Roll Call
Fourteen names, fourteen unfinished sentences, and the parallel universe we owed them.
You slept through the alarm. Five days of sleeping in through summer break doesn’t reset itself just because the district decided the calendar says August now.
Fourteen minutes before the bus stops waiting for you, and you’re moving in that specific panic-shuffle unique to teenagers: one shoe on, backpack half-packed, patting your pocket for the gray Nokia brick that does exactly two things — make calls and run Snake — and that cost you actual money, like real, counted-out change, every time you used it to text your best friend the night before. Does she still sit with us at lunch. Did he get taller over the summer. Is your locker anywhere near your friends’ this year. You rehearsed a hundred versions of walking through those doors again last night on the family’s corded kitchen phone, curly cord stretched as far down the hallway as it’d reach for privacy — which hallway first, which outfit reads right in daylight, whether your stomach will stop doing this — and none of the rehearsals matter now because you missed the bus, and your mom has fourteen minutes to get to work herself, so move.
The car ride is fast and quiet and full of a different kind of nervous. You care, deeply and specifically, about a dozen tiny social physics problems this morning — who’s dating who, who moved this summer, whether your people are still your people — because that’s what fifteen is supposed to be about, when the world lets fifteen be about anything at all. School, on most days for most kids, isn’t the thing you’ll hear about later on cable news. It’s the center of the whole world: your people, your routines, the low hum of something that on a good day feels almost exactly like belonging.
You get dropped off. You jog in through a side door, backpack half-zipped, already rehearsing your apology to first period.
Then the alarm that isn’t a fire drill goes off, and nobody in the hallway has rehearsed this part.
That’s the morning, in some combination, that started for fourteen people connected to Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. Thirteen of them never left the building. The fourteenth did, and spent the next twenty-six years finishing what that morning started anyway.
A quick note before the rest of this one, because it’s different from what we usually run.
Everything below about who these fourteen people were comes from what their families, teachers, coaches, and in one case their own public record actually put down: memorial inscriptions, funeral tributes, interviews given over twenty-six years. I’m not going to invent a spouse’s name or a job title for anyone. For thirteen of them, what I’m going to do is the math nobody wants to do out loud: take who they already told us they wanted to become, and follow that thread forward to where a person who wanted that thing plausibly, ordinarily, unremarkably ends up by their mid-forties. Call it arithmetic done with love, for people who were denied the chance to do it themselves. The fourteenth doesn’t need that math. We know exactly what her twenty-six years looked like, because she lived them in public, and then the shooting took her anyway.
Read it slow. That’s the whole ask.
Rachel Joy Scott, 17. In the library that morning she told a teacher, “I’m going to have an impact on the world.” She loved acting, writing, drawing, and her faith; the nonprofit built in her name has since reached more than thirty million students with anti-bullying programming, which means the line she said before she died turned out to be true anyway, just not in the way anyone would have chosen. She’d be 44 now. Old enough that “impact on the world” might have quietly become a career instead of a premonition.
Daniel Mauser, 15. A sophomore who was already paying attention to gun policy before anyone thought a fifteen-year-old should have to. His father, Tom, spent the next two decades becoming one of the country’s most recognizable gun-safety advocates, in part because his son had already started asking the questions. Daniel would be 42 now — roughly the age his father was when he first picked up that fight on his behalf.
Cassie René Bernall, 17. Wanted to be an obstetrician. Wanted, in her own words, to spend her life “bringing new life into this world.” She’d be 44. An OB in her forties is a doctor who’s delivered somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand babies by now, each one a name Cassie never got the chance to hear.
Steven Curnow, 14. The youngest one killed. Found his love of flying on a family trip to England and decided, at fourteen, that he was going to be a naval aviator. He’d be 41 now — just past the age where Navy pilots typically transition into training the next generation, which is its own quiet tragedy: he’d likely be the instructor by now, not the student.
Isaiah Shoels, 18. Weeks from graduation, already accepted into the Denver Institute of the Arts, chasing his father’s footsteps into music as a producer or a comedian. He’d be 46. Old enough that the music industry he wanted to enter has completely reinvented itself twice since 1999, and he never got to watch it happen, let alone be part of it.
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Matthew Kechter, 16. An ‘A’ student, a weightlifter, a kid whose family remembers his grin the day he caught his first trout. He was posthumously inducted into the National Honor Society that fall — an honor society inducting a member who was already gone. He’d be 43. No memorial page records what he wanted to be when he grew up, and that gap is its own kind of evidence: some of these kids were still figuring it out, the way sixteen-year-olds are supposed to be allowed to.
Daniel Rohrbough, 15. Remembered as high-spirited, with a smile his family says lit up a room. He’d be 42. Some of what we know about Daniel is what his family had to keep fighting to have acknowledged — including where, exactly, he was standing when he died, a fact contested for years. That’s its own quiet postscript: even in death, some of these kids had to be fought for twice.
