by Jeff Kass
“Part of our anger at Simon’s Rock College, and one of the main reasons for the lawsuit, was our belief that they had failed to respect our need for the truth.”
Some Columbine families, fighting the pull of this tragic gravity, chose silence. But many launched crusades, and the Shoels were no exception. Early on, they were among the victim families who spoke most loudly, and critically, from their new-found public platform. In turn, they were among the most criticized.
The Shoels undertook a traveling ministry that ranged across the country with a mix of gospel, grief, and civics lessons. They armed themselves with a spokesman and an attorney, helpful tools in a modern American tragedy. They asked the questions on everyone’s mind. They were the first to file a Columbine lawsuit, just over a month after the shootings, and went straight to the Harrises and Klebolds, charging that the parents had not properly controlled their sons. The Shoels were the first to sue the Jefferson County Sheriff. They alleged officers did not properly investigate the two teens before the shootings, nor fully deploy the day of the shootings. “They might as well put they wings on and call themselves cluckers,” Michael says of the police. “Chickens.”
The Shoels sued the Columbine teachers for allegedly failing to piece together the violent class essays and videos that popped up in the classrooms, and again asked whether anyone could have predicted Columbine before the fact. The Shoels tried to take the gun accomplices to task for aiding and abetting; Michael figures Robyn Anderson knew what the guns would be used for, but wasn’t prosecuted because she was white. “Now you know if that had been one of our daughters, we all woulda been in jail,” he says. “We all woulda been lookin’ for bondsmen, you know what I’m sayin’?”
Michael says he didn’t sue for money, but answers. His pleadings seeking monetary damages were like the economic boycotts of the civil rights era. “I just did the same thing,” he says. “It’s just in a modern way.”
The injured, and other victim families, would also file lawsuits.
The Shoels appeared on radio and television, and two days after the shootings Michael took part in one of the most powerful moments in television history. On the Today Show with Katie Couric, he listened as student Craig Scott recounted seeing Isaiah get shot. Craig’s own sister, Rachel Scott, had also been shot dead, and Michael held hands, healing and grieving, black and white, with Craig. Looking back, Michael is almost amused by the scene. “When I went to see Katie Couric, it was to call all black men in America to help me fight the Klan,” he says, “then something like the Holy Spirit struck me.”
Leeza, Montel, Queen Latifah, Oprah, and The 700 Club also beamed the Shoels into America’s living rooms, the couple recalls. But Vonda says, “I really would have rather go on for a different reason. Like maybe listenin’ to other peoples’ problems.”
The Shoels have what might easily be called conspiracy theories. Michael and Vonda believe the whites who died at Columbine were killed because they liked black people. “We dealin’ with the Aryan Nation or the Klan, and they hate to say it,” Michael says at one point of the forces behind Columbine. “Instead of them sayin’ a apple is a apple and a orange is a orange, they tryin’ to make something; they tryin’ to make those fruits be something else. You can’t make a peach be a banana. How you gonna do it? They don’t even look the same. You see what I’m sayin’? You can’t turn a apple into a lemon. They too; they opposites. You might try, but you can’t do it.”
In fact, Michael at one point calls Eric and Dylan scapegoats. “If we really get down to it—I hope we can find out—but I don’t think Dylan or Eric killed Isaiah,” he says.
“Now I wouldn’t say that,” Vonda parries. “I don’t trust that. I don’t; [someone] would have to show me proof of that.”
Yet Vonda has other conspiratorial thoughts. “Eric and Klebold I don’t think shot theirselves,” she says. “I think somebody else did it figurin’ they was gonna snitch. They couldn’t hold a secret. So they just got rid of them too. That’s how I feel. Maybe not. That’s how I really feel.”
Michael adds: “This is the biggest cover-up in America.”
The Shoels received their share of emails, phone calls, and hugs of support. They were also, as the Denver Post put it, “vilified,” at least in Denver. “Are they victims or are they opportunists?” Denver talk show host Peter Boyles told the paper. “Clearly they’re victims, but they’ve got the opportunism thing going pretty strong, too.”
