The Littleton Massacre: ...In Sorrow And Disbelief

(4 of 11)

Cafeteria worker Karen Nielsen had rushed to help the bleeding students when she spotted the shooters. As she heard the shots blowing through the room, she shoved the kids into a bathroom. She pulled a phone along with her to call the police. But then she worried, "They'll see the cord. And then we'll be trapped."

Sheriff's deputy Neil Gardner, posted at the school for security, heard the shots and ran toward the cafeteria. When he spotted one gunman, he exchanged fire, then ducked for cover and called for backup. By this time the 911 calls were already coming in, and the SWAT cars were on the scene within 20 minutes. But the bombs were still going off, and the officers had no idea how many shooters there were--or which ones were killers and which were targets. "They didn't want to go in there with guns blazing," says Cathy Scott, mother of two students who escaped, "and kill the wrong kids." And so the police hunkered down, as the bombs kept exploding all around.

Upstairs in the science wing, science teacher Dick Will thought, "There go those chemistry people blowing things up again." But when the fire alarm rang, Will knew it was more than students at work. A group of his kids went down the hall to investigate and came back yelling and screaming, "They're shooting!" He herded his charges back to the corner of the room, shut off the lights and started turning over chairs and desks and piling them up against the doors.

Other teachers had the same instincts. Business teacher Dave Sanders was in the faculty lounge when he heard the trouble, raced toward the cafeteria and went to war. "He screamed for us to get down and shut up," says freshman Kathy Carlston. "We crawled on the floor and made it to the stairs." When the firing began again, they got up and started to run. Sanders, on the ground, propped himself on his elbows, directing kids to safety as the killers moved in. Too terrified to look back, Kathy never saw the shooters, but she could tell they were close, very close. She stands over 6 ft.; she knew she made a promising target. So while other kids raced down a first-floor hallway, she leaped up the stairs toward the second floor. She tried the door to one science room, but it was already locked. Furiously she worked her way down the hall, finally to Science Room 3, into which two teachers were herding other kids.

The class had been taking a long, nasty biology test when the explosions came. Lexis Coffey-Berg, 16, saw Sanders running toward them, saw him shot twice in the back, with a jolt and spasm. "You could see the impact," she says. "You could see it go through his body. He was spitting up blood." He stumbled into the room, blood streaming from his chest, and collapsed over the desk, knocking out his teeth.

A teacher got the paramedics on the phone, and the classroom turned into a trauma ward. Aaron Hancey, a junior, had had some first-aid training, and the paramedics tried to talk the kids through the basic lifesaving treatment. Boys stripped off their shirts to make pillows for Sanders' head and bandages for the bloody holes in his torso. They found some emergency blankets stashed with the fire gear in that room and wrapped him up as his temperature started to fall. They could tell they were losing him.