Columbine High shooting survivor: Social media is giving Parkland students the voice we never had

A survivor of the Columbine High School shooting has said the reaction of the Parkland victims has renewed her hope of meaningful action finally happening on gun control.

Anne Marie Hochhalter said social media had given survivors of mass shootings a platform to call for change that the teenagers of Columbine never had.

In recent days students from the Florida school had held emotive rallies and are planning further marches calling for tighter gun regulations after 17 people were killed in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine's Day.

Ms Hochhalter was left paralysed when she was shot during the 1999 massacre that killed 13 at the Colorado high school.

Yet social media has also provided a breeding ground for a perverse subculture that valorises mass shooters, according to the 36-year-old

The Telegraph found numerous posts on Facebook and Tumblr glamorising the shooters of Columbine, with people even sharing tattoos they had of the killers stalking the school’s cafeteria during the massacre.

Ms Hochhalter said she fears such social media posts could help inspire other shooters by holding out the prospect of a warped fame.

Facebook has since deleted a number of pages flagged to it by this paper.

'Social media gives survivors a voice'

Ms Hochhalter had long since given up on the idea that the continued mass killings would lead to meaningful action on gun control. Yet the sight of Parkland teenagers organising rallies and marches calling for legislation has given her renewed optimism.

She says that social media has empowered the survivors of mass shootings in a way that the students of Columbine could never have envisioned.

“Seeing these kids - my heart bursts with pride,” said Ms Hochhalter. “They are speaking up and calling for action from lawmakers and parties. I hope so badly there will be change.

“They can now set the agenda themselves, they have the power and they have a voice. These kids are not going to give up.”

President Donald Trump is now preparing to ban bump stock devices that modify semi-automatic rifles and considering other gun control measures in the wake of the tragedy in Florida on Wednesday February 14.

Back in 1999 the narrative around Columbine quickly coalesced around the shooters being part of a sinister group called the Trenchcoat Mafia, about whether video games and goth culture had desensitised them to violence and whether the attack was two outcasts taking revenge on more popular jocks.

It is a narrative that has been largely debunked in the years following the attack. For instance the Trenchcoat Mafia was group of computer game enthusiasts who met to play the fantasy tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Members said the shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were rejected from the group for being too strange.

The initial explanations for the shooting didn’t tally with the experience of many at the school, but Ms Hochhalter said they did not have a platform to challenge them.

She said: “We didn’t have social media. I did some [media] interviews, but they wanted to focus on the shooters. The focus wasn’t on what it should have been.”

Infamy motive

Ms Hochhalter is clear in her mind as to what motivated the Columbine shooters - notoriety. It is the same conclusion that the FBI working with psychiatrists and psychologists came to five years after the shooting.

Columbine was not a rash act by two teenagers with ready access to guns. It was calculated operation, methodically planned over a year and the aim was clear. The pair hoped to inflict "the most deaths in US history", Klebold boasted in one a video.

It wasn’t even planned as a shooting but as a staggered bomb attack that would kill students during the lunch-rush and then emergency workers rushing to the scene. Only the shooters ineptitude as bomb-makers stopped Columbine turning into a slaughter in the hundreds.

The FBI is clear in its conclusions about the pair's motivation: They didn’t just want fame, they wanted infamy. The students they massacred that day were not the main target, their true aim was their reputations after death.

Perverse online subculture

If notoriety was their true aim then Klebold and Harris succeeded to some degree. A measure of their success is the perverse subcultures that have sprung up around them on social media.

The Telegraph has seen multiple pages on Facebook glamorising the Columbine shooters and praising their actions.

One with more than 2,000 likes describes its “mission” as to “never forget and always honor these heroes”. The page has shared CCTV stills of the shooters rampaging around the school, as well as fan art of them clutching their sawn-off shotguns, and even tattoos a fan had got of them mid-shooting spree.

Comments on the page talked of posters “admiring” the shooters, praised their looks, described them as “idols” and accused the victims’ families of trying to “bury their memories”.

Facebook has since deleted a number of the pages after being alerted to them by the Telegraph. In a statement the company said: “We condemn the terrible tragedy that took place in Florida and our thoughts are with the families of the victims and those who are injured.

“There is absolutely no place on our platforms for people who commit such horrendous acts. We thank The Telegraph for bringing these pages to our attention, which have been removed for violating our Community Standards.” 

On the social media site, Tumblr, which is popular with teenagers, a quick search turned up scores of posts about the shooters, showing quotes from them, gifs from their videos and even a post advertising T-shirts printed with CCTV stills from the massacre.

No Notoriety campaign

Ms Hochhalter fears that social media pages and posts that valorise mass shooters could help inspire the next tragedy.

She said: “The motivation is different for each shooter but these people are in some sort of emotional pain and they want to inflict that pain on others and they want to go out in a blaze of glory”.

