Youth Radio - Topic: Littleton

Hope and Prayer from a School Shooting's Aftermath

noah — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:40:07 -0600

It takes only 272 steps to get from the front door of Deer Creek Middle School to 13-year-old Savannah's house. But on Tuesday, February 23, those 272 steps felt more like miles for Savannah and her sister Makayla.

For Savannah, it was supposed to be just another Tuesday. She woke up, got dressed, and ate a large bowl of Grape Nuts cereal with extra sugar before driving to school with her dad and 12 year old sister Makayla. At school, Savannah went through her daily routine, chatting with friends, working on homework, and handing in assignments. Everything at Deer Creek seemed to be going according to business as usual.

At about three p.m., just as Savannah and her sister began walking home from school, the sound of gunshots pierced the air. Savannah recognized the sound immediately, remembering it from a camping trip earlier that year during which she'd practiced shooting a rifle at the surrounding pine trees. As Savannah turned around towards the noise, she saw children and adults, running towards the parking lot and screaming. Savannah never saw the shooter, but something told her to run. She felt strangely calm as she grabbed her sister by the hand and started running towards her dad's house. "It's okay, It's okay, It's going to be okay" Savannah repeated over and over, trying to calm her terrified sister.

Shortly after she got home, Savannah got a call from her friend Kelly. She was in hysterics. "Matt got shot, Matt got shot," she told her. Matt had been Savannah's lab partner in science class, a nice kid who loved skateboarding and whose closest friends called him "Frenchie" because he was born in France. We know now he survived, but at that moment, for all Savannah knew, he could have been dead.

Savannah tells me that the tragedy of the shooting at Deer Creek feels surreal, like a bad dream that she's sure she will wake up from any second. She tells me that she replays the day's events over and over in her mind as she and her sister watch policemen search through the field behind their house, putting up yellow crime scene tape and searching for evidence.

This isn't the first time that this community has had a shock of this sort. Exactly ten months and four days ago, I was sitting bleary-eyed at my computer writing a piece to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the shooting at Columbine, remembering how scary it was and how many loved ones had been lost. Today, as I speak to Savannah over the phone, as I hear her recount the day's events and as I listen to the aching sound in her voice, I am reminded of that day when so many of us lost so much: April 20, 1999. Although Savannah was only about four when the shooting at Columbine High School took place, she definitely sees parallels between that event and what happened at Deer Creek. "It's just so close," Savannah tells me and she sighs deeply, sounding, in that moment, incredibly old and weary.

And yet, as with Columbine, amidst the genuine horror, there is also triumph. There is the heroism of one man, Savannah's math teacher Dr. Benke, who tackled the shooter to the ground, a man who Savannah tells me assured his students that if anything should ever threaten their safety, he would do anything in his power to protect them. There is the bravery of parents like Savannah's mother, who never let her daughters see the worry on her face as she came to pick them up. And then, of course, there is the optimism of students like Savannah. When I ask her if she has taken anything from her experience, her response is clear: "Hope." "You can't keep it bottled up inside you until you go crazy," Savannah tells me, "You have to stay strong. You have to have hope."

Previously:

Growing Up In the Shadow of Columbine

noah — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:53:41 -0500

By: Erin Bilir

At 12:08 on the day of the Columbine shooting, I was sitting in a playground sandbox playing with my Barbie dolls, not at all aware that five minutes away shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were committing suicide.

I was only six-years-old and like most childhood recollections, my memories of that day come in snapshots. I remember my mom picking me up from school early and hugging me so hard I lost my breath. I remember seeing my neighbor racing across her lawn to her car, tears running down her face, shoes clutched tightly in one hand. I remember not understanding. Being afraid but not quite sure of what.

Now I know that I was lucky - that I am lucky. I'm a student at a private school where the term "falling through the cracks" is applied to those who don't consistently make honor roll and join a sports team. What happened that infamous day in April at Columbine was both worlds away and within walking distance. I was never close to any of the victims. But Columbine had a significant effect on us all.

After Columbine, it was the little things that changed. Suddenly I couldn't stay out with my neighborhood friends after four o'clock even in the summer. Parents would huddle in front of the door of our kindergarten class, shaking their heads, squeezing each others' hands. My mom, a gastroenterologist, began to see more and more parents from the surrounding area coming in with ulcers. I never wanted to go to the mall down the road because the teenagers in long dark trench coats and heavy makeup who gathered around the fountains now left me petrified. Columbine was a reason to start looking at the kid in the back of the bus with low slung jeans, large headphones, and black nail polish with suspicion and anxiety. The air was thick with paranoia. Some parents we knew made their only son throw out his entire CD collection because it consisted of too much Eminem, Marilyn Manson, and Slipknot.

It was a communal tremor of fear, a backlash against youthful rebellion of any kind.

But some changes were for the better. Parents started reading books with titles like "Communicating with Your Estranged Teen." Game nights were revived. Columbine flowers were planted. More people were seen embracing each other in the streets. Columbine allowed for strangers from different corners of Colorado to grieve for the frailty of innocence. Columbine created an informal support group numbering in the thousands.

