Shots Fired in Terminal 2

by William Hazelgrove

  “You gotta leave…now!”

  That's what the soldier says to me. I know I have one chance to get our luggage back. I don't know there are 25,000 other pieces of luggage that will remain unclaimed until the next day. No one is getting back anything, but I have to try.

  “That's my luggage,” I exclaim, pointing to the luggage cart. “I just want to grab it and go.”

  He turns, keeping both hands on his rifle. “That's your luggage?”

  I nod. “Yes. That's my luggage. All I need to do is grab it and I'm outta here.”

  He look at me, a man with red hair, blue eyes, shorts, sunglasses, baseball cap, and backpack. Yeah, a dad. A middle-class man from the middle of the country. He rolls his shoulders and takes a chance.

  “Get it and get the fuck out of here.”

  I run to the luggage cart and throw the pieces that have fallen onto the top. I see the granola I bought and the vitamin water. I see ear buds on the ground, flip-flops and tennis shoes. The terminal is frozen in the moment when my family started running from the shots. I throw the carry-on bags on top as well and start to push the baggage cart toward the door. The solider watches me as the carry-ons fall off. I throw them back on and keep pushing and I am outside.

  Sweat cools all over my body as I begin pushing my leaning luggage cart. I am one with the homeless pushing their earthly possessions in shopping carts. I push the bumping cart back toward the media trucks. The luggage keeps falling off and it is slow bumping over cables from the trucks and down sidewalks. People watch me like I am some curious circus that keeps falling apart as I keep throwing the luggage back up and continuing. The Japanese woman watches as all the luggage falls out of the cart and I run around stacking it again. Her expression doesn't change. I am wet with perspiration as I inch to where Clay is sitting against the post. He turns and then a glimmer of a smile crosses his mouth. It is the first time since the shooting I have seen the expression of impending doom leave his face.

  “You got it!”

  It is a victory of sorts on a day of horrible defeats. I nod, coming to a halt and wiping my face with my T-shirt. Kitty, Callie, and Careen walk up, and I know the sanctuary of the photographer's car is now gone. It is time to get the hell out of Dodge.

  “She had to go,” Kitty explains, before I asks. “You got the luggage.”

  “Yes. I got the luggage.”

  “Buses are coming to take us out, so it's good you got it.”

  I nod and turn, seeing a line of Greyhound-style buses approaching. We are finally getting out of the Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport. Hallelujah. Callie is staring at the luggage and I realize in that moment she isn't wearing her glasses. She turns to me, her blue eyes picking up the media glare.

  “Dad…did you see my glasses?”

  I frown. “No…did you leave them?”

  Callie nods. “Uh huh.”

  I stand up and stare at her. “Shit.”

  Her glasses cost six hundred dollars and she is nearly blind without them. We are getting some semblance of our lives back, and the pieces of family life hinge on phones, glasses, wallets, and keys. Her glasses are a piece to be retrieved. Callie shrugs.

  “It doesn't matter.”

  In a way it doesn't matter, but suddenly I am pissed. I am pissed that we are about to be victimized again and my daughter will be without her glasses and we will have to pay six hundred dollars to replace them. We have been victims all day and I am tired of being a victim.

  I breathe deeply. “Where did you leave them?”

  “By where we were sitting.”

  I turn back to Terminal 1 and stare at my nightmare. I breathe heavily again. I want to wrestle something back from this beast who has turned our lives upside down and terrified us all day.

  “Stay right here…I'll be back.”

  “Are you sure?” Kitty calls out.

  “Yes! Stay there!”

  I take off, and this time I run. I want to get back before the buses come, and I weave my way back through the media trucks and sprint up the slight incline to Terminal 1. The door is still open and I go in again and this time no one is there. I run into the semi-darkened terminal and realize I am pushing my luck. I half expect to meet the second shooter in that cavernous space. Instead, I meet the SWAT man again.

  “Hey…what the fuck are you doing?”

  I turn. He looks really pissed.

  “My daughter left her glasses,” I shout, looking around frantically.

