Students run from Columbine High School under cover from police during a shooting at the school in Littleton, Colorado, Apr. 20, 1999.The epicenter of the Columbine High School mass shooting was the library, where Craig Scott was studying for a biology test on April 20, 1999. Scott, then 16, said he had just sat down next to his friend, Matt Kechter, when his life turned upside down.in American history, killing 12 students and a teacher.
Craig Scott said he survived the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999, in Littleton, Colorado, by hiding under desk in the library.By some miracle, Scott said, he got out safely, covered in the blood of another injured classmate whom he helped escape, only to learn his own sister, 17-year-old Rachel Joy Scott, was the first victim slain in the rampage.
The only other tandem school shooters in U.S. history were a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old who killed four classmates and a teacher in 1998 at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The pair were tried and convicted as juveniles and were released from prison when they turned 21. "And what really haunts me a little bit is thinking that we're still talking about Columbine to the fact that when there is another school shooting ... they make references to 'another Columbine attack,'" the 69-year-old DeAngelis, who retired in 2014 after 35 years as a teacher and school administrator, told ABC News.
He said about a month before his sister was slain, she wrote an essay for a class titled, "My Ethics, My Codes of Life." He said he adopted it as his mantra for life. He said that after his sister's death, his family was going through her journals and belongings. They found on the back of a chest of drawers, an outline Rachel made of her hands when she was 13.
"We stayed in this hallway a few minutes and then this door opened. To me, it felt like this magic door opened. One of the teachers had opened the door into the auditorium and we went in the auditorium," she said."We ended up having to climb over a chain link fence, and then we walked through this parking lot that's in the park behind the school," Hanley said. "One person we knew had a cell phone, you know one of those big cell phones.
"I felt so helpless to be with my friends, who had lost their best friend. And again to have survived, and then to not be able to do anything or say the right words or address this, that it just is devastating," Hanley said.