The media poked through the muck of Michael’s rap sheet, almost as long as his list of complaints against the Columbine disaster. The Denver Post reported: “He served a three-year stint in a Texas prison from 1974 to 1977, according to the Texas Department of Corrections. He’d been on probation for burglarizing a pharmacy when police found him illegally in possession of a 12-gauge shotgun and .38-caliber revolver during a car accident, records show.”
Michael told the paper he was seventeen at the time of the burglary when his friends did the break-in. He was just a bystander. “People are trying to pull up my history, something that wouldn’t happen if I weren’t black,” Michael added. “I’ve proved myself to be a law-abiding citizen.”
At one point he was behind on almost $7,000 worth of child support payments to his ex-wife.
After the Shoels sued the Harrises and Klebolds, the right-leaning Rocky Mountain News editorial page blasted their high profile attorney, Geoffrey Fieger: “It’s about accountability, he [Fieger] promised. It’s about responsibility. And who knows? Depending on what ultimately comes out at trial, he may even partly be right. But at his press conference Thursday it was vibrantly clear that this first of the Columbine lawsuits is also very much about a loud, flamboyant attorney by the name of Geoffrey Fieger.”
The father of slain student Dan Rohrbough and the Browns, all of whom are white, would later bear the brunt of the criticism for being the loudest Columbine critics. But Michael, a thundering black preacher in a quiet, white state, sees racism in the criticism directed at him. “We were the talk of the land,” he says. “I’m just a mad, deranged black man.” He adds, “They treatin’ us like we went in that school and pulled the trigger.”
But the Shoels lived up to their own code, becoming the first and still only victim’s family to release their loved one’s full autopsy without a court order. They did it to emphasize the horror of Columbine, and the need to investigate it. Their spokesman called Colorado the “Rocky Mountains of Hate,” and Michael moved his family to suburban Houston before Columbine’s one-year anniversary. “Colorado is smothering with so much hate that black people like us cannot stay there,” Michael says.
If the Shoels didn’t seem intellectual, they made an intellectual argument. They said the derision they received was a version of the hatred that caused Isaiah’s death in the first place. Columbine wasn’t about tears and teddy bears, but finding meaning. That meant slogging through details to see what went wrong (and right) to head off future incidents. The Shoels believe that if the memories of Columbine are buried, the problems that caused it will rise again. Their protests against the sheriff and others were often justified.
Some people still wanted Columbine to just go away. But it would not. And neither would school shootings. And neither would the Shoels.
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Michael says he was one of sixteen children. His father was a railroad worker, his mother a housewife. They could not read or write.
Born on October 1, 1956 Michael says he flirted with the idea of playing running back for the Denver Broncos, but never made tryouts because he hurt his back. Instead, he says he got an associate of arts degree and a cosmetology license. He had his own barbershop in Texas.
In 1977, on his twenty-first birthday, records show, he married Renelda L. Westmoreland in Texas. She was nineteen.
Michael says he also worked for Discount Tire, became an ordained Pentecostal minister, and was assistan
t pastor at True Pillar of Faith church in Denver. He got into the music business and was director of Dankside Productions and Hit Room Productions—a couple of his record companies.
Michael is listed as the father on Isaiah’s Colorado death certificate, and maintains he is Isaiah’s father. The Shoels spokesman says Michael is “the only father Isaiah ever knew.”
According to social security records, Isaiah Eamon Moore was born August 4, 1980, and apparently took Vonda’s last name. Vonda was only fifteen at the time, and Michael was still married to Renelda. Michael married Vonda in 1983, six months after divorcing Renelda.
Vonda was born and raised in Denver. Petite and cute, she reads Stephen King, Harlequin romances, and pads around her house in brown clogs. She did not attend college, and her professional history boils down to working with Michael on various business projects.
If the Shoels did not have the background of world-class rabble-rousers, they had help from a pair of trained professionals.