Kelly Fleming, 16. An aspiring songwriter and author who filled notebooks with poems and short stories, buried with two teddy bears under her arms. She’d be 43. Long enough a career to have published, revised, maybe shelved, and started over on more manuscripts than most working novelists manage in a lifetime.
John Tomlin, 16. Loved baseball, cats, his family, his faith, and — as he got older — Chevy trucks and the Green Bay Packers. Worked thirty hours a week hauling trees at a nursery to pay for the pickup he was still fixing up. Planned to join the Army after graduation. He’d be 43 now, most likely a father teaching his own kid to drive a stick shift in a truck bed full of mulch.
Corey DePooter, 17. An outdoorsman down to his bones — camping, golfing, hunting, and fly-fishing above all of it, especially in Yellowstone, where he spent every free hour he could find. He’d be 44. A man who’s spent nearly three more decades finding rivers, the way he already knew he wanted to.
Lauren “Lulu” Townsend, 18. Valedictorian, posthumously. Captain of the volleyball team her own mother coached. A straight-A student who never once got a B, with two scholarship offers to Colorado State University already in hand, where she planned to study biology and become a wildlife biologist. She’d be 45. The fund built in her name has been sending other kids to college in her place for over two decades, which means Lauren has, in a sense, been quietly funding other people’s futures this entire time. Just never her own.
Kyle Velasquez, 16. Lived with developmental delays his whole life, and by every account, was just starting to like who he was. His family says he taught the people who loved him more about unconditional love, patience, and forgiveness than anyone else in their lives. There’s no career goal recorded for Kyle, and there doesn’t need to be one for his life to have mattered exactly as much as everyone else’s on this list. He’d be 43. Somewhere, in a version of this story with a functioning building alarm, he’s still teaching people that lesson.
William “Dave” Sanders, 47. The teacher. Shot while running through hallways warning students the shooting was happening, credited with getting hundreds of kids to safety before he was hit. His daughter has said the students he saved now have children of their own, and those children will have children, which means Dave Sanders is already, quietly, several generations deep into a legacy he never got to watch unfold. He’d be 74 now. Likely retired. Very possibly still showing up to coach something, because that’s who he was.
Anne Marie Hochhalter, 17. Shot twice in the cafeteria, in the back and chest, and paralyzed from the waist down for what everyone assumed, at the time, would be the rest of a long life. And it was a life; she spent the next twenty-six years as a disability advocate, showing up at other cities’ vigils after their own mass shootings to tell newer survivors the truth instead of the comfortable version: it gets better, but it never goes away. In 2016 she wrote a public letter forgiving Sue Klebold, the mother of one of the two boys who shot her. On February 16, 2025, she died of sepsis at 43, and the Jefferson County Coroner ruled it a homicide, naming her 1999 gunshot wounds a significant contributing factor. Twenty-six years is longer than any of the other thirteen got. It still wasn’t hers to keep.
Read the Ledger
Fourteen people. Ages 14 to 47, and it took the county twenty-six years to finish counting them, because the fourteenth victim didn’t die on the day everyone remembers. A sophomore who studied gun policy on his own time. A valedictorian who never got a B. A teacher who ran toward the gunfire instead of away from it. A woman who lived a quarter-century in a wheelchair and forgave a stranger’s mother before the wound she’d been carrying since seventeen finally, officially, killed her. Thirteen of them never got the ordinary, boring, unremarkable rest of a life — the mortgage, the bad haircut phase, the disappointing sequel to a favorite movie, the mundane Tuesday that nobody thinks to be grateful for until it’s the thing that got taken. The fourteenth got pieces of it, on loan, for twenty-six years, before the bill came due anyway.
Since Columbine, more than 370,000 students have been directly exposed to gun violence at their own schools, and the tally of school-shooting casualties in a single recent year ran more than double the number of casualties from the year Columbine happened. Every one of those students has their own version of this list now. Their own thirteen, or their own two, or their own one — a name, an age, a half-finished sentence about who they were going to become.
We didn’t stop this. We wrote eulogies for it instead, and we got faster at writing them, and now we can produce one before the candles at the vigil have finished burning down. Call it what it actually is: a trauma response wearing the costume of policy, and we’ve been letting it play the part for twenty-seven years.
The ask
I’m not going to relitigate the policy fight in this one. We’ve done that, and we’ll do it again. This piece exists because you cannot argue your way to caring about a statistic, but you can be introduced to a person, and once you’ve been introduced, walking away gets a lot harder.
So here’s the only ask: the next time someone tells you gun violence is too politically complicated to fix, too tangled up in rights and lobbying and culture war to touch, ask them to read fourteen names out loud first. Ask them to sit with the fact that Lauren Townsend would be 45 this year, and isn’t, on purpose, and that Anne Marie Hochhalter got to 43 and not one year further, also on purpose, twenty-six years and one autopsy report later, because a policy failure we’ve had twenty-seven years to correct is still uncorrected.
Then ask them again if it’s really too complicated. I’ll wait.
