Columbine survivor Anne Marie Hochhalter always had time for others struck by tragedy

History records that 13 people had their lives stolen in the Columbine school massacre, but only if you stop the clock that day.

Celine Dion, second from right, with Columbine High School students, from left, Beth Ratay, Anne Marie Hochhalter and Kim Chlