The Littleton Massacre: ...In Sorrow And Disbelief

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That rivalry had been smoldering for months. Some students say even the teachers picked on the Trench Coats, blaming them for things they hadn't done and letting the jocks get away with anything because they were the crown princes. One athlete in particular liked to taunt them. "Dirtbag," he'd say, or maybe, "Nice dress." Others called them "faggots," inbreeds, harassing them to the point of throwing rocks and bottles at them from moving cars. "You have to understand that there were as many lies, rumors and intrigue as in Washington this past year," says Marsh. "It's almost the definition of a teenager to be cruel to those who are not like you. They don't like to admit it," she says, but "the ones who are the worst at spreading rumors and lies would be the jocks and the cheerleaders. There was one rumor we went around killing small animals. Another rumor that we had orgies."

Some of the Trench Coats tried to ignore the hazing, but some snarled back, and one reportedly flashed a shotgun at his abusers in the park. They made a video for class, a tale of kids in trench coats hunting down their enemies with shotguns. The graffiti in the boys' bathroom warned: COLUMBINE WILL EXPLODE ONE DAY. KILL ALL ATHLETES. ALL JOCKS MUST DIE.

It was all out in the open, all the needles and threats, but in a school of nearly 2,000 busy, ambitious kids, that quiet hissing sound was just background noise, drowned out by the gossip about who went to the prom with whom on Saturday night; the humming of the seniors' theme song, The Way You Look Tonight; and finally the normal sounds of a Tuesday morning, when the biology class was worrying about its test on the digestive system, the choir was rehearsing for its afternoon concert and it was warm enough outside to wear shorts, at last.

It was Free Cookie Day in the cafeteria, and there were hundreds of students draped around the tables and waiting in lines at the 11:30 lunch hour when the sounds of the firing erupted outside. Students saw two boys in trench coats and masks firing at kids; one tossed something up onto the roof of the school, and it exploded in a flash. Some kids thought it was the long-awaited senior prank; they had been expecting balloons filled with shaving cream. Surely those are firecrackers, they thought. Surely those guns are fake. Is the blood fake? Can a fake bomb make walls shake? Then they were screaming and running. One boy could feel the rush of a bullet past his head.

"Get down!" the janitor yelled. "Get under a table!" They dove for cover, then began crawling--under furniture, over backpacks, slithering toward the stairs. Then they ran as the shots came again. "We heard boom after boom," says sophomore Jody Clouse. "The floor was shaking from the explosions." Bullets clanged as they bounced off metal lockers. Some tried to run upstairs, to the safety of the library. But there was smoke everywhere, the fire alarms had gone off, and the sprinkler system was turning the school into a blinding, misty jungle. So they retreated back downstairs, away from the library, which, by the time the mayhem ended, had turned into a tomb.