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In 1970, Sam Riddle was already making headlines at age at twenty-three. He became a member of the Associated Students of Michigan State University after beating out almost two dozen other petitioners, and an article in the State News noted he was also a member of the executive council of the Black Liberation Front. Riddle told the paper he saw no conflict of interest between the two organizations. He discussed race, decentralizing the Associated Students to make it more effective, and criticized a proposed “all-events building.” “Physical fitness is a beautiful thing, but I seriously question the way priorities appear to be being set,” he said, according a copy of the News provided by Riddle. A photo of Riddle shows him smiling and accented by an Afro, sunglasses, and what appears to be a jean jacket.
As a twenty-five-year-old senior, he was already married, a father of two sons, and a U.S. Army veteran. On Feb. 26, 1972, Riddle and approximately one hundred other blacks flooded onto the university basketball court during the national anthem of the MSU-Iowa game. They were protesting the suspension of two black University of Minnesota basketball players involved in a brawl during an Ohio State game. The MSU-Iowa game was delayed for forty-five minutes as Riddle struggled to read a statement that was nearly drowned out by “boos, jeers, catcalls and threats from the predominantly white audience,” according to the Lansing State Journal.
Riddle said the audience outbursts mirrored the “true feelings” of white America toward blacks. He expressed the need to eliminate racism, but also “a restructuring of the present system of capitalism.” Otherwise, he said, there would still be poor blacks and poor whites. “While the possibility of violent revolution is a real one, Riddle said he does not necessarily think it is an inevitable one,” the Journal added.
More than a decade later, Riddle had obtained a law degree, trimmed his afro, and looked comfortable in a suit and tie. A news clip (also provided by Riddle) from the April 3, 1988 Detroit News describes him as a key player in orchestrating Jesse Jackson’s “stunning upset victory” over Michael Dukakis in the Michigan Democratic presidential caucuses. A thumbnail bio described Riddle as: “A Flint (Michigan) lawyer and former ‘60s militant, has worked for Jackson in ten states and specialized in organizing standing room only rallies.”
When the bullets started flying at Columbine, Riddle was working for then Colorado Secretary of State Vikki Buckley. She was called the country’s highest ranking African American Republican female to hold statewide office.
Riddle had been Buckley’s campaign consultant when she was up for re-election, but under fire for how she ran the office and down in the polls. Buckley won and promptly retained Riddle as a seven-month consultant for $70,000. That came out to $250 an hour, according to press reports, and Buckley asked for an additional $22,500 near the end of the contract. Those numbers would later collide with Columbine.
Riddle and Buckley were eating breakfast when Michael Shoels emerged on the Today Show. “The Secretary of State looked at me and wondered if the state should reach out to the Shoels,” as Riddle recalls it. They headed out to Littleton, and the timing was right. A fight had just broken out in the Shoels home between the television shows Hard Copy and Inside Edition over who would get to interview the Shoels first, Michael recalls. Fists were about to fly. Riddle restored order by sending the reporters out of the house and making them form a line. (Riddle doesn’t exactly remember who the journalists were, but says they were “sensationalistic media.”)
Riddle has been with the Shoels ever since, and the Shoels say they haven’t paid him a dime. One of Riddle’s observations is that people caught in the vortex of tragedy learn to “message,” which is seizing a cause while in the media spotlight. He calls the Shoels the most messaged of the Columbine families.
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Attorney Geoffrey Fieger not only wins multi-million-dollar judgments in cases fit for television—where he has appeared many a time—he has sued television. He won an approximately $25 million judgment against the Jenny Jones Show for setting up a straight man (Jonathan Schmitz) with a gay man (Scott Amedure) who had a crush on him. Schmitz then killed Amedure. An appeals court later overturned the monetary judgment, but the case imbued Fieger with a certain power of attorney, and he ended up on the show called Power of Attorney, and helmed a radio talk segment in Detroit called Fieger Time. He has a website devoted to him, fansoffieger.com, and a 2000 profile in GQ magazine called him the “lawyer of the moment.” He was indicted in 2007 on federal charges of violating campaign finance laws, but was acquitted by a jury.
