A quarter-century later, trauma still accompanies survivors of the Columbine massacre

2024-04-18 04:58:01

DENVER (AP) — Hours after escaping the Columbine High School massacre, Missy Mendo slept in her parents’ bed. The 14-year-old girl was still wearing the shoes she wore that day when she ran out of her math class. She wanted to be ready to flee.

Twenty-five years later, the trauma of that horrendous day still haunts her.

It came to light in 2017, when 60 people were massacred at a country music festival in Las Vegas, a city he had visited several times when he worked in the gambling sector. It surfaced again in 2022, when 19 students and two teachers were shot to death at a school in Uvalde, Texas.

Mendo was filling out her daughter’s enrollment application for daycare when news of the shooting in Uvalde broke. He could barely read a few lines before bowing his head and bursting into tears.

“I felt like nothing had changed,” he remembers thinking.

A quarter-century has passed since two young gunmen shot and killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher at Columbine in suburban Denver, an attack broadcast live on television that ushered in the modern era of school shootings. . Since then, the traumas of that day have haunted Mendo and others who survived the massacre.

It took years for some of them to see themselves as Columbine survivors, since they had not suffered physical injuries. However, the noise of, for example, fireworks can still trigger disturbing memories. The consequences—often ignored at the time, before mental health problems were more widely accepted—caused insomnia, school dropouts, and marital or family disengagement in some of the survivors.

Survivors and other community members plan to attend a candlelight vigil on the steps of the state Capitol on Friday night, the eve of the anniversary of the massacre.

April is a particularly complicated month for Mendo, now 39 years old. “My brain turns to mush” every year, she admitted. He shows up early to his dentist appointments, loses his keys, or forgets to close the refrigerator door.

He relies on therapy and the understanding of a growing group of shooting survivors he has met through The Rebels Project, a support group funded by other Columbine survivors following a shooting in which a gunman killed 12 people. inside a movie theater in Aurora, a Denver suburb. At the recommendation of other survivors who are mothers, Mendo began seeing a therapist after her daughter’s first birthday.

After suffering a nervous breakdown with the news from Uvalde, Mendo, a single mother, said she talked to her mother, went for a walk to get some fresh air, and then finished her daughter’s enrollment application.

“Was I afraid that she would go through the public education system? Without a doubt,” Mendo said about his daughter. “I wanted her to have as normal a life as possible.”

Researchers who have studied the long-term effects of gun violence in schools have quantified the obstacles survivors face, including long-term academic effects such as absenteeism and low college enrollment rates, as well as minor income in their adult life.

“Counting only the loss of life is not exactly the right way to understand the full cost of these tragedies,” said Maya Rossin-Slater, an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Massacres have reappeared with shocking frequency since Columbine, with nearly 600 attacks that have killed at least four people, not including the attacker, since 2006, according to data compiled by The Associated Press.

More than 80% of the 3,045 victims of these attacks died from gunshot wounds.

Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of people have been exposed to school massacres that often do not leave large numbers of dead but are still traumatic, Rossin-Slater said. The impact can last a lifetime, she added, resulting in “a somewhat persistent reduced potential” among survivors.

Those who were present that day at Columbine say that the years since have given them time to learn more about what happened to them and how to deal with it.

Heather Martin, now 42, was a senior at Columbine in 1999. At the university she began crying during a fire drill, later realizing that a fire alarm was going off for three hours while she and 60 other students They sheltered inside an office during the high school shooting. She was not able to return to that class and has been noted absent ever since. She says she failed after refusing to write a final essay on school violence, despite telling her teacher about her experience at Columbine.

It took her 10 years to see herself as a survivor, after she was invited along with the other Class of 1999 students to an anniversary event. She saw how some of her classmates had similar problems, and almost immediately she decided to go back to college to become a teacher.

Martin, co-founder of The Rebels Project—named after the Columbine mascot—says that 25 years has given her time to face her problems and work to solve them.

“I know myself so well now and I know how I respond to things and what might trigger me and how I can recover and be okay. And, even more importantly, I think I can recognize when I am not well and when I need help,” she noted.

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Associated Press writer Mead Gruver contributed to this report.

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