While the first five and half minutes of the call have been released to the public, the rest of the audio is "available" in the form of a transcript.[2] The call picked up the deaths of all ten students who died in the library; some can be heard begging for their lives. Since the shooting, families of the injured and deceased have strongly protested the release of the entire 911 call, fearing that it would inspire future copycats.
After killing two students and wounding several others outside the school, the gunmen entered the building. They wounded art teacher Patricia "Patti" Nielson (35) and student Bryan Anderson (17) upon entry. Nielson and Anderson fled to the library, where several students had assumed that the sound of gunfire was some sort of senior prank. Less than a minute after she entered the room, Nielson called 911 as she shouted for everyone in the room to seek refuge underneath their tables.
Columbine Library 911 Call Full Version
Download Zip: https://tinurll.com/2vIILy
During the panic, Nielson tells the operator that she's too scared to get up and barricade the library doors because she's unaware of how close the shooter is. At around four minutes and twenty seconds into the call, a large explosion erupts from Nielson's end of the line. As she tells the operator her name, Harris and Klebold enter the library and begin to execute their classmates.
At one point during the rampage, Klebold uses racial slurs against one victim (Isaiah Shoels, 18) before Harris executes them. An injured student (John Tomlin, 16) asks the shooters, "Haven't you done enough?" before he is fatally shot. Val Schnurr (18) is heard pleading for her life as Klebold taunts her with, "Do you believe in God?" Towards the 12-minute mark, a loud crashing noise is heard near the phone's receiver; Klebold was using a chair to smash a computer that was above Nielson's hiding place. When the gunmen leave, survivors are heard fleeing. A few moments later, Nielson retreats to a back storage area in the library and her voice is no longer heard during the call.
Reader Portia Masterson walked into the office on a drizzly day in late March. It was an unusual moment for a couple of reasons: first, Portia usually sticks close to her home in Golden, near Denver; second, when she's out and about, she's usually riding her bike. Masterson owns Self-Propulsion Inc., a bike shop that caters to bicycle commuters and long-distance tourers. She doesn't think much of the adrenaline junkies who tear up trails on their mountain bikes. "Every once in a while, we'll have someone walk into the shop with a bike just covered in mud," she says. "Our first question is, 'Where'd you get that?'... Well, don't do it again.' " Her Self-Propulsion newsletter is full of tips for serious bikers - how to keep your hands from going numb, your buns from hurting and your ears from freezing. Her mechanics are mainly women, who, she says, give "great attention to detail," and she offers discounts to only two groups: folks who pedal to work each day and bike cops. In theory, Portia's friend, reader Neal Schwieterman, ought to qualify for a double discount. Neal spends his days pedaling around Paonia on his knobby-tired, two-wheeled police cruiser. After only a year here, he knows just about everyone in town. Before coming to the Western Slope, Neal was a Jefferson County, Colo., sheriff's deputy for 11 years, three of them on a bike. He's full of harrowing tales - like the time he was run over by an irate Christmas shopper searching for a parking spot, or the time a bunch of kids tossed firecrackers at him, thinking he was just a biker in a yellow shirt (he stopped and introduced himself, then got to know their parents). His most heartbreaking experience came during his last week with Jefferson County, when he answered a call to Columbine High School. "It was eerie," he says. "The first call said, 'There's a 911 call from Columbine High School. There's a party down in the southwest parking lot.' The next call said 'multiple shots fired,' and the floodgates just opened." Neal spent much of the next five hours hunkered behind a football outbuilding with 10 kids; "Four of them were almost 1084 - that means almost dead." He called for help while the two student gunmen fired down at them from a library window. Amazingly, all the teenagers with him survived the experience. "I thought, 'I'm never going to live through that again,' " he says now. "I decided to do something active to make sure that doesn't happen again." That something is teaching Paonia High School students how to kayak. He starts them out with rolling lessons in the county swimming pool, then takes the braver souls out into the local rivers to try their paddle at whitewater. In the process, the kids learn about self-reliance and determination. Government officials can throw all the money in the world at preventing disasters like the Columbine shootings, says Neal, but it won't do much good. "The biggest problem was that those two kids didn't have the coping skills they needed."
Among the most compelling documents are 16 pages of testimony from Patty Nielson -- the teacher famous for making 911 calls from the library as the killers rampaged through the building -- that effectively refute the most misleading myth of all: that the entire tragedy was intended as a horrible attack on jocks, blacks and Christians.
"As Patty Nielson continued to reflect on the incident in the library she began to recall additional details," the report states, "...at one point during the incident she remembered hearing a boy being confrontational with [the killers]." Nielson stated that the confrontation was strictly verbal, but remembered hearing the unidentified male student state words to the effect of "that's enough, he's dead."
When the bombs failed to detonate according to plan, the Columbine killers began shooting students face-to-face, most of them in the library, near the building entrance where the murderers had their gunfight with the deputy. Teacher Patti Nielson was in the library along with many students. Nielson immediately called 911 from a library phone. She followed the 911 operator's instructions to keep the students inside the library and wait for the police to arrive. That turned out to be a death sentence for 10 students. The two killers entered the library and began taunting the students, then killing them one by one. Through the open 911 line, the police dispatcher could hear the students being gunned down.
2ff7e9595c
Comments