Events in Bailey rattle Columbine survivors

Lynn Bartels, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 27, 2006 at midnight

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Connie Michalick and her son, Richard Castaldo, sat in a Social Security office this morning, trying to explain to a newcomer to Colorado about the Columbine shootings that left Castaldo paralyzed.

Michalick turned on her television this afternoon to see frightened students running for school buses.

"Oh my God," she said. "This is actually giving me chills. I want to cry.

"I hope some poor parent doesn’t have to stand and wait for a bus and a child who doesn’t come home."

A hostage situation at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey revived harrowing memories for those parents whose children who attended Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.

Terry Savage’s son, John, was in the school library that day when seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold stormed Columbine.

John, who was hiding under a table, moved. One gunmen said, "Halt, who goes there?"

John knew Klebold and asked him what he was doing.

"I’m killing people," Klebhold calmly replied.

"Are you going to kill me?" John asked.

"No, get out of here," Klebold said.

John escaped, but his parents wouldn’t know that for more than two frantic hours.

"I get very tense when I think about it," Savage said in a trembling voice. "This thing in Bailey brings back memories, doesn’t it?"

Klebold and Harris killed 12 students and a teacher before commiting suicide.

They injured about two dozen more, including Castaldo, a junior who was sitting outside the school with friends when he was shot in the chest, back and arm.

His mother recalled waiting at nearby Leawood Elementary School for hours that day.

After police finally stormed Columbine, classrooms were emptied and students ran from the schools to waiting buses that took them to Leawood.

"We were all standing there and a bus would come. You would look for your child. You would say, ‘Surely he’ll be on the next bus.’ The crowd kept getting smaller and smaller and finally they said, ‘That’s the last bus,'" Michalick said.

"The parents that were left were in a panic. It was excruciating."

Only then did she learn that her son was in the hospital.

In the days that followed, TV stations endlessly replayed footage of students running from the school to the buses.

Michalick said it seemed almost unreal to think that earlier Wednesday, she and her son were talking about the Columbine shootings with a Social Security administrator.

Castaldo, now 25, is a paraplegic and receives disability payments.

Michalick said the Bailey situation on top of shootings recently in Montreal are too much to compehend.

"This is just horrible," she said. "I just don't know what the answer is."

Another Columbine parent, Sue Townsend, had also waited that day at Leawood for a bus that never came. Her stepdaughter, Lauren Townsend, had been killed in the library.

Sue Townsend heard about the hostage situation at Platte Canyon High School on the radio, but declined to immediately turn on the TV.

"It just dredges up all those emotions," she said. "I don’t want to relive it.

"I’ll say a prayer for the families involved."

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