10 years after Columbine, my community is still reverberating with the sounds of those gunshots. And For me, April 20th 1999 will always be the day when I stopped sitting down with my parents to watch the six o'clock news. Here where I live, we are all still Columbine.

Legacy Of Change: Gaming After Columbine

noah — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 01:56:31 -0500

In the hours and days that followed Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s deadly spree at Columbine High the nation, stunned by the seeming randomness of the massacre, sought answers. Why had two boys gone from geeks to gunmen? Could this happen at my kid’s school? What drove their violent impulses? Could the shocking music of Marilyn Manson or the ultra-bloody first person shooters the boys enjoyed have been the catalyst of their rage?

“Everyone can point their finger to violent images that they’ve seen in some form of media, and so it seems to be the answer,” says Dr. Karen Sternheimer, a professor of Sociology at USC and the author of “It’s Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture’s Influence on Children.” Her research centers on trends in youth behavior as it relates to popular culture. She’s seen that the impulse to scapegoat violence in video games hasn’t faded in the ten years since Columbine.

“Two years ago when the Virginia Tech situation happened,” she recalls, “before they even had a name or an identity on the shooter there were already people on cable news shows talking about video games. Which was amazing, and of course it turned out that this guy didn’t play video games much.”

It is a scenario similar to the one John Davison-- founder of What They Play, the family guide to video games-- remembers playing out after the tragedy in Littleton. In the case of Klebold and Harris, “there was a lot of attention on the fact that they played a lot of Duke Nukem. Which at the time was really big, and for some people it was an easy thing to blame.”

Davison, whose work centers on helping parents understand the content of the games their kids crave, knows the impulse to link children’s behavior with what they see is “an easy argue to make with video games. Even though it’s not particularly credible that it’s a direct causality thing, it’s ‘Well you’re doing things in a video game that are violent so therefore it’s going to make you have more of a propensity to be violent.’”

Bonus Video: John Davison on one of the other lessons of Columbine.

Brooks Brown, mentioned by John in the video, is the student at Columbine High who was warned away by Eric Harris on the day of the shootings.

PERCEPTION VS. REALITY

Yet conventional wisdom is often demolished by raw data.

“What we’ve found is that violent crime has decreased dramatically starting in 1996 while video games sales have soared. More than doubling last year,” said Dan Hewitt, a spokesman for the Entertainment Software Association the trade association for the video game industry. He cites a report that contrasts the Department of Justice numbers on violent crime and sales figures for games. Hewitt contends that “if there was some type of causal connection between video games and real life violence that the rate of real life violence would actually be going up, but actually the opposite is true.”

Dr. Sternheimer, like Davison, says that because a game is “interactive it seems like logically that it could cause some kind of casual effect.” She notes that the decline in the rate of violence “is most notable in youth, especially juveniles.” While the data and the perceived connection don’t agree, the perception remains “compelling because it’s really easy for us to understand.” The professor points to Dave Cullen’s recent book on Columbine that paints a picture of Klebold and Harris as “not just everyday kids who played video games, and just kind of became crazy from too many video games. These were seriously disturbed individuals. We make a really big mistake when we overlook issues like that.”

In many ways what happened at Columbine High is a kind of prologue to the wave of violence that has shocked the country in recent weeks. A wave that adds weight to Professor Sternheimer’s assertion that “we don’t just have a health care crisis-- we have a mental health care crisis in this country.”

MEDIA SCAPEGOATS AND THE NEW FACE OF GAMES

“When a tragedy occurs it touches off an understandable wave of soul searching as we try and comprehend how such horrific events could occur,” says Hewitt of the ESA. “Unfortunately that search also touches off a wave of finger pointing and scapegoating, and what we’ve seen in the past is that people point to comic books and to movies and to music and it's really generational. The generations that don’t understand the contemporary entertainment medium blaming [the new medium]. Today it's computer and video games, but 10 or 20 years from now we’re not going to be having these conversations.”

Yet the shift in perception may come sooner than that. John Davison points to the broadening market for games: “Honestly a big part of the rationalization of thought about video games, I think we can thank Nintendo over the last couple of years. Getting a Wii into so many homes that previously didn’t have a video game system in them. Or getting a Wii or a DS into the living room or kitchen or the back of the car or whatever.

“Previously it was always in the boy's bedroom and mom and dad knew nothing about it. The Wii has become kinda the friendly face of video games.”

As the generation that grew up playing games comes into adulthood (according to the ESA the average age of video game players is 35) and are becoming parents themselves the rush to link games and real life violence is likely to fade.

“We’ve seen kind of a few years into people coming of age playing video games and again we’re seeing crime decline,” says Dr. Sternheimer. “So there is, I think, definitely a greater realization that ‘Huh, maybe video games are not exactly the magic bullet that if we can just get rid of those we can deal with these crime problems.’"

MORE: What They Play Podcast with Columbine survivor Brooks Brown.