Littleton Killings Strike at Heart of U.S.

LITTLETON, Colo. —  After every school shooting, families and friends of the victims say the same thing.

“I never thought it could happen here.”

But after last week’s shooting at Columbine High School, people across America were saying it. Stunned by the coldblooded teen killers, and by their 13 helpless victims, many also were shocked by the incongruous backdrop of the spree: a prosperous suburb nestled against snow-draped mountains.

This was the unlikeliest setting yet, many said, for a schoolyard smeared with blood. And therefore the scariest.

“I think, because suburban Denver is an awful lot like a whole lot of America, and an awful lot like a whole lot of America where Americans with teens live, this shooting makes us feel like, ‘Wow, we do have to watch out for this,’ ” says Diane Carman, a columnist for the Denver Post.

The school shootings in Pearl, Miss., West Paducah, Ky., Jonesboro, Ark., and Springfield, Ore., were national tragedies. But measured in media attention, Littleton already dwarfs them, and Carman and others say one reason may be that many Americans just couldn’t identify with West Paducah or Pearl.

“These other places could be written off as out of the way,” says Bryce Nelson, a journalism professor at the USC Annenberg School of Communications. “They were Southern. This gun culture was part of the South.”

Not this time. Now the spectacle of gun-toting teens and wrenching 911 calls from inside a school and students running for their lives has come to Colorado, a place much closer to the nation’s geographic and emotional center.

School Violence Possible Anywhere

“This shooting reinforces the idea that school violence can take place anywhere in the country,” says Denver Mayor Wellington Webb. “No one is immune when somebody goes off and uses a gun.”

But Colorado was supposed to be immune. If some Americans recognized their communities in Littleton--a quiet city of 35,000, just 20 minutes south of downtown Denver--many held out Littleton and its surrounding suburbs as lofty idylls. Safe harbors with solid schools. Places to strive for. “People view Colorado in a way as a sanctuary,” says John Hickenlooper, a prominent developer who owns one of Denver’s most popular saloons, the Wynkoop Brewing Co. “Colorado is a place that has progressed beyond all the burdens and horrors that have to be carried by the rest of the urban centers of the country.”

For years, Colorado has projected an image of itself as above it all, literally and figuratively.

“Colorado is a place where--even if you’ve never lived here--it’s special,” Carman says. “It has this magical attraction. You come here on vacation to be restored by the natural beauty.”

And for the last decade or so, the image hasn’t been far from the reality. Colorado has enjoyed a remarkable run of good fortune since fighting its way out of the late-’80s doldrums, when its oil-based economy went belly up. Within the story of America’s economic recovery, one of the most exciting subplots is Colorado, which added 750,000 new jobs in about the last 10 years.

“Our latest research data shows unemployment has virtually vanished in Colorado,” says Henry Dubroff, editor of the Denver Business Journal. “In the area where the shooting took place, the southern suburbs, unemployment is below 2%.”

In Denver, the once-dreary downtown has transformed itself in grand style, from a collection of unsightly parking lots, outdated office towers and musty warehouses into one of the nation’s shining examples of urban renewal.

Anchored by Coors Field, the architecturally acclaimed home of the Colorado Rockies baseball team, Denver’s downtown is robust enough to support two more massive sports venues. Before long, there will be ribbon-cuttings at the Pepsi Center, home to the Denver Nuggets basketball team and the Colorado Avalanche hockey team, and a new football stadium for Denver’s beloved Broncos, who further burnished the state’s image by winning the last two Super Bowls.

Along with economic prosperity, Colorado has become almost accustomed to hosting happy events and public-relations fantasies, including the pope’s 1993 visit, the 1996 Stanley Cup championship (which Colorado won), the 1997 Summit of the Eight economic conference, and the 1998 major league baseball All-Star Game.

The state has been on such a roll, and for so long, that it’s conditioned the rest of the nation to think of it as a good-news, gloom-free zone.

“Something got fixed in everybody’s mind,” says Peter Boyles, longtime host of a popular radio call-in show in Denver. “The ‘Rocky Mountain High’ thing. Everybody around a campfire, everybody getting high. And in fact, there’s always been this place, sort of Western and sort of a hippie haven, and it all came together with the economy.

“And then, out of that, comes this?”

Boyles and many others compare the Littleton shooting to the Oklahoma City bombing. Although far fewer were killed in Littleton, the psychic shock and lost innocence seem the same. Along with Oklahoma City, Littleton is another blow to pristine Middle America, that spiritual wellspring of the American dream.

