By Lisa Ryckman and Mike Anton
News Staff Writers

At the crack of dawn, five hours before the terror began, Eric Harris went bowling.

Harris hated jocks, but he was an enthusiastic bowler. When he and his friend Dylan Klebold scored a strike, they'd congratulate themselves with a stiff-arm salute and a "Heil Hitler!"

Harris showed up for Columbine High School's weekly bowling class on Tuesday at 6:15 a.m.

'He wasn't acting strange or anything," remembered classmate Jessica Rosecrans. "He was wearing regular clothes. He was wearing flannel."

No black. No trench coat.

Harris was saving that for later.

This was no drive-by shooting

Aaron Hancey was running late. The clock said 6:20 a.m. and he was due at choir practice in half an hour. He grabbed a slice of bread and a gulp of orange juice and was out the door.

Hancey was an overachiever at a school full of them. Football, choir, scouting, schoolwork, shooting video of games for the basketball team. Always on the move.

Tuesday promised to be another hectic day.

First singing, then math, then history and German and language arts and then back to choir.

Except this day Hancey skipped choir. He had a concert in the afternoon and would have to miss chemistry. So he headed to the science lab to get his work in.

"It would have been safer if I had been in the choir room," Hancey said.

It was a small thing on a day almost too huge to comprehend, a day made up of so many tiny details. A day when the mundane gave way to murder.

Littleton firefighter Monte Fleming remembered that he and partner John Aylward were sitting down to an early lunch at Station 11. Left-over ribs and macaroni and cheese.

The call came: shots fired at Columbine. Given the location, Fleming figured it was a drive-by among students. Could be something, could be nothing.

"Most of them are pretty piss-poor shots," said Fleming, a 35-year-old ex-Army medic. "We didn't realize then what was going on."

Fleming and Aylward jumped in their truck. Bowles west to Pierce, then south. As they came up on Clement Park, next to the school, Fleming noticed dozens of students running.

After drive-bys, kids usually hang around to gawk.

This was no drive-by, he thought.

Troy Laman and Robert Montoya were in their truck listening at 11:30 a.m. to increasingly heavy traffic on the police scanner.

"We heard some stuff going down," Montoya said. "We had an idea something bad was happening."

The paramedics for Denver Health Medical Center had seen it all. Gunshot wounds, car wrecks, heart attacks, overdoses. Montoya, Los Angeles born and bred, had spent half his 35 years in emergency rooms, six in Denver. After L.A., Denver was a walk in the park.

Laman, 32, grew up near Winter Park, where multiple gunshot wounds were no more common than palm trees. After college, he moved to Los Angeles and worked in sports medicine. He got to know paramedics, heard their stories, became fascinated by their work. He joined up six years ago.

As different as these two were, they shared a calm peculiar to people who cope with other people's emergencies day after day.

"My wife calls me a stone," Montoya said. "Nothing affects me. I just suppress things. You've got to be able to not get emotionally attached to one certain patient. The next patient could be worse."

It was 11:45 a.m. when the call came: Columbine High School. Then they knew the situation was serious, very serious. Denver paramedics almost never crossed into the suburbs.

"We have too much to do in our own city," Montoya said.

Chris Colwell's shift as attending physician in Denver Health's emergency room didn't start until 3 p.m., but the day began the way Tuesdays always did -- at 7 a.m.

First came a staff meeting, followed by the morbidity and mortality conference, followed by a lecture, followed by an education meeting, followed by lunch.

By 3 p.m., Colwell would be in the ER handling the cases that rolled in all night, every night. The day before, he had tended a man shot in the chest, a woman who had stopped breathing, a man who had suffered a massive heart attack and a woman giving birth -- all in about 15 minutes.

It was a rhythm Colwell had grown accustomed to, one he was born to as the son of a doctor and a nurse.

He had been in the ER for seven years, and he had seen life at its worst. Someone stabbed to death. A man who hanged himself. A woman whose husband had doused her with fuel and set her on fire.

Those were the worst things Chris Colwell had ever seen.

Until Tuesday.

