition of the Sandy Hook Elementary School building where 26 students and teachers were killed in 2012 and construction of a new school with the same name near the first site. The building where 17 people died at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 is also expected to be razed; there has been no public discussion about the name.
The discussion of Columbine’s future is likely to take months. An initial proposal would keep the school’s new library, which was built after the attack, and construct a new school on the existing campus.
An online survey gauging community support will close this week. District officials will spend the summer reviewing and summarizing responses. If they decide to present a plan to the school board in August, its members will determine whether to put the estimated $60 million to $70 million expense on November ballots.
Conversations with victims’ families, survivors and current staff convinced district officials that changing the school’s name was a non-starter, said Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Jason Glass.
“Until you’ve heard those thousands of people yelling ‘We are Columbine’ together, you don’t really get it,” he said. “The sense of pride is real.”
Some of those closest to the shooting have changed their minds over the years on the best course of action.
After the attack, Frank DeAngelis, then the school’s principal, met with the families of those killed, students and staff about their scarred building’s future. He said the majority felt demolishing it meant “the two killers had won.”
But after years of coping with unwanted visitors, DeAngelis, who retired in 2014, said he now supports the proposal to demolish and rebuild the school.