DENVER — Hours after escaping the Columbine High School shooting, 14-year-old Missy Mendo slept in bed between her parents, still wearing the shoes she wore when she fled her math class. She wanted to be ready to run.
Twenty-five years later, and now that Mendo is a mother herself, the trauma of that horrific day continues to haunt her.
She was struck when 60 people were shot dead at a country music festival in Las Vegas in 2017, a city she had frequently visited while working in the casino industry. And then again in 2022, when 19 students and two teachers were shot dead in Uvalde, Texas.
Mendo was filling out her daughter’s kindergarten registration form when news of the elementary school shooting broke. She read a few lines from a news report about Uvalde, then laid her head down and cried.
“It felt like nothing changed,” she remembers.
In the quarter-century since two gunmen at Columbine fatally shot 12 fellow students and a teacher in a Denver suburb — an attack that played out on live television and ushered in the modern era of school shootings — the trauma of that day continues to overshadow Mendo and others who were there.
It took some years for some to see themselves as Columbine survivors, as they were not physically injured. However, things like fireworks can still bring back disturbing memories. The aftershocks — often unrecognized in the years before the mental health struggle became more widely recognized — led some survivors to suffer from insomnia, drop out of school or break away from their spouses or families.
Survivors and other community members plan to attend a candlelight vigil on the steps of the state capitol Friday evening, the eve of the anniversary of the shooting.
April is particularly difficult for 39-year-old Mendo, whose “brain turns to mashed potatoes every year.” She shows up early for dental appointments, misplaces her keys, forgets to close the refrigerator door.
She relies on therapy and the understanding of a growing group of shooting survivors she met through The Rebels Project, a support group founded by other Columbine survivors after a 2012 shooting in which a gunman killed 12 people at a movie theater in the nearby suburb Aurora. . Mendo saw a therapist after her child’s first birthday, at the urging of fellow survivor mothers.
After collapsing over Uvalde, Mendo, a single parent, said she talked to her mother, went for a walk to get some fresh air and then completed her daughter’s registration for kindergarten.
“Was I worried about her going into the public school system? Absolutely,” Mendo said of her daughter. “I wanted her to live as normal a life as possible.”
Researchers studying the long-term effects of gun violence in schools have quantified long-term struggles among survivors, including long-term academic effects such as absenteeism and lower college enrollment, and lower earnings later in life.
“Just counting lives lost is an inaccurate way to capture 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.
Mass killings have repeated with numbing frequency in the years since Columbine, with nearly 600 attacks killing four or more people, not including the perpetrator, since 2006, according to data collected by The Associated Press.
More than 80% of the 3,045 victims in those attacks were killed by a firearm.
Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of people have been exposed to school shootings that are often not mass casualties but are still traumatic, Rossin-Slater said. The consequences can last a lifetime, she added, resulting in “a kind of lingering, diminished potential” for survivors.
Those who were present at Columbine say the years since have given them time to learn more about what happened to them and how to cope.
Heather Martin, now 42, was a senior at Columbine in 1999. In college, she started crying during a fire drill, later realizing that a fire alarm had gone off for three hours as she and 60 other students hid in a barricaded office during high school. shooting school. She was unable to return to that class and was marked absent each time. She says she failed after refusing to write a term paper on school violence, despite telling her professor about her experiences at Columbine.
It took a decade for her to see herself as a survivor after being invited to an anniversary event along with the rest of the class of 1999. She saw that fellow classmates were having similar problems and almost immediately decided to return to college to become a teacher.
Martin, co-founder of The Rebels Project, named after Columbine’s mascot, said 25 years has given her time to struggle and figure out how to get out of those troubles.
“I know myself so well now and how I react to things and what could trigger me and how I can bounce back and be okay. And most importantly, I think I can recognize when I’m not doing well and when I need to get help,” she said.
Kiki Leyba, a first-year teacher at Columbine in 1999, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder shortly after the shooting. He felt a strong sense of commitment to return to school, where he threw himself into his work. But he continued to have panic attacks.
To help him cope, he had sleeping pills and some Xanax for anxiety, Leyba said. One therapist recommended chamomile tea.
Things became harder for him after the 2002 graduation of Mendo’s class, the last class of students to survive the shooting since they had been through so much together.
In 2005, after years of not taking care of himself and suffering from sleep deprivation, Leyba said he often left family life behind, sleeping in on weekends and turning into a “slob on the couch.” enrolled him in a week-long trauma treatment program, making sure he took time off work without telling him.
“Luckily, that really gave me something to hold on to… to do the work to climb out of there,” said Leyba, who said breathing exercises, journal writing, meditation and antidepressants have helped him.
Like Mendo and Martin, he has traveled the country working with shooting survivors.
“That worst day turned into something I can offer to others,” says Leyba, who is in Washington, D.C., this week to meet with officials about gun violence and promote a new film about his trauma journey.
Mendo still lives in the area and her five-year-old daughter attends school near Columbine. When her daughter’s school was closed last year when police swarmed the neighborhood during a hostage situation, Mendo recalled disturbing things like: What if my child is in danger? What if there is another school shooting like Columbine?
When Mendo picked up her daughter, she seemed a little scared and hugged her mother a little tighter. Mendo took a deep breath to stay calm, a technique she learned in therapy, and put on a brave face.
“If I suppressed a fear, she would pick it up again,” she said. “I didn’t want that for her.”
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Associated Press writer Mead Gruver contributed to this report.