as much as i dont want to say this i do believe it is true the police that day were absolutley useless they did absolutly nothing to save the children inside of that high school i live in colorado i was pretty young when this happened but looking back at all of the news footage and other videos related to this incident i feel like many peoples lives could have been saved if the police would have grown a pair and tried to actualy do something other than let the kids die.
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Faith, Fear and the Wages of Columbine
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Kirsten, 65, arrived in Littleton as a Denver Seminary student in 1974. He was asked to start a nondenominational evangelical church in the 1980s, just as the megachurch movement was beginning to take off. Today, West Bowles is a soaring modern building facing the Rocky Mountains where ministers preach a fundamentalist Christianity. "We rely heavily on scripture," says Kirsten, "and on the premise that Christ is the ultimate forgiver, the ultimate lover, and that only through him can we know the Lord."
The story of Cassie's martyrdom instantly became legend at West Bowles. In youth-group meetings, kids mourned that they could not be in heaven with her, says Craig Nason, who was a friend of Cassie's and is now the West Bowles young-adult pastor. According to Kirsten, the church's youth pastor at the time approached the Bernalls about writing a book on Cassie's life, her descent into sin and her acceptance of Jesus. "She Said Yes" became an instant bestseller.
As the months passed, new evidence began to show that it had not, in fact, been Cassie who "said yes." Another girl, sitting under another library table, had said she believed in God when prompted by Klebold, who let her live, according to Dave Cullen's new book "Columbine." Brian Rohrbough, whose son, Danny, was among the first to die that day, continues to believe that propagating the Cassie legend despite contradictory evidence exploits the grief of all the families in Littleton. "Cassie Bernall deserved to have a book written about her, but if there was reason to believe that it wasn't truthful, then it's a disservice to her memory and to the community."
But at West Bowles, the Cassie legend was not then—and is not now—a matter of debate. "People were missing the big point," says Kirsten. "She said yes with her life. So to have the entire credibility of it washed away, that hurt."
The further Kirsten got from the tragedy, though, the more he began to crack. He had survived a helicopter crash in Vietnam; two months later he had watched as fellow crew members aboard the USS Enterprise burned alive. "I pushed [the pain] down, and I did that again with Columbine. When you're in it and so impacted by it, you just don't think about the effect it's having on you." A buddy finally persuaded Kirsten to go to the VA hospital, where he was diagnosed as being 80 percent disabled with PTSD.
Marxhausen now lives south of Littleton in Highlands Ranch with his wife, and he ministers to a tiny, rural congregation in mountainous Idaho Springs. In 2003, Kirsten relinquished his pulpit, though he remains the senior pastor at West Bowles. Sunday attendance has declined from 2,000 in 1999 to about 1,100 today. Kirsten takes comfort in riding his Harley-Davidson motorcycle on mountain highways, and still goes to the VA hospital weekly for therapy. Marxhausen probably speaks for both men when he says the toll Columbine has taken on his life is incalculable. "I learned how fear can take hold of a community. You have to be prepared to hurt when you go into the ministry. But I never thought it would hurt that much."
© 2009
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