“When Oklahoma City happened,” Boyles says, “people talked about murder in the heartland. And if, in fact, this were to happen in Red Hook, N.J., everyone would say, ‘Oh, well, that’s Red Hook.’ ”

If America’s shock has been profound, Colorado is shaken to its very core. Longtime residents, and those who have watched the state grow for decades, say Littleton may be the state’s most pivotal event.

“I think we’re all speechless,” says Chris Romer, son of former Gov. Roy Romer and founder of the Colorado chapter of the I Have a Dream Foundation, which grants scholarships to disadvantaged elementary school students. “An idea has crept into the mind of every [Coloradan]: There is something wrong. There is something fundamentally amiss.”

A State Forever Changed

Patricia Limerick, who chairs the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado-Boulder, says Coloradans are just like other Westerners, always feeling that what happens to them is without precedent, that the glorious West they once knew has been irrevocably spoiled.

But this time, she says, they’re right.

“I really do think the world was different on the morning of April 20 than it was on the afternoon of April 20,” Limerick says. “I have new respect for nostalgia as an emotional and intellectual practice.”

During his 50 years in Colorado journalism, Rocky Mountain News columnist Gene Amole has seen many stories cause statewide depression. He’s written his fair share about the JonBenet Ramsey killing, and 30 years ago, he covered the story of a Denver man who blew up a passenger airplane, killing 44 people aboard, including the bomber’s own mother.

But Amole has never seen Colorado so consumed, so grieved, by one story.

“Not ever, on any kind of event,” he says. “And I don’t think this story is going to go away anytime soon.”

One small proof of Littleton’s effect is the way it’s kept another giant Colorado story off the front pages. Under normal circumstances, the impending retirement of Broncos quarterback John Elway would be the story of the year in Colorado. The most famous Coloradan ever, Elway is a living legend. But in the wake of Littleton, he’s postponed his big announcement until this Sunday, when it still may not be the biggest news of the day.

More proof of Littleton’s impact, Amole says, was the turnout at last Sunday’s Columbine memorial service, at which Vice President Al Gore spoke. Despite a driving rain and near-freezing temperatures, 70,000 Coloradans came and paid their respects, then lingered in the rain and cold for hours.

“All of this has engendered a sense of community that maybe wasn’t there at first,” Amole says. “Not in just that Colorado neighborhood but in the whole city. You can feel that, here was this big rambling urban sprawl, that somehow [since the tragedy] is finding itself.”

“This has made Colorado smaller,” says Margie Permann, a resident from the nearby suburb of Arvada who slogged through mud and rivers of rainwater Sunday to bow her head at the memorial service.

Signs of a smaller, tighter Colorado community are everywhere: The Rockies, Nuggets and Avalanche players will wear patches or black tape for the rest of the season, honoring the victims of Littleton. Blue-and-silver ribbons, the school colors, flutter not just from every car antenna but from the lapel of every civic leader and news anchor. Enormous ribbons hang from houses and downtown office buildings.

At 11:21 a.m. Tuesday, exactly one week after the shootings began, Colorado fell silent. In hospitals, schools and police stations, people stood still and stared at the ground. In the state Capitol, at the convention center, in the streets, people stopped and wept, or remembered. Emergency dispatchers took themselves out of service, and nearly every TV and radio station went dark.

This Sunday, yet another memorial service is expected to draw tens of thousands, perhaps including President Clinton. Like the makeshift memorial over a muddy ridge from Columbine, the grief keeps growing and growing.

“A psychologist told me, ‘Have you noticed the drivers on the road are much more polite?’ ” Carman says. “Isn’t that something? I’ve noticed people don’t fight over parking spaces now. There’s a funny sense that, ‘I don’t want to be part of the problem.’ ”

If people are being more polite, they’re also being more political. The gun control debate, which already was raging here, has gained new urgency. As the National Rifle Assn. prepares for its convention here this weekend, hundreds are preparing to protest outside. And outcry over various forms of expression grows louder every day. Ever since police confirmed that the two teenage killers in the Littleton shootings were avid fans of violent video games and music, some Coloradans have been demanding tighter restrictions on access to such forms of media.

Many here take comfort in predicting that, whatever Colorado’s ultimate response to the tragedy may be, politically or psychologically, the state will boldly lead the way for a grief-sick nation. Others fear that, no matter what Coloradans do, Colorado and America will feel diminished for years to come.

“I think there’s something about this crime that is almost epochal,” says Tom Strickland, the new U.S. attorney for Colorado, who toured the crime scene Monday. “There are benchmarks that we all experience, where a little bit of us dies along the way. And I think for America, a little bit of us died last Tuesday.”