We are just about to pull up to speak to some Columbine survivors.
It’s been 19 years since the shooting at Columbine.
I’m really nervous because I know that the anniversary of these kinds of events are really
tough on survivors but they’ve been doing a lot of great work to help other survivors
so I think this story is an important one that needs to be told.
Heather Martin and Zach Cartaya have known each other since they were six and have been
best friends their whole lives.
And on April 20, 1999 when they were 17, they were in choir room at Columbine High School
when those lives and their friendship were changed forever.
So take me back to you guys in high school.
What were your hopes, what were your dreams?
I was going to go into computer sciences.
I had been accepted into a school at that point.
I was looking forward to the future.
I was going to go to college, get an education and just see where that took me.
That obviously changed on April 20th.
What was the day like before?
You guys wake up … It was an incredibly typical day; everything
was normal until 11:20.
We started out choir like we always did; warmups; trying to warm our voices up; it was a really
large class.
One of the students that was out in the bathroom came running back up the stairs, back into
the room yelling someone’s got a gun downstairs and they’re shooting.
And we all stood up like what?
And Mr. Andres is like sit down!
So we all sat down and then the gun fire got really close and then it was like BOOM!
A lot of people ran out one way, some people were running out another way and we didn’t.
We didn’t run.
For me, what I remember is that I was like don’t overreact.
We looked at the door, the first thing we saw was a fireball and then we saw Mr. Sanders
take the shot in the back of his upper neck if I’m not mistaken.
And that was the first time I had seen anything really gruesome in real life.
And then we froze.
What’s going through your head while you’re hiding?
I think there was, very least at first, if not throughout the day a consensus that we
were going to die there.
We all kind of moved to one side of the room there so that we were far away from the outer
door and outer rooms; we’re basically like catty corner to the library.
So we heard everything that happened in the library.
We heard the gunfire and the screaming.
And I remember finally understanding that it was gunfire and that these are shots being
fired in the school and I started crying.
Eventually then came a knock at the door and we all look at each other like what are we
going to do and finally someone yells out “who is it?”
And they say “Denver swat team, open the door.”
We could not move the desks away from the door fast enough.
We’re moving the desks, we swing open the door, we come flying out of the room.
We went up along the side of the building.
We did pass Danny’s body and Rachels body on our way.
Danny carpooled with me.
And so that was really hard.
I recognized Danny right away and he had ridden with us to school that morning.
You’re seventeen years old, supposed to be graduating in weeks so how do you cope
after that?
We’re just trying to get back to normal.
We’re not impacted.
It’s cool.
We’re just going to keep going and so we did.
But a lot of the class of 99 struggled and a lot of people dropped out and a lot of suicide
attempts and trying to cope using drugs and alcohol …
And suicides plural.
We lost a lot of people along the way too.
It took me nine or ten years before I finally …. I used to just say I went to Columbine
until it turned into I am a Columbine survivor.
It took me about eight years to go and get help.
I went to college.
I worked on Wall Street for a little while but I also realized at that point that this
was going to be something I was going to be dealing with for the rest of my life.
So I think at that point I was like I survived this and I’m going to keep having to survive
this.
In 2012, Heather got an idea for a support group.
She wanted to take the anger and frustration and helplessness she felt after every mass
shooting and use her experience to help other survivors cope.
That's when The Rebel's Project born.
This was the night you guys got pizza remember …
No this is at the resiliency center.
Oh this is at the center.
So a husband and wife held an elementary school hostage so Laurie and her family traveled
out to one of the rebel project meetings.
She worked at a bar and I came tearing into the bar saying I have an idea, let’s start
a nonprofit, lets start a nonprofit for shooting survivors and she was like I’m working on
a support group and I was like well how do we get these things to come together.
As survivors, every time a shooting occurs, we are re-traumatized to a point, we feel
really really helpless, like what can we do to help.
And so we’ve been through this and it was awful and so we can share our experiences,
our awfulness in hopes of making it better for someone else.
Rough days are going to happen and you’re going to stumble and that’s okay and everything
you’re experiencing given what you’re experiencing is going totally normal.
What are your top goals for people who come to the rebels project.
There are a few things.
First, I hope they get validation for what they’re feeling and what they’ve been
too and for as soon as possible in their journey its going to go at their own pace but own
that label of survivor because they are survivors.
You can collapse at five years, you can collapse at ten years but you’ve got someone who
is like yeah me too.
Yes you may fall apart at year five, six, eleven and seventeen but through the work
that we do, we’re able to tell our stories, share those with others and that filters down
and people see that and they start doing that and they start getting involved in the conversation.