25 years after Columbine, trauma shadows survivors of the school shooting
LA TimesA rose is placed at the plaque for Corey DePooter, one of the 12 student victims in the massacre at Columbine High School 25 years ago, at the Columbine Memorial, in Littleton, Colo., on Wednesday. Hours after she escaped the Columbine High School shooting, 14-year-old Missy Mendo slept between her parents in bed, still wearing the shoes she had on when she fled her math class. In the quarter-century since two gunmen at Columbine shot and killed 12 fellow students and a teacher in suburban Denver — an attack that played out on live television and ushered in the modern era of school shootings — the traumas of that day have continued to shadow Mendo and others who were there. “Just counting lives lost is kind of an incorrect way to capture the full cost of these tragedies,” said Maya Rossin-Slater, an associate professor in the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Department of Health Policy. By 2005, after years of not taking care of himself and suffering from a lack of sleep, Leyba said he would often check out from family life, sleeping in on the weekends and turning into a “blob on the couch.” Finally, his wife, Kallie, enrolled him in a one-week trauma treatment program, arranging for him to take the time off from work without telling him.