  He points to the door. “You have to get the fuck out of here!”

  His hands are still firmly on his rifle. I nod and stare at where we had been sitting. The glasses aren't there. I am about to turn and go when I see a thin pair of glasses on the floor. They are just sitting there in the open…a young girl's glasses with an arabesque design on the frames. I grab them and a pair of earbuds that I think might be hers as well.

  “I'm good,” I shout back at the man with the automatic weapon.

  I run outside and now I am sprinting because the buses are filling with people and the one thing I do not want is to be left behind. I run past the Japanese woman, the woman with her ukulele, the people sitting, lying down, the SWAT officers, the cops, the FBI men in suits, and I reach Terminal 2. My family is still huddled around our luggage. Callie turns and smiles.

  “Here,” I say breathing hard, handing over her glasses.

  “Yay! You got them.”

  A small victory. Callie puts them on and I realize it is the first time we have put some things back together all day. We had our luggage and she had her glasses.

  “Let's get going,” I say, pushing the luggage cart toward the curb where the buses are lining up.

  I look at Careen, who is staring at her phone. She does not seem fazed at all by what has been going on. I mention this to Kitty later and she shrugs. “Well, they have been training for this for years in school on lockdowns. It is part of their world more than ours.”

  This is true. They have been going through lockdown drills ever since elementary school. This is part of their life: training for the shooter who might come into their school. They have grown up in a post-Columbine world where the television images of people running out of that fortress school in Colorado still haunt the internet. School shootings happen in their world, and every time I am buzzed through locked doors after staring into a concave lens confirms it. School kids all over America practice hiding under desks and locking doors and teachers are trained to minimize slaughter by sheltering in place. That had all started with a school in Colorado and two seniors named Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris.

  Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were seniors and they were brains. Eric was handsome and Dylan was tall, angular, and geeky. Eric had spiky hair and listened to industrial rock and got lots of high school girls. Dylan was six-three and 143 pounds and didn't have the success with girls, but he had a date for prom and Eric didn't. None of this mattered. They were going to kill people, lots of people. They called it “Judgment Day” and it would begin with a holocaust of exploding propane tanks they had learned how to detonate from The Anarchist Cookbook on the internet. Then, after the fireball had incinerated hundreds of students at Columbine High School, the real killing would begin with an Intratec TEC-DC9 and sawed-off shotguns while they tossed portable explosives from a duffel bag loaded with ordinance. Their long trench coats would conceal their weapons and add to the swaggering Western gunslinger motif. In their words, this would be fun.1

  Columbine was not the first school shooting. Many preceded it. But it was the most deadly school shooting at that time; the mother of mass death in a school. When you read the book Columbine, by Dave Cullen, you have a deep revulsion that two humans could do this to other humans. Thirteen students plus the shooters were killed in the Columbine shooting and twenty-four were wounded.2 Columbine would become the face of all school shootings until Sandy Hook for the deadly cold-blooded planning and the detached way the two shooters murdered teenagers in
the school library.

  Video games would be examined. Bullying would be examined. Police tactics would be examined. The culture would be examined. Books would be written and FBI reports complied. In the end, there are still the questions of what drove Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to murder their fellow students using automatic weapons, bombs, and sawed-off shotguns. It is sadly the monument to all school shootings before and since. The worst of American school carnage related to firearms and children. Even Sandy Hook would not approach the sheer cultural impact that Columbine would have at the time and still does. Many lockdown procedures, security procedures, zero-tolerance policies, shooter profiles, intervention programs, and bullying programs have a blood trail leading back to Columbine. The shooting ranks up there with the great calamities of the late twentieth century.

  I don't remember how I found out about what had happened on April 20, 1999. I know I saw it on television, with the aerial shots of the helicopter showing a fortress of a school in Columbine, Colorado, surrounded by police cars, with students running in small lines. A memorable scene was a bloody student dropping from a window that turned out to be an escape from the carnage of the school library and the CNN red letters above images of police crouched behind their cars with guns drawn while the shooters inside massacred students.3 This approach of not going into a school where a shooting was taking place would be forever dumped into the ash heap of police procedures in exchange for an immediate entrance policy that recognized that shooters were not hostage takers but killers.

  Most people would never know the real horror of Columbine. When you read about it, though, you recognize the cold-blooded horror inflicted by two seniors in Columbine High School. Gun-control laws would come out of Columbine, along with movies, games, and subcultures that worshiped the nihilism of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Michael Moore's film Bowling for Columbine would become a staple for gun-control advocates. It is the two killers of Columbine who are responsible for my children knowing how to duck and cover in lockdown drills in their elementary schools and high schools. And it all began with a website on America Online.

  Eric Harris created the website to vent his hatred of his teachers and fellow students. Then came posts about how to make bombs. There were death threats to students at Columbine. The video game Doom played into it, with Harris designing new gaming levels for his friends. The Jefferson County sheriff became aware of the site when the mother of Brooks Brown discovered it after Eric had made death threats against her son many months before the Columbine killings occurred. The Jefferson County sheriff investigated with an affidavit created to secure a search warrant. The affidavit was never filed and the warrant was never obtained, which would later become the center of an alleged cover-up by the Sheriff's Department and would become the great “might have been” of Columbine. If the search warrant had been issued then the worst mass school shooting in history might never have occurred. Eventually, Harris deleted the site from AOL.4

  Eric Harris grew up on military bases and loved playing war with his brothers. His father, Major Wayne Harris, was a stern taskmaster and discipline was handed out quickly. Eric attended five different schools as the family moved around from base to base. His childhood photos show a normal clean-cut kid. He wrote later that he loved guns and loved playing war, always playing a Marine. His father eventually retired in Colorado in Jefferson County, and Eric started attending Columbine High School.

  By that time he was very into the video game Doom, which gave him a virtual reality for his war fantasies. When writing later about his childhood, he said he remembered the Fourth of July most vividly. He loved explosions.

  Dylan Klebold, on the other hand, liked school. He was in the Challenging High Intellectual Potential Students, or CHIPS, program. His parents named him after Dylan Thomas. He made a pine wood derby car in Cub Scouts and earned merit badges. He had a great pitching arm and in Little League loved to strike out the batters. He was competitive and really hated to lose. His parents were liberals, intellectual, and loved taking the kids into the woods in Colorado. One time on a trip to a creek he fell in the mud and went berserk when his friends started to laugh at him. His mother had to take him away to calm him down. A neighbor noted that he seemed to just blow up at times.5

  Harris and Klebold acquired their weapons from a “straw buyer” at a gun show and a friend whom they paid five hundred dollars. They constructed pipe bombs, most of which would never go off, and propane tank bombs.6 They sawed off the barrels of the shotguns to increase the power and make them easier to conceal and loaded up their vests with ammo on the morning of April 20, 1996. They drove to the high school and attempted to set off the propane tank bombs. None exploded, however. Eric Harris carried a 12-gauge Savage Springfield 67H pump action shotgun and a Hi Point 995 Carbine. Dylan Klebold had the 9 x 19mm Intratec TEC-9 semiautomatic handgun and a 12-gauge Stevens 311D double-barreled sawed-off shotgun. They loaded their weapons by their cars, hoping the propane tank bombs still might go off. Harris saw fellow student Brooks Brown in the parking lot and told him to go home and get away from the school.7 Locked and loaded, they walked toward the school cafeteria. They wore their long trench coats and referred to themselves as the Trench Coat Mafia. The two high-school students kept their shotguns low inside their coats.8

  Rachel Scott was eating her lunch outside the cafeteria with her friend Richard Castaldo. Harris shouted “Go Go” and they raised their weapons from their trench coats. They began firing and Rachel Scott was hit in the chest and head and instantly killed. Dylan shot Castaldo in the torso and arms, hitting him eight times with the nineteen-cent Kmart bullets from the TEC-9. The gun tended to spray bullets, and the fact he was hit so many times indicates the rapidity of fire. Rachel Scott was shot four times.9

  Harris lost his trench coat as he and Klebold approached the stairs leading to the cafeteria. He let loose with his 9mm carbine and shot Daniel Rohrbough, Sean Graves, and Lance Kirklin, who had been walking up the stairs. They at first thought Harris was holding a paintball gun until he fired shots into Danny's knee, chest, and stomach. Danny hit the concrete hard, and Lance tried to help him. But Danny was dead and Lance was shot in the chest, leg, knee, and foot. Lance blacked out and when he came to Harris was standing over him. Sean Graves was shot in the back.