A lucky cigarette break

Brooks Brown needed a smoke. The lanky member of the Columbine debate team stepped outside the school about 11:15 a.m. Tuesday to grab a cigarette.

It might have saved his life.

As he stood outside a door that leads to the cafeteria, Eric Harris came up the walk. Gone was the flannel shirt, replaced by the long, black trench coat.

"Brooks, I like you," Harris said as he passed and pushed his way into the school. "Get out of here. Go home."

Brown took a drag. He didn't know what to think.

Suddenly, a gunman appeared

It was a stupefying cacophony of sight and sound.

Shotguns roaring. Bullets pinging off lockers. Glass shattering. People screaming, crying, squeezing through doorways, stumbling over each other, literally running out of their shoes. Smoke from the bombs mixing with water from the sprinklers. The fire alarm shrieking a warning that was now too late.

Dave Sanders had already helped clear the cafeteria of most of its students. Now, the 47-year-old business teacher, girls basketball coach, father of three, ran to the second floor, outside the science labs, looking for more students.

He stood in the hallway, herding students toward the door. Suddenly, a gunman wearing a black trench coat appeared and shot Sanders once in each shoulder.

He went down, then got up and stumbled through a door and into a biology class. He collapsed, hitting the ground hard, leaving teeth where he landed.

Aaron Hancey was in a lab down the hall, crouched in a corner of the room. He had been mixing chemicals when he looked out a window and saw students running. Then he saw smoke.

Then he heard the shotguns.

"I could feel it through the walls," Hancey said. "With each one, I could feel the walls move."

Kent Friesen, a science teacher, came in.

"Who knows first aid?" he said.

Hancey stepped forward.

"Come with me," Friesen said.

He looked out the door, up and down the hall, seeing if the way was clear. They sprinted across, then through another door. Inside were about 30 people behind overturned tables. Dave Sanders was bleeding on the floor.

Hancey knelt and checked Sanders' breathing. Fine. He looked at his wounds. In from the front, out the back. He felt his skin. Warm. He touched his right shoulder. Broken.

He and the other guys in the room pulled off their shirts, rolled them into a ball and put them under Sanders' head. They covered him with wool blankets that are kept in all the science rooms.

Hancey reached in Sanders' pocket and pulled out his wallet. He held up a photo.

"Is this your wife?"

"Yes."

"What's your wife's name?"

"Linda."

Hancey didn't want Sanders going into shock, so he kept the questions coming: What's your name? What do you teach? Are you the basketball coach?

"Hang in there. You can do it," Hancey told Sanders.

For the next 31/2 hours, as the fire alarm and class bell wailed non-stop, Hancey and classmate Kevin Starkey took turns applying pressure on the bullet holes, hoping to stem Sanders' bleeding.

This was way beyond the Boy Scout first aid manual. "You're trained to deal with broken arms, broken limbs, cuts and scrapes. Stuff you get on a camping trip," Hancey said. "You never train for gunshot wounds."

Yet here he was, rolling Sanders from side to side on the tile floor, keeping him awake and off his back so he wouldn't choke on his own blood, pressing the heels of his hands to the wounds.

"I need help," Sanders said. "I've got to get out of here."

"Help is on the way," Hancey told him.

As the hours passed, Sanders' skin took on a bluish tone. He became cold to the touch. His breathing slowed. And he continued to bleed.

"I'm not going to make it," he said. "Tell my girls I love them."

Early on, Hancey called home from a phone in the classroom. His dad and a police dispatcher on a third line kept them informed about what was going on.

Sometime after 2 p.m., word came that a SWAT team was six classrooms away.

It took the officers an hour to reach them.

The first black-clad officer who burst into the room told the group to put their hands on their heads and follow them.

"Someone's got to stay with Mr. Sanders," came a voice from the crowd.

"I will," Hancey said.

No, a second officer said. Hancey had to go.

"I felt like I could leave it with them," he said. "That he'd be fine."

They were led down the stairs and out the door to safety.

Hancey walked down the street to the public library and into the bathroom. He was shoeless and shirtless and had Dave Sanders' blood all over his hands.

Hancey scrubbed them, but it didn't do any good.

His hands still didn't feel clean.