His most famous client is probably assisted suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian, whom Fieger kept free through nine years of courtroom battles before they split. Kevorkian ended up behind bars after a 1999 conviction for a lethal injection that was broadcast on 60 Minutes. Fieger, whose father was a civil rights attorney, has portrayed Kevorkian’s cause in the same light.
One on one, Fieger can be friendly and mellow, but he also has a defining smirk and gleam in his eye. And while lawyering is his profession, politics is his hobby. Although his success at lambasting courtroom opponents has not always made for an even-keeled pol cultivating votes. In 1998, he ran as a Democrat for Michigan governor and lost to Republican incumbent John Engler. Among Fieger’s more famous lines—and he has many—is accusing then Michigan Attorney General Jennifer Granholm of having all the loyalty of an alley cat.
Fieger is half Jewish, half Norwegian, and calls himself a “Jewegian,” although he is also wildly popular in the black community. “Maybe they like my style. I’m outspoken,” he says. “I challenge authority.”
At federal court in downtown Detroit, the city is gray in both color and character. But a couple years after Columbine, Fieger provides the sunshine, and his courtroom appearance begins long before he handles the day’s case. Wearing a blue suit and blue tie, Fieger comes across a beefy, black security guard in the hallway and shakes his hand like a politician. Someone else asks Fieger what it’s like being a dad. It is Halloween, and as Fieger bides his turn in the courtroom, a snippet of conversation from two men floats into the air: “Dr. Kevorkian mask.”
When Fieger picks up his deep blue metallic Volvo in the parking lot across from the courthouse, he knows the attendant. In the car on his cell phone, Fieger is on the political hustle, talking about an upcoming mayoral race. That conversation is off the record, but he then turns and comments about his representation of the Shoels. He alludes to an offer the killers’ parents made to settle. “To give up the opportunity to cross-examine the Klebolds and Harrises for $23,000?” he says. “Thank God Michael and Vonda wouldn’t do it.”
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About one year before Columbine, Sam Riddle threw a phone at Fieger when he was running for governor and Riddle was his campaign manager. Riddle missed, but says he both quit and was fired. Columbine, and a phone call, helped smooth things over as Riddle says he asked if Fieger would represent the Shoels. “I picke
d up the phone and Michael Shoels was on,” Fieger remembers of the days after Columbine.
Fieger flew out to Denver a couple days later. Isaiah had not yet been buried, he recalls. Fieger walked through the Columbine parking lot, what he described as “a ground zero” and “a strange war zone.” “Columbine had a lot of parallels to Sept. 11 in that nothing had ever happened like that in America,” Fieger says. “That was a shock to the nation’s nervous system.”
Fieger’s take no prisoner tactics were an aftershock to Colorado. But he figured if school shootings were going to be understood, Columbine was the “hot spot.” He could take on the case and not expect to collect a dime. “And he [Michael] felt very strongly the only way you’re going to get answers is with a lawyer,” Fieger added, “and he’s right.”
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The lawsuits would play out for years and give rise to stacks and stacks of court files the size of telephone books. But they were not the only sabers the Columbine families, including the Shoels, would rattle.
Guns were among the first targets. And for the sake of controversy, the scripting couldn’t have been better: The National Rifle Association was already scheduled to hold its national convention in Denver on May 1, barely two weeks after Columbine. Mayor Wellington Webb wanted it canceled. The NRA downsized it to a nub, but otherwise stood firm. Tom Mauser was among those who stood outside in protest. He held a sign with a photo of his son that read: “My son Daniel died at Columbine. He’d expect me to be here today.”
Inside, Secretary of State Buckley welcomed the NRA with a speech and cited the Shoels. “I must agree with Isaiah’s father Michael who has stated that guns are not the issue,” she said. “Hate is what pulls the trigger of violence.” The crowd went wild. Yet the Shoels soon showed up in Atlanta and Dayton, Ohio participating in gun buyback programs.