The Littleton Massacre: ...In Sorrow And Disbelief

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"I can't breathe," he murmured. "I've got to go." But they kept talking to him, pulled his wallet out of his pocket and held up the pictures of his daughters. Tell us about them, they said. "He was breathing and awake the whole time," says Jody Clouse. "I'm sure the pain was great." They made a sign with the dry-erase board and held it up in the window for the rescuers to see: HELP, BLEEDING TO DEATH. As the students prayed, Sanders every now and then managed to cough and spit out some blood to clear his lungs. But the time kept passing, and no one came. Said Sanders: "I don't think I'm going to make it."

On the classroom TVs, the barricaded students could see the SWAT teams assembling, the news choppers hovering and eventually the parents beginning to gather, as they and the rest of the country watched the siege take hold of the school. "[The police] didn't know where the shooters were, or where the bombs were," says Lexis, "so they couldn't get us right away." Her friends began writing notes to their parents, saying that they loved them, that they thought they were going to die. Everyone was praying. "In a world where there are so many religions," says Lexis, "everyone was praying the same way." One friend made a vow. "If I ever get out, I'm going to be nice to my little brother."

Elsewhere up and down the halls, students locked themselves in closets and classrooms, also calling out on their cell phones. They called police; they called parents; they called for anyone who could come and help get them out. Some could hear sounds of laughing in the hallways, as the shooters prowled through the smoke. They heard the jeering. "Oh, you f__ing nerd. Tonight's a good night to die." Senior Nick Foss and a friend ducked into a bathroom, punched through a ceiling panel and shimmied along the ventilation shaft. Suddenly one of the vents broke, and Foss fell 15 ft. down onto a table in the teachers' lounge. Somehow uninjured, he picked himself up and sprinted out a door to freedom as the shooting continued behind him. "They were shooting everywhere; it seemed like they wanted to kill everything in sight," he says. "I've never been so frightened in my life. It was run for your life or die."

His twin brother Adam, meanwhile, was in trouble down the hall. He had been in choir practice, preparing for a concert that afternoon at an elementary school. When the shooting started, Adam and about 60 others crammed into the choir-room office as the explosions seemed to come closer and closer. They pushed a filing cabinet and two upended desks against the door. In the hot, stagnant air, several kids began to gag and cough. Shhh, quiet, the others said, fearing any sound would lure the killers, who for all they knew were right outside. The choir room lay near the top of the stairs, close to where the carnage began, and very close to the library where it would finally end.