World changed in an instant

Hostage survivor, 15, describes terrifying hours with gunman

Fernando Quintero, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 29, 2006 at midnight

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Lynna Long picked up her books and headed toward the door as her honors English class wound down.

She had nearly reached the hallway when a man wearing a blue hooded sweat shirt calmly walked into Room 206 of Platte Canyon High School, blocking her path.

In that split second, Lynna's world changed.

The girl who dreams of being a doctor became one of Duane Morrison's six hostages. Over the next hours, she was terrorized and she was molested. She thought she was going to die. And when he finally let her go, she felt guilty about the girls left behind.

Lynna, a 15-year-old sophomore, talked Thursday about what it was like inside that schoolroom-turned- chamber of horrors during an exclusive interview with the Rocky Mountain News.

She and her mother agreed to allow her identity to be revealed, but asked that her photo not be shown in the newspaper.

Morrison, brandishing a gun and announcing that he had a bomb in his camouflage backpack, made Lynna and the other students go back to their desks.

"He began talking to our teacher, Mrs. Smith, and told her, 'If you don't do what I say, I'll shoot you.'

"He told us to get up and line up against the blackboard, our faces toward the wall. Then he fired a shot. I think it's because some people weren't complying fast enough, and he was trying to scare us."

Morrison told the students that he had enough explosives to blow up the whole school.

"He said 'You won't have to worry about going to class.' "

Then he asked each student for their name, she said.

"A boy named Scott was the first person he asked. Then he put a gun to his face. Then he made all the rest of the males leave. I don't remember how many there were. Maybe three or four. Then he asked the teacher to leave."

'Special attention to Emily'

The gunman was calm, but acted oddly, she says.

He put on layers of clothes, and looked through the students' backpacks.

Then he went over to the six remaining girls, who were still facing the wall.

"He paid special attention to Emily. I don't know why. He asked her for her name, and her father's name. He seemed to know her dad.

"All the things he said were so random. He asked us 'Do you have water?' 'What's your last name?' He asked us if we had cell phones.

"I was afraid to say I did, even though it didn't matter because we have cell phone blockers at school and you usually can't get reception up here in the mountains anyway."

Lynna tried to call her mother, and then saw she had a text message from her friend, Haley, who goes to school in Conifer.

"Are you OK?" it read.

At one point, Morrison ordered Lynna to give him his bottled water, which he'd put next to his backpack.

"He said, 'Don't bump the bag.' "

At first, Lynna said she thought it was a drill, somehow not real, maybe to test their response.

But when Morrison began touching and molesting the girls, she knew it was something else.

"The thing that kept me going through it all was I kept thinking that what was happening wasn't -real. I don't know how to explain it, but that's what I did."

She knew the other girls were being molested, even though she was facing the wall and was afraid to turn around.

"You could hear the rustling of clothes and elastic being snapped and zippers being opened and closed."

Lynna, who says she was groped above the waist, believes Emily "got it worse."

"We kept facing the blackboard because we didn't want him to fire any more shots. But you could hear Emily saying, "No. Please don't."

'I didn't want to die'

Meanwhile, Lynna also could hear the SWAT teams outside the classroom.

She thought about action movies.

"I imagined that a group of SWAT team guys would bust through the windows. Or that I could fight off the gunman with a kick in the groin. But that just happens in the movies. I guess it doesn't quite work that way in real life."

She also thought about the possibility her life was ending.

"I didn't want to die. I thought about my family. I'm the oldest of three kids. I thought about my 4- year-old brother without his big sister. And my other sister. And my parents and my friends."

Lynna paused at this point in the interview, looking out the window of her family's restaurant to the traffic whizzing by on U.S. 285. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

"I never had a really strong relationship with my mom. But I thought, 'I'll never get the chance to make things better with her.' "

She returned to the retelling of the nightmare.

Morrison began ordering the girls to leave, one by one. " When he was letting a girl go, he would grab one of us as a shield."

It's hard for her to estimate how long it took to be released.

"Time was so slow, and so fast."

She tried to judge the passing of time by the bells that continued to ring.

"I heard the end-of-class bell, and the second lunch bell, and the fourth-hour bell."

As each girl left, Lynna says, he yelled "Make sure you close the door."

Once she made it out the door, she was passed from one police officer to the next.

"I felt like a toy or a doll. When I got outside the building, it was really like a dream.

"I felt incredible relief, but I also felt guilty because I got to go free and there were three girls still in there."

Four officers interviewed her immediately.

Twin loses sister

Thursday morning, she went to the Park County sheriff's office for more interviews.

"They asked me strange questions, like if I had a myspace.com account."

Lynna knew Emily Keyes, the girl who was killed. But she knows Emily's twin brother, Casey John, even better.

"It's hard. He's without his sister now."

Aside from an occasional overwhelming sense of grief mixed with other emotions she can't quite explain, Lynna says she is getting by.

"This has made me think - it's so cliché - but life is short. You can't take things, or people, for granted."

Lynna's friend Annie arrives to pick her up and take her to Platte Canyon Community Church, where students were meeting to comfort one another.

"They have counselors there. But I don't feel like talking to them. I don't know where I am right now in terms of processing. It's not been 24 hours. I don't know if it's hit me or not. Right now, it doesn't seem like I was that bad off.

"I know I'm going to feel mixed emotions. I know I'll never be the same. I know I'll never be able to go into that room again."

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