Looking Back!

When Columbine High School was over taken by violence and intrigue, I put together a story with a former Colorado State Poet Laureate. I interviewed her two days after the shootings, and asked if she had expressed how she felt in verse.

"No, I've just been observing all the media coverage, taking mental, and written notes. I'll let the ideas simmer for a while and then start writing poetry."

I was drawn to the poetry angle of the story by what I saw and reacted to at the school. Makeshift memorials to the slain students were going up everywhere. And EVERYONE, big burly football players, snowboarders, student leaders, Goths, old, young, teachers, family members contributed to a massive volume of poetry. It wasn't all perfect pentameter, it didn't often rhyme, but it WAS all poetry.

I hope when those memorials got torn down someone hung on to all those printed tributes. Those poems document a powerful mass catharsis, and a warning to all of us that "it can HAPPEN here."

I can tell you where I WAS when Kennedy was shot, when Nixon quit, when 9/11 happened, when Martin Luther King was shot, when we sent men to the moon. But I find over time I oft get confused, mix up my locations by thousands of miles, trade off locations. But the day two disgruntled students started shooting up the Columbine campus?

Photographer Jim Weis and I are doing a drive thru at Burger King at Speer and Broadway(fine dining for news crews.) We were working a story on housing.

Jim: "You gettin' the usual?"

Paul: "Yeah!"

Speaker: "Welcome to Burger King. How can I help you?

Jim: " We need a double Whopper with cheese, hold the mayo...add mustard, and an ice tea."

(Jim always brought his lunch from home.)

Speaker: "That's a double Whopper with cheese, hold the mayo, add mustard and an ice tea. Is that it?"

Jim: "Yep!"

Speaker: "That will be four seventy five at the second window. Go ahead and pull forward."

Paul: "Jim did you hear that on the (police) scanner?"

Jim: " Yeah, what's all the commotion?"

Paul: "Somethings going on at Columbine High School. Sounds like a catastrophe. It has to be one of those doomsday exercises."

Jim: "Yeah it's got to be!"

Speaker: "That'll be four seventy five. Thank you. Here's your ice tea, and here's your Whopper."

Jim: "Thanks!"

Paul: "Jim, this Columbine thing is sounding really weird. We ought to at least make sure the station knows about."

As occasionally happens during a crisis, the assignment desk is already dealing with more situations than an air traffic controller could handle. This was one of those days. They hadn't heard about Columbine, so we asked to talk to the News Director or Assignment Manager. Turns out they were both out to a meeting 4o miles away. Mildly frustrated Jim and I looked at each other and knew we might be making career decisions...but we were in agreement...we were blowing off our housing story and screaming to Columbine about 30 minutes away.

I'm no spring chicken. I forget many things every single day. But, I'd be willing to wager a "pretty penny" the verbal language exchanges you just read are 95 percent accurate. This is a day every single person in the Denver Media has firmly imprinted on the brain, in memory centers, in emotional places. And we are not talking about what we were hearing on the scanners, rather what we saw and heard when we got to Columbine.

In my 35 years in broadcast journalism I witnessed many things that are tough to take. I watched suicides, I was within 3o feet of a drunken barricaded suspect who unwisely decided to raise up his rifle and point it at a swat team. He was hit by more than 20 bullets and died ten feet away. I coped with every one of those situations with journalistic distance. I might have gotten a little rattled when I got home, but it was essentially part of the job.

" Your job is to just tell the story."

But Columbine? Whoa! First of all it was the pure size of the crime scene.

There were police and firemen on the scene from every jurisdiction in the metropolitan area. If you are not from the Denver area, but from some other metropolitan area, just put yourself in an environment that attracted that size an emergency force.

The first official I ran into was the Public Information Officer for Denver Fire. Columbine, in Jefferson County, mailing address Littleton, is a good half hour drive from this guy's office. He had no jurisdiction at this scene. Regardless, I decided to do my job and ask him a few questions. Those questions were in vain. His face was wan, his jaw hung low, and he could only just shake his head. I got the same reaction from every cop, fireman, or paramedic that seemed to be in charge.

"Where was the Command Post?"

Nobody knew. There were several of them.

"Who was in charge?"

Nobody knew.

"How many gunmen?"

Nobody knew for sure.

"Had the shooting stopped?"

Nobody knew.

"Victims?"

Nobody knew.

"Fatalities?"

Nobody knew. (The number of fatalities and wounded wasn't sorted out for twelve hours. The reason for that is yet another story I'll save for another day.)

"Is any body's swat team going in?"

Nobody seemed to know.

The outfall from this event swallowed up all media resources in this 17th largest population center in the country for more than two months. Reporters never had to wonder what story they would be doing the next day. It would clearly have something to do with Columbine. (On the day of the shootings, one of the sports anchors spent all afternoon and evening coordinating live shots from the various reporters.)

I'm going to share some more with you in coming postings, as much for me, as for you. That is why I started this one with the poetry story. That poet needed to sort out her thoughts and feelings before she could appropriately express herself. That is what I've been doing.

Columbine left the community and the media many life lessons. One of them is clearly, " YES, IT CAN HAPPEN HERE!"