Wednesday April 21, 1999, front page: Mass shooting at Columbine High

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Teen gunmen joked during the rampage, survivor says

© 1999 The Dallas Morning News

LITTLETON, Colo. ─ Two heavily armed students dressed in black stormed through a suburban Denver high school yesterday in a bloody rampage that left as many as 25 students and teachers dead.

If the death toll holds, it would be the worst attack ever on an American school.

The gunmen wounded at least 20 others, many critically, and laughed and joked as they fired and threw pipe bombs, students said. Police later found the attackers' bodies in the library of Columbine High School. They apparently killed themselves at the end of what Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone described as "a suicide mission."

Classmates and Denver media identified the gunmen as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both juniors at the school. Police refused to identify them.

They left behind scenes of incredible carnage, with bodies draped one atop another in the school's stairwells, in the cafeteria and the library, Stone said. And the shaken students who survived the attack spoke of the gunmen's savage and casual cruelty.

"One of them opened his cape and had a shotgun. Finally I started figuring out these guys shot to kill, for no reason," said a student, Nick Foss. The gunman "didn't say anything. When he looked at me, the guy's eyes were just dead."

"There was a girl crouched beneath a desk, and the guy came over and said, 'Peekaboo!' and shot her in the neck," said sophomore Bryon Kirland, 15.

Aaron Cohn, a 17-year-old junior, said he was in the library when the two gunmen ─ one of them a youth who lived three doors down from him ─ entered wearing trench coats.

First, he said, they threw pipe bombs that wounded some of his classmates. Then one attacker called out, "All the jocks stand up ─ I'm going to kill every single one of you,'" Cohn said.

The killers began shooting. When someone survived the initial round and cried out in pain, he said, "they just kept shooting them until they were dead. They were laughing, hooting and hollering.

"They were having the time of their lives," he said.