Horrific game of peek-a-boo

"All the jocks stand up!" one of the shooters said. "We're going to kill every single one of you!"

They walked through the library, asking the kids why they should live, laughing and hooting as they shot them. If someone quivered or yelled after the first volley, they'd shoot them again.

"Peek-a-boo!" one of them said to a student hiding under a table. And then came the blast of a gun.

"Do you believe in God?" one asked Cassie Bernall as he trained his gun on her.

"Yes, I believe in God," she answered.

"Why?" he asked.

He didn't wait for an answer.

'We're getting you out of here'

The southwest side of the school was secure, Monte Fleming was told, and he ought to get over there fast. Four or five victims were down on the ground.

It was at that point that Fleming knew things were going to be bad.

He had seen bad before. Mangled bodies in traffic accidents. Failed suicides that left people alive but with half their heads gone. Bags filled with body parts after United Flight 585 slammed nose-first into the ground outside Colorado Springs.

But nothing like this.

When Fleming got to the southwest corner, there was a phalanx of police, their guns trained on the windows of the second-floor library.

"This isn't as secure as we'd like it to be," Fleming told his partner John Aylward. "Let's get 'em and let's get the hell out of here."

They got the truck as close as they could to the building. Aylward jumped out and made a bee-line to a girl who had been shot in the chest. He picked up Anne Marie Hochhalter and ran with her back to the truck.

Fleming ran toward the school, under the library. He kept down and as close to the building as he could, inching his way along the brick looking for victims.

He found one, a boy.

Fleming ran to him. His skin was blotchy and cold. No pulse.

Ten feet to the right, Fleming saw another boy, face down.

He ran to Lance Kirklin and turned him over. A shotgun blast had ripped open the left half of his face.

"Help," Kirklin said.

Just then, Fleming heard glass shatter. Gunshots rained down from the library.

He hoisted Kirklin, 200 pounds if he weighed an ounce, and cradled him to his chest.

"We're getting you out of here," Fleming told him.

Kirklin was quiet. There were no tears in his eyes.

Fleming ran under a police barrage that sounded like a howitzer going off, a 40-foot sprint to a waiting ambulance.

It went like that all day and into the night. Loading the injured into ambulances. Driving them to a hospital. Coming back for more.

About 9 p.m., Fleming and Aylward were finally relieved. They drove back to Station 11. They were drained and covered with blood.

Their lunch of left-over ribs and macaroni and cheese, now nine hours old, was waiting for them on the table.

They sat down and ate.

He had drawn his last breath

It was a collision of circumstance that put Troy Laman on the southwest side of Columbine at the exact moment they needed a paramedic to go inside.

Because by 3 p.m., the scene was swarming with paramedics, 100 or more. It could have been anyone.

They didn't know how many injured were still in the building, and numbers were flying everywhere. The math was mind-numbing. More than 1,900 kids. Hundreds pouring out. Hundreds more unaccounted for.

Laman and his partner, Robert Montoya, worked triage, checking out the kids the police brought out. Quick questions: Are you hurt? Can you walk? Then on to the next, and the next.

Everybody had to be in place, ready, waiting. Just in case.

Laman and Montoya moved to another triage station, but when they got there, they were told to keep going, to head to the southwest side of the building.

The hot zone. Alive with weapons and SWAT.

And then one Denver SWAT officer grabbed Laman. It was somebody he knew, a friend.

"Troy, I need you to go in," he said. "Let's go."

So Laman went in, through the shot-up cafeteria with its three inches of standing water, up the stairs, into a science classroom. Dave Sanders was there, where Aaron Hancey had left him. And it looked to Laman as if he had just drawn his last breath.

But the paramedic was there to do triage, not treatment. To find out what was going on, to determine the number of patients and their injuries, and to call for the right help.

In triage, a person who can't breathe on his own is considered dead. It's important to move on, to go past that person and find someone who can be saved.

The good of the many over the good of the few.

But at that moment, it didn't matter. Because Laman couldn't leave the room. The building simply wasn't secure yet.

So he stayed there, helpless. For 10 minutes, 15 minutes, Laman really wasn't sure how long it was. All he knew was that it felt like an eternity.

