The Littleton Massacre: ...In Sorrow And Disbelief

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They were laughing, excited. "Who's next?" they said, "Who's ready to die?" The two moved through the room, calling out: "All the jocks stand up. We're going to kill every one of you." Seth Houy had come to the library to hang out with his sister and a friend; they ducked under a table and he lay on top of them so he would be the one to be hit. "Honestly, I think that God made us invisible," he told the Denver Post. "We prayed the hardest we'd ever prayed, and God put an invisible shield around us."

The killers went round the room, asking people why they should let them live. Students heard one girl pleading for her life, then a shot, and quiet. They told wounded kids to quit crying; it will all be over soon, you'll all be dead. They approached another girl, cowering under a table, yelled "Peekaboo!" and shot her in the neck. Anyone who cried or moaned was shot again.

The murderers were utterly without pity. Survivors said they treated it like a video game. "We've waited to do this a long time," they said. At one point one of the gunmen recognized a student and said, "Oh, I know you--you can go." And then, "We're out of ammo.. gotta reload. We'll come back to get you three."

Craig took off his white baseball hat and hid it. When the killers walked by, they saw Isaiah and called him a "nigger." He pleaded with them not to shoot, just let him go home, he wanted his mom, and they pulled the trigger. Then they shot Matt. Craig, covered in his friends' blood, lay very, very still. As he told Katie Couric two mornings later, in an account almost unbearable to watch, Craig began praying for courage. "God told me to get out of there," he said. So he got up and started to run, yelling to others to come with him. One girl pleaded for help. "She had a chunk of her shoulder blown off with a shotgun," Craig said. "And I helped her get out. She was bleeding all over the place, and her--her bone was showing." They got out of the library, out to an exit, down to the cops, where Craig told them what the shooters looked like, where they were.

And then he asked the other kids if they had any brothers or sisters in the school, and they started praying for them. As the minutes passed, "All these people that I was praying for, 30 minutes later, their brothers and sisters were showing up." And he said to the others, "See, I told you, I told you prayer worked. I told you your sister was going to come out of this, I said--and they thanked me. And they kept praying for my sister." But something told him that all was not right for Rachel. Only the next morning did he learn, officially, that she had died. But he already knew.

Meanwhile, in the science room, Mr. Sanders was dying. Students kept giving the police specific directions to the room, but there was so much confusion, and the time just kept passing. Via phone, Sanders was told it would be another 10 to 15 minutes before help would arrive. "It's too long," he responded. "Tell my girls that I love them...my wife..."