Pictures of the Past
By NOREEN GILLESPIE
News Writer
Packed away in Jake Cram's high school scrapbook are pictures of smiling graduates, freezing the culmination of a four-year journey in a flash of film. Yellow tassels and shimmering royal blue caps and gowns robe post-adolescent scholars, beaming with the pride of their accomplishments.
The pictures are not unlike those in any other high school graduate's memory capsule. They tell a story of friendships, accomplishments and success. But underneath the pictures, behind the smiling graduates, lay magazines that tell another story. As a graduate of the Columbine High School Class of 1999, these magazines tell the story of the day Jake watched 15 of his classmates lose their lives — the day he nearly lost his own.
Today, on the one-year anniversary of the Littleton shootings, Jake and his classmates will return to Columbine High School for a memorial service that will bring back the horror of April 20, 1999. While the memories are now packed away in a scrapbook, they are anything but old for the Notre Dame freshman and his classmates.
"It doesn't seem like a year at all," Jake said. "Some kids will be there, others are going up to the mountains to get away. A lot of people want to forget, want it to go away, but it won't."
Columbine High School is a different place than it was a year ago; art has replaced the bullet holes in the concrete, lockers line the walls that once were windows to the library. But underneath the new paint and sparkling exterior, the tainted memories of a year ago still linger in the hearts of the survivors. Today will be Jake's third return to Columbine since the shootings, but it never gets any easier.
"Right after, nobody ever wanted to go back, ever," Jake said. "I didn't think I could ever go back there. Slowly, as everything happened and we found out what [Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's] plan was, we said `No, we're not going to let them have what they wanted.' If we didn't go back, we were letting them have what they wanted."
Jake's first return was to collect his belongings just weeks after the shootings. With his parents on either side of him, he spent an hour in the building walking through the hallways, still untouched.
"It was really scary … nothing had changed. There was still blood and bullet holes everywhere. There were half-eaten sandwiches in the cafeteria. In the parking lot, there were shoes everywhere. It was really hard to be in there."
Even after a summer of reconstruction, some still will not return. While some students, Jake included, watched the re-opening of the building in August, it is still impossible for some members of the class of 1999 to confront what happened there.
"A lot of my friends can't see Time; can't see what happened on April 20," Jake said. "The kids don't really talk about it that much. For me, I liked to read the Time articles because I wanted to figure out why. Everyone is looking for answers, but I don't think that there is one. Sometimes I just think this was supposed to happen at my school, and I can only hope something good comes out of it."
Still, Jake says, a lot of his classmates just want to forget.
Or maybe it's too hard to remember.
April 20, 1999
It was a normal day in choir for Jake, who was stressing about what he now calls "little things." Prepping for a test in his choir class, he remembers worrying about completing the exam.
"After, I remember thinking why I worried about something so stupid," he said.
But during the test, the 120 students who filled the choir room heard gunshots echo through the hallways, unidentified at first. Brushing off the first few noises as nothing but a senior prank, the class suddenly realized the situation was anything but a joke. Half of the class exited through a back door, while Jake and other classmates ran to a door that led to the hallway. Five feet away, Jake witnessed Klebold shooting at students running down the hallway.
"He never looked at me," Jake said. "My life flashed before my eyes right then. I knew this kid — I'd stayed at his house overnight when I was younger. I couldn't believe it."
Jake and 60 other choir members crammed into a storage closet, pushing a bookshelf in front of the door for protection. None of them knew what would happen.
Inside the pitch-black closet, the students could do nothing but listen for three and a half hours. Stifled by the sounds of continuous gunshots, yelling, fire alarms and bomb explosions, their own frightened sobs and prayers filled the tiny closet.
And when the noises stopped, no one moved.
In the silence, Jake's best friend, Matt Cromwell, pulled out a cell phone he had in his pocket and dialed his father, who was outside with other panicked parents in the parking lot.
"His dad was talking to the police," Jake said. "He told us that the police weren't in the building yet. He told us `Don't move, don't make a sound,' and to call back in 30 minutes."
The cell phone was the only link to the outside world the group had during the crisis. Kept calm by Mr. Cromwell's assurances that the police knew where they were, Matt phoned his dad on regular intervals. But nearly two hours since the crisis began, students were rapidly losing composure in the storage closet. After a third phone call to Mr. Cromwell revealed that SWAT teams were entering the building with caution due to bombs that were still active in the school, the panic level was still rising.
"A couple girls passed out, and we all — girls and guys — took our shirts off because it was so hot in there," Jake said. "We lifted a few kids up through the ceiling to give us some room and air."
Three hours later, there was a knock on the door.
"We were all really scared, and didn't know what to do," Jake said. "Then they said it was the Denver Police. We opened up the door and couldn't run anywhere — they had a barrier."
They pulled each student out of the closet one by one, holding a gun to each student's head and frisking them for weapons.
"At the time it seemed rough, and we couldn't believe they were doing that," Jake said. "Later we found out the SWAT guys hadn't found Eric or Dylan, and they didn't know if they'd dropped their guns and hid like an innocent kid."
The last group to be evacuated from the school, the class ducked, sprinted, and fell to the floor in an effort to get out of the building. They raced past bullet holes in the wall, blood on the floor and the corpse of a classmate. Finally reaching the exit, they made it to safety and sped away in the police cars awaiting beyond the door.
Beginning recovery
As the details began to unfold about the events of April 20 in the Columbine community, Jake and the students of Columbine High School would begin a journey of healing that for some, still has not been completed.
For Jake, it meant realizations of what was important.
"The whole time I was in that room, and we felt our lives in danger, it really made me appreciate life," Jake said. "My friends and family were what was really important in the long run, and I really changed my outlook on life. Nothing really seemed to matter anymore … I used to get stressed out about every little thing, but now I don't worry about the small stuff."
But still plagued with memories of April 20, Jake spun into a cycle of nightmares and weight loss that made his trauma visible. At the advice of his parents, he consulted his sports psychologist and began discussing the events with her. When fall came and freshman orientation at Notre Dame approached, the beginning of college provided a welcome reprieve.
"I was kind of happy to get away," he said. "But it was hard for me not to be around people that went through it with me. Everybody here asked about it. They see your name and `Columbine' next to it, and they want to know what happened. It helped me deal with it, but there were times I wanted people like my friends back home."
But being in South Bend may have allowed him to heal faster than those still in Littleton. Surrounded by memories of the tragedy, a suicide by a parent of one of the victims and a lunchtime student shooting, the tragedy continues in the community.
"I have friends who are seniors [at Columbine], and while the stuff that's gone on there since the shootings has affected me, it's affected them even more. It's a lot easier for me to deal with it here," he said.
But he still struggles with his friends who have not recovered, including Matt. Speaking to him once a week on extra cell phone minutes, he knows his friend's recovery has not gone as well.
"He wouldn't go to counseling," he said. "A lot of kids wouldn't. They thought they could deal with it on their own. I didn't think I needed to go, but I was glad I did. It definitely helped me a lot. I've progressed a lot more than he has … but we're a lot closer now. No one else knows what that experience was like."
As of Wednesday, Matt was not set on going to the memorials.
"I've been trying to get him to go, but he doesn't want to," Jake said. "I don't know if he'll be there."
When Jake returns to Columbine today, Matt and several other classmates may not be with him. But for Jake it is a part of healing, a part of moving on and a part of trying to answer the lingering question of "why."
But as he closes the magazines that tell the story from a year ago and looks at the pictures of students robed in shimmering royal blue gowns and yellow tassles, he knows that the smiles in the pictures celebrate more than just diplomas.
They celebrate survival.
All News Stories for Thursday, April 20, 2000