"As paramedics, our job is to put our hands on people and take care of them," Laman said. "I knew there was nothing I could do for this guy. But because I was stuck in a room with him by myself for 15 minutes, I wanted to help him.

"I had nowhere else to go. I couldn't leave the room. I wanted to do something for him."

Finally, a SWAT officer gave the all-clear. Over the radio, Montoya urged him to go on to the other victims, to find somebody to save.

"There's nothing you can do," he told Laman. "There's nothing you can do."

And so Laman left Dave Sanders, who was already dead, and went looking for someone who was still alive.

Echoes of screams and gunfire

The library looked like people had left in a hurry, Chris Colwell thought.

He had left triage outside to come in and certify death. And all he saw at first were signs of high school life.

"It looked almost as if there were all these kids studying, and they had to leave because of a fire drill," the emergency room doctor said. "And they had to leave everything as it was."

And then he saw the floor.

A carpet of glass from a bank of blasted windows. Ammunition clips, used and dropped. And bodies: 12 of them, dead for hours. Echoes of screams and gunfire in a room where no one was even supposed to raise a voice.

It was as if a neutron bomb had detonated in the room. No haphazard path of destruction. Just bodies riddled with wounds, alongside the unscathed vestiges of a typical school day.

From behind a counter, Colwell could see tabletops and bookshelves untouched. Books open, waiting to be read. A college application, half-done. A "to do" list. An open calculus book with unfinished homework problems.

Humming computers the only sound.

One boy was shot as he worked at his computer. When Colwell saw him, he lay crumpled beside his chair. His computer remained on, untouched, running Windows 95.

One victim still clutched a pencil. Others died as they crouched under tables, desperate to escape the bullets.

But there had been no escape. Colwell read that in the wounds, most of which had killed instantly.

"I would say if you had an entire medical team of paramedics standing on top of these people the moment it happened, there still very likely would have been nothing you could have done to save them," he said.

Harris and Klebold lay on the floor, not far from their victims, dead of self-inflicted wounds. Save for their trench coats, the guns lying beside them, and the bombs strapped to their bodies, they were indistinguishable from the students they had terrorized and executed.

"Eventually, in the emergency department, you get used to seeing dead bodies and dealing with death," Colwell said. "But I don't think you ever get used to dealing with dead children."

He pronounced them all dead at 4:45 p.m. The 15 bodies remained behind until Wednesday, but Colwell took their images with him, enduring visions of violence.

Earlier, Troy Laman saw the same scene, but he took away a different memory.

A memory of coming into the library, before anyone else, and tiptoeing through the carnage.

Be careful, the SWAT team had told him. Don't touch anything you don't need to. Don't move anything unless you have to. Stay away from their backpacks. There were bombs everywhere, they said.

So Laman moved gingerly. He was there to do triage, so it was his job to assess everyone's condition. He had to make sure they were dead.

"If I couldn't get a look at somebody, at their face, to see if they were still alive, I tried to kind of touch them," Laman said.

The first body he came to was a girl, and he could see she was gone. So he moved to the next, another girl.

She was lying on her side, and her face was hidden from view. And because Laman couldn't see her face, he reached down to touch her.

That touch told him he needed to see her face.

Laman moved to her head and bent down. Gently, carefully, he rolled her over.

Her eyes were wide open.

And she was crying.

What happened afterwards

Lisa Kreutz, 18, the last person brought out alive from the libary, underwent surgery to reconstruct her shoulder. She was listed in serious condition Saturday.

Aaron Hancey, who kept Dave Sanders alive for 31/2 hours, wishes he could've done more. ''I feel like I could've carried him out on my back.''

The day after the massacre, paramedic Robert Montoya was back at work. He had one call: an 82-year-old man with an aneuryism. He died in the operating room.

Firefighter Monte Fleming went to Wednesday's vigil in Clement Park. Despite the huge crowd, he was uneasy. ''I didn't feel safe,'' he said.

Dr. Chris Colwell went home Tuesday, downed a beer and called it a day. ''I can't imagine something worse than this,'' he said. ''I hope this is the worst thing I ever see.''