The Littleton Massacre: ...In Sorrow And Disbelief

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In all it was 3 1/2 hours before the second-floor class was rescued. Students asked if they could please help carry Sanders out on a table. No, said the SWAT team, and they herded the students through the halls, now filled with 6 in. of water from the sprinklers, past the bodies and the blood sprayed everywhere. In the cafeteria the half-eaten lunches lay soaking on the tables. "Everything was left in place," says Lexis, "like it was a normal day." She recalls the police yelling, "If any of you take your hands away from your head, we're going to pull you away immediately. Get up and put your hands on your head. Run! RUN!"

It was too late for Sanders. Gradually his breathing weakened, his face turned blue and pale. He died just minutes after paramedics reached him. "The wait for help was so long," says Jody Clouse. "Everything that happened just didn't seem real."

All the while, the terrified parents were watching it unfold in real time. They streamed toward the campus as the news spread, some abandoning their cars as they came. They approached anyone who looked official, begging for news of their children. Why were the police waiting so long? Their kids were in there, some were running out in gushes, but so many were still missing. Where are they? Who is helping them? In time the parents were told that everyone would be reunited at nearby Leawood Elementary School, and so the vigil moved there. The parents waited as the yellow buses pulled in one at a time, dispensing 40 or so kids into joyful reunions with family and friends, like some kind of awful lottery.

There were so many lists circulating, like the dreaded lists of the war dead, except these were survivor lists, and parents were desperate to see, hear anything, called out names, searched for their kids' friends to find out if they knew anything. They called homes, called hospitals, called anywhere they could think. Some of the kids who fled the school early on had gone into hiding at their friends' houses, in such shock that it was hours before they made contact with their parents.

"I'm so very happy," said Cathy Scott, mother of two, "and so very sad. My kids aren't going back to school anytime soon."

Bruce Beck searched each face coming out, looking for his stepdaughter Lauren Townsend. "You see all the kids run out of the building," he told the Rocky Mountain News. "You're just sure one of the kids is going to be yours." Lauren's mother waited by the phone, waiting for word. And it didn't come. As the afternoon turned to evening, the crowd finally became smaller and more desperate. At one point there were far more pastors and counselors than parents left. Over a basketball hoop was a pink sign--PRAYER CORNER: PLEASE JOIN US. Though by this time the police had secured the high school, officials from the sheriff's office explained that there were bombs stashed among the bodies and it was too dangerous to go in and move them. And then they asked parents to come back in the morning--with dental records. Two mothers fled the building and threw up outside.