I was in Aurora during Columbine

I was in Colorado this May before the fires in Colorado Springs and the shootings in Aurora.  (Garden of the Gods - Colorado Springs)

When someone informed me of the Aurora massacre, I wasn’t concerned for my two children who live there. I had spoken to my daughter the night before, and she was in Texas, and I knew my son wouldn’t be at a midnight screening of any movie, especially Batman.

However, my mind rewound to the day of the Columbine shootings when I was living in Aurora, Colorado.

At the time, I was a stressed out IBM data center manager conducting my weekly staff meeting with the supervisors that reported to me. The email supervisor worked a later shift than the others and joined the meeting in progress. When she walked in, she asked the network supervisor if his daughter goes to Columbine. He said, yes.

She said that she thought she heard on the car radio an early report that there was a shooting at the school, but she wasn’t sure. 

After a few moments, the guy called his wife at home to ask her if she heard anything. 

She hadn’t.

About 10 minutes later, the wife called back in a panic. The story was out and history was being made.

He desperately tried to reach his daughter on her cell phone, to no avail. We didn’t have a TV at work so we didn’t know how bad things were.

Twenty minutes later, his daughter called and told him her harrowing story.

She was working out in the gym and heard shots. Unlike many of the curious others who went to see what all the commotion was, she hauled-ass out of a side door and ran to the parking lot where one of her friends was just pulling in. She jumped in the passenger side and told the girl to drive like a ‘bat-out-of-hell’ and get away.

That story had a happy ending but it took a while for the Denver area to adjust to all the attention while being the focus of the biggest news story in the world. 

To see that they’re going through it again brings back reminders that I didn’t expect to have to go through.