Columbine graduation mixes hope for the future with sadness over lives cut short

By Katie Kerwin McCrimmon
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

GREENWOOD VILLAGE -- Dawn Anna held up the blue-and-silver graduation gown her slain daughter, Lauren Townsend, would have worn Saturday. She gently kissed it.

As the empty gown waved in the breeze, many at Columbine High School's commencement ceremony wept for all that should have been.

Anna said she had to finish things for her daughter, who died in the April 20 attack that left 15 dead at the school.

"I was very happy being there. And it was the hardest thing I've ever done," she said.

Lauren was named one of Columbine High's valedictorians, but her parents had to collect the honor.

Her two older brothers and sister, all Columbine graduates, accepted her diploma. They planned to hang it in Lauren's room and celebrate her accomplishments with a graduation party.

"Lauren's the kind of person God wants us all to be," Anna said. "When I grow up, I want to be just like her."

The graduation ceremony was a joyous triumph for 435 seniors. But missing were Lauren and Isaiah Shoels, both shot to death by two other seniors who would have graduated Saturday.

Instead, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 fellow students and a teacher before committing suicide one month ago in America's deadliest school shooting.

No one mentioned their names at graduation.

Their actions forever cast a pall over Columbine High, but the graduates at Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre on Saturday were determined to wrest happiness from the tragedy.

Witness Valeen Schnurr.

She suffered nine bullet and shrapnel wounds in the attack. But on Saturday, she looked as if she never had been wounded.

She sat with her classmates and walked victoriously onstage to collect her diploma.

She blew kisses to the cheering crowd.

On the way back to her seat, she hugged Lauren's stepfather, Bruce Beck.

The other graduating survivors of the attack triumphed as well, drawing standing ovations from admiring classmates.

Lisa Kreutz remained in a wheelchair. But, assisted by her parents, she collected her diploma.

So did Jeanna Park, whose wounded arm hung in a satin sling that matched her shiny gown. She walked with a limp but relished her moment of glory.

Robyn Kay Anderson's name was listed on the program, but school officials asked her to stay away, friends said. She attended the Senior Prom with Klebold days before the shooting and bought three of the guns used in the attack.

Principal Frank DeAngelis mourned those who were lost with a moment of silence.

"Their lives were cut down too short," he said.

"Their lives were full of courage and hope and enthusiasm. Each of us will carry the spirit of Isaiah Shoels and Lauren Townsend and Dave Sanders into the future."

DeAngelis told the graduates that the entire nation was with them in spirit Saturday.

Shoels' family chose not to attend the graduation. They had already buried Isaiah in his graduation gown with his diploma and said the graduation would break their hearts. So they mourned in private Saturday.

The morning sky was brilliant blue, and the sun warmed the graduates. As the strains of Pomp and Circumstance filled the outdoor amphitheater, proud parents dabbed their eyes as they watched their children pass by.

Two graduation speakers tried to make sense of the chaos of a month earlier.

Sara Martin told classmates about a beautiful stained-glass window at King's College Chapel in Cambridge, England. During World War II, townspeople fought to save the precious glass by breaking it into numbered pieces.

They carefully stored the pieces until the war ended, then re-created the window.

The Columbine community is like that fragmented window, wounded, but still full of beauty.

"We are being called upon, particularly at this time, to restore the vision, to take our numbered pieces and rebuild the window of our community," she said.

"And, though we have faced disasters of our own, and our window may appear to have been shattered, we can achieve a greater beauty as we put the pieces back together again.

"Let the light shine through the stained glass, colored by these last four years, these last four weeks.

"And, like the people of Cambridge, let us recognize what is worthy to be saved, to be restored, and in unity rebuild the Columbine window from which others may draw their inspiration," Martin said.

She recalled her friend, Cassie Bernall, who was one of those killed April 20.

"I wish that I had had more time and more opportunities to tell her what she meant to me," Martin said. "I must recognize what I have learned: to love deeply and to appreciate every word and every gesture of every person I love or will love."

Jennifer Wallick used the poetry of Robert Frost to remind her classmates that fleeting moments are golden.

She remembered eating pizza with Lauren Townsend during an Advanced Placement English trip to London.

"We had a terrible case of the giggles, and we laughed until our stomachs hurt," Wallick said. "I'll cherish that memory forever."

She remembered, too, the first time she met Isaiah. Her economics teachers saw him walking by in the hallway and pulled him into class.

"This is Isaiah, and he is an awesome person," the teacher said.

"If we remember them all, then they can never leave us," Wallick told her classmates. "Never let them go. They are waiting for us in that realm of pure blue, that mysterious place where the Earth meets the sky."

As the ceremony ended, the graduates gathered on the grassy hillside at the top of the amphitheater.

Together, they moved their tassels from left to right, then they flung their mortarboards, like Frisbees, into the sky.