As well as calling on social media platforms to ban pages dedicated to lionising mass killers, Ms Hochhalter has also backs the No Notoriety campaign, which has been set up by the victims mass shootings.

This calls for a media blackout on the names of mass shooters in an effort to dampen down the infamy they seek.

In the US, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper has backed such an approach by refusing to name shooters on air.

Other sections of the US media have argued that journalists have a duty to report the full story when such incidents occur.

Yet Ms Hochhalter sees the recent pattern of mass shooters not committing suicide, such as those of Parkland of the Aurora theatre massacre in 2012, as evidence of them wanting to see the reaction to their crimes.

She said: “They are not killing themselves as much now as they want to survive and see the attention afterwards.

“So with Parkland with that photo of him being arrested he is looking right at the camera - that is exactly what he wants.”

April 20, 1999

As the debate over gun control and how to prevent the next mass shooting continues after Parkland, a small Florida community is just beginning to try and come to terms with what happened.

For Ms Hochhalter and dozens of other ex-students of Columbine High, it is a “rough road” they have been treading for nearly two decades.

Ms Hochhalter was sitting with her friends and enjoying the sun on a grassy knoll outside the school on April 20, 1999, when the first shots rang out. At first the 17-year-old Ms Hochhalter assumed it was senior students playing a prank.

She said: “I was eating outside with friends and I heard the shots behind me. I thought they were paintball guns and as I didn’t want to believe what was happening.

“Before I knew what was happening I was shot in the back and that was the bullet that paralysed me.

“My friends had run away but came back and dragged me to relative safety then I was hit again and that bullet hit a bunch of internal organs and my friends had to leave me as there were bullets flying around everywhere.”

She lay bleeding for 45 minutes before paramedics reached her. They only go to her due to a mix-up in communications with police, who were holding back from the school due to confusion over how many shooters there were.

Had the paramedics held off with the police Ms Hochhalter would have been the 14th Columbine fatality. Klebold and Harris turned their guns on themselves before the police could reach them.

The aftermath

After she woke from surgery, Ms Hochhalter’s family tried to shield her from the full scale of the horror of what happened at Columbine by not telling how many had died and asking friends not to share details with her when they visited her in hospital.

It wasn’t until she was interviewed the police a month after the shooting that she learned 13 had died, including a close friend.

In the weeks that followed she threw herself into her rehabilitation, convincing herself she would one day walk again, despite what the doctors said.

But six months after the shooting Ms Hochhalter’s mother, who had a history of depression, committed suicide.

In the wake of the trauma of the shooting and tragedy of losing her parent, she said she went to "a daze".

For two years she had counselling but stopped and described a process of repeatedly burying her feelings and the trauma deep down for the next 18-years.

Las Vegas

Over the years Ms Hochhalter learned to avoid certain sounds and sights that could trigger flashbacks to that day in April 1999.

She has since been unable to go live firework displays and can be traumatised by other loud bangs such as cars backfiring. She also breaks down if she sees young people wearing trench coats.

When she saw news of other mass shootings she adopted a coping mechanism of suppressing her feelings. The mechanism worked for 18 years until Stephen Paddock opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel on a country music festival on the Las Vegas strip with a modified semi-automatic rifle, killing killing 59 and wounding over 400.

Hours after the Las Vegas shooting happened smartphone footage was being broadcast around the world showing visceral scenes of the carnage.

Ms Hochhalter said: “The metaphor I use for all of us involved at Columbine is we shoved our emotions in a suitcase. With Las Vegas it was like ‘I will do my usual coping mechanism again and shove it in the suitcase’. But the locks broke and everything popped out.

“It was the vantage point, the shooter was up high and with Columbine they were up high. It was the screams and the sounds”.

Ms Hochhalter wasn’t the only Columbine survivor to be affected badly by Las Vegas, she said it caused a number to have breakdowns and seek counselling.

She says Las Vegas was the starting point of her resuming professional help and really starting to deal with the trauma of the shooting.

Parkland

A week has passed since 17 people were killed and 14 seriously wounded in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

The quiet Floridan suburb of Parkland remains a focus of national and international attention as the political fallout over gun control continues.

But Parkland will still be dealing with the events of last week long after tragedy has ceased to dominate the headlines.

Ms Hochhalter said: “Now it seems that these shootings are becoming more common. People around the world will forget in two weeks and the people of Parkland will be left to pick up the pieces. It will be difficult and they will think ‘why have people stopped caring?’

“But not the people of Columbine. We will always be there, even when the whole world has moved on.”

She urged the teenagers now just starting to process the trauma they experienced that day not to take the same approach she and other Columbine survivors did.

“I would say to them don’t go through this alone,” said Ms Hochhalter. “It is going to be a rough road but it is imperative that you have a strong support network with friends and family.

“My advice would be don’t do what we did and shove it deep down. Don’t delay with counselling.”