Johnson: I'd wait, too, before I met this accuser

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published April 24, 2002 at midnight

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I am very much into forgiveness. It comes from my religious upbringing, the whole spectrum of how I was raised. "Now tell him you're sorry!" My dad seemed to bark this every day.

It is quite virtuous to admit a mistake. And it is, indeed, divine for the injured to accept fully the apology. That said, if I were Dan O'Shea, I wouldn't meet with Brian Rohrbough, either.

It'd take a while, a good long time, to meet with a man who so publicly branded me a child killer.

A man who sued me for it, saying I killed his kid. A man who turned my life upside-down, had co-workers and others eye me suspiciously, implied I wasn't man enough to admit a mistake, and chicken enough to try to cover it up.

So you just know there's considerable pain and, in equal measure, anger roiling through Denver police Sgt. Dan O'Shea. To his credit, O'Shea, described by his wife, Susan, as having "been through hell," has said nothing, leaving the business solely to his lawyer.

"Candidly," David Bruno, his attorney said Monday while rejecting the Rohrbough family's request to meet, "his perspective is that he was accused of wrongdoing in public, and the apology ought to also be in public."

Brian Rohrbough, to his credit as well, immediately offered one: "We're very sorry for the pain and frustration we have caused him."

Is it going to go any further? Probably not, David Bruno said. Which is yet another episode of sadness and tragedy, of wrecked lives and reputations that has been Columbine.

I understand, somewhat, why Brian Rohrbough did what he did. A man who loses a child so violently is liable to point fingers wildly and, possibly, do worse.

It is what got Dan O'Shea. This unyielding, damn-the-torpedoes quest to learn precisely, down to the final second, how a loved one died. Which is something I don't fully understand and, more importantly, never want to find out.

"Some people simply want to know, down to the nitty gritty, every last detail," says Ruth Dillon, an Arvada grief counselor.

It is why some families of United Flight 93 victims last week went to hear the cockpit recording of the minutes before the plane went down in Pennysylvania, while others stayed away.

"Not all answers fit all people," she said, "but what is common is, we all need closure. And if you are being told one thing, and it turns out to be another, it upsets the whole belief system. To feel lied to adds significantly to the trauma."

So a cop trying to do the right thing, risking his own life to help save others, gets smeared. And ridiculously so.

Only after many more months of investigation by the El Paso County Sheriff's Office and more than 3,000 pages of documents conclusively sort out what should have been known three years ago is he cleared.

No, Danny Rohrbough was killed by Eric Harris -- not by Dylan Klebold, as the Jefferson County sheriff concluded, or Dan O'Shea or some other police officer, as the boy's family maintained.

The cruel irony, certainly as it applies to Dan O'Shea, is maybe it has never been a case of the Jefferson County sheriff lying to the Columbine families, leading them to such wild accusations.

Rather, the sheriff and his investigators maybe never intended to mislead. They just weren't skilled enough -- to put it kindly -- to uncover fully the real truth.

Bill Johnson's column appears Saturday, Wednesday and Friday. johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or (303) 892-2763.

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