Unexpected healing at Columbine High

The school unveils its new atrium, built to replace the library where so many died, and the victims' families find some peace.

By Dave Cullen

Aug 24, 2000 | The best news about Columbine High School anyone has gotten since the tragedy was no news: When school resumed a week ago Monday, nobody came to cover it. Students and staff were relieved, and the reporters chained to this story the past 16 months were pretty happy, too.

But last weekend Columbine officials held a press event showing off the new school atrium, phase one of a $3.1 million project to raze the old library -- where most of the students were killed April 20, 1999 -- and add on a new one, adjoined to the school by a hallway.

A year ago, the school had unveiled its post-massacre renovation project to reporters, on the eve of its "Take Back the School" reopening event, and the half-baked solution to the library problem was its most disturbing feature. The goal was laudable: to keep the structure of the school intact -- so students didn't feel they'd lost it -- while making superficial changes to provoke subtle differences in perception that would be hard for students to put their finger on. There were softer colors, a different pattern on the ceiling, new texture on the floor, different clatter in the hallway.

The glaring problem, though, was that dreaded hallway past the library. They'd erected a wall to cover the internal library windows, and installed a long bank of dark blue lockers to camouflage the empty space. It evoked way too many associations with childhood horror fables: dead bodies walled off by crazy grandpa in the cellar, the telltale heart lurking under the floorboards. I found myself thinking: We know what's back there, we know what you're hiding.

A year later, Brian Rohrbough remembers that temporary solution as a metaphor for the massacre's aftermath. "Everything about what happened here has been hidden," he says. His son Daniel was one of the first killed, on the steps just outside the building. He spent the next 16 months leading some of the families on a relentless investigation, which culminated this April in a series of lawsuits against the sheriff's department.

The atrium, by contrast, was the victims' parents' own solution. The district initially hoped to simply redesign and reopen the library, but the families had been adamant that no one should ever set foot in there again. They raised $3.1 million to tear it down and build a new one.

One of our nastier local columnists had written this spring that the families should stop whining and sucking up money for their problems. I thought he was a jerk to complain, but I did think the families were misguided. It was hard to see how ripping out a floor and ceiling was going to provide the kind of relief they were looking for.

How could obliterating the library wipe out their bad memories? They'd thrown their hearts into this campaign for a year now, they were heavily invested emotionally and they seemed to be headed for sure disappointment.

But I was wrong.

Next Page: As if the library never existed

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