  Many students in the cafeteria thought the shots were part of a senior prank. The shooters fired at some other students sitting outside and wounded them before descending the stairs to the cafeteria. They stepped over the boys they had just shot. Lance Kirklin lay on the ground, pleading for help. He tugged on someone's pants leg, but Klebold sneered, “Sure I'll help you,” and shot Lance in the face.10 Harris shot and paralyzed Anne-Marie Hochhalter, who was trying to escape. The two shooters then headed toward the west entrance of the school and fired at Patti Neilson, an art teacher, who thought at first that it was either a prank or a movie. When the glass shattered in the door, she ran to the library, telling students to get under their desks. She then dialed 911.

  Deputy Neil Gardner had received a call that there was a shooter in the school. At 11:22 Gardner spotted Eric Harris outside the school, and Harris fired ten shots at him. Gardner leaned over the top of his car and fired off four rounds. He didn't have his prescription glasses and his bullets didn't strike anywhere close to the shooter. Harris then fired several more rounds and disappeared into the building. The killers began moving down the hallway of the school. The police were beginning to arrive, but Harris and Klebold still had the school to themselves as the police wouldn't enter for over an hour.

  Columbine was the Wild West for Harris and Klebold, or they were characters in Doom, as they threw pipe bombs, shot out windows, and gunned down fellow students. Stephanie Munson was shot in the ankle but managed to hobble out of the school. Science teacher Dave Sanders was spreading the alarm and had been evacuating students from the cafeteria. He moved through the school with a student, trying to get as many people out as possible. They turned into the
main hallway and saw Klebold and Harris at the other end. The shooters opened fire and Anderson was hit twice in the chest. He fell as Klebold passed him and went after the student. They were hunting humans in a large mazelike building similar to every American high school. It was very much like a video game in which bad guys were popping out around every corner.

  Dave Sanders dragged himself toward the science lab, where he was pulled inside by a teacher hiding with thirty students. He was bleeding heavily and one of the student put a sign in the window reading, “Bleeding to Death,” so that rescuers would come to that classroom first and get Sanders out. Those in the lab applied pleasure to Sanders's wound while students called the police from the classroom with their cellphones.11 The students and teacher used their shirts but Sanders was bleeding out fast. He would not make it, but the most depraved part of the Columbine massacre was about to begin in the library.12

  Fifty students were hiding in the school library, which made for a contained and target-rich environment. The two shooters entered while Patti Nielson was on the phone with 911. Eric Harris's command “Get Up” was recorded on the 911 tape. Then, “All jocks stand up, we'll get the guys in the white hats.” A tradition of the jocks wearing white hats had made them a target for the socially ostracized Harris and Klebold. When no one stood up, they began shooting anyway.13

  What followed then was on the level of war-crime atrocities. Kyle Velasquez was hiding under a computer desk, and Klebold shot and killed him first. A girl was asked if she believed in God and then was shot. An African American student was taunted and called racial slurs and then murdered. The two shooters went to the window and fired at police, then returned to their duffel bags to reload and continue killing. A girl under a desk was killed with a single shot to the head. Klebold fired his shotgun under desks without looking. The recoil of the sawed off shotgun caused the gun to kick upward into his nose and blood gushed from it. A girl who was shot in the neck cried out and Harris snapped, “Quit your bitching.” Harris walked around the library shooting sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds with his shotgun. He killed students instantly with shots to the head and the back while Klebold fired with his TEC-9. The carnage was surreal, and in the end the list of the dead and wounded read like battlefield horror.