Paralyzed Columbine survivor’s death ruled a homicide 26 years after school massacre
The Columbine killers have claimed another victim.
Nearly 26 years after two troubled Colorado teenagers barged into Columbine High School and opened fire, killing a dozen classmates and a teacher, one of the students left wounded by their barrage of bullets has died from the injuries she sustained on that April 20, 1999, the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office reported.
Anne Marie Hochhalter, 43, died of sepsis on Feb. 16 and the two gunshot wounds that left her paralyzed were a “significant contributing factor” in her death, Dr. Dawn B. Holmes, a forensic pathologist, wrote in a 13-page report released March 1.
“The manner of death is best classified as homicide,” Holmes wrote.
With Hochhalter’s passing, the death toll now stands at 14. That total does not include the shooters, Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18, who killed themselves before police could arrest them.
Hochhalter, then a 17-year-old junior, was eating lunch with friends when she was shot in the chest and back, suffering wounds that left her paralyzed from the waist down and in chronic pain for the rest of her life.
Six months later, Hochhalter suffered another loss from which she never completely recovered when her mother, Carla June Hochhalter, who had been struggling with depression, walked into a pawnshop and killed herself with a loaded gun that she had been inspecting.
Leaning on her faith and on friendships forged in the wake of Columbine, Hochhalter devoted her life to supporting other victims of mass shootings.
“She was fiercely independent,” Sue Townsend, stepmother of Columbine shooting victim Lauren Townsend told The Denver Post last month. “She was a fighter. She’d get knocked down — she struggled a lot with health issues that stemmed from the shooting — but I’d watch her pull herself back up. She was her best advocate and an advocate for others who weren’t as strong in the disability community.”
In 2016, Hochhalter found it in her heart to reach out with forgiveness to Klebold’s mother, Sue Klebold, after she published a memoir about raising a mass killer called “A Mother’s Reckoning.”
“Just as I wouldn’t want to be judged by the sins of my family members, I hold you in that same regard,” Hochhalter wrote. “It’s been a rough road for me, with many medical issues because of my spinal cord injury and intense nerve pain, but I choose not to be bitter towards you.”
The mass killing at Columbine put a previously obscure Denver suburb called Littleton on the nation’s radar, and images of heavily armed SWAT teams descending on the school and the sight of students filing out with their hands up were burned into the national consciousness.
“Columbine played out on TV,” Bruce Beck, who was Lauren Townsend’s stepfather, told NBC News in 2019 on the 20th anniversary of the massacre. “No previous school shooting had done that. There was the unknown of where the shooters were during the entire time that it was being filmed, so I think people connected with Columbine more.”
The others killed at Columbine that day were teacher William “Dave” Sanders, 47, and students Cassie Bernall, 17, Steve Curnow, 14, Corey DePooter, 17, Kelly Fleming, 16, Matt Kechter, 16, Daniel Mauser, 15, Daniel Rohrbough, 15, Rachel Scott, 17, Isaiah Shoels, 18, John Tomlin, 16, and Kyle Velasquez, 16.
Sadly, the Columbine massacre also set a tragic template for the school shootings that followed.
The Washington Post, using law enforcement reports, news articles and various databases, has calculated that as of Thursday, more than 394,000 students “have experienced gun violence at school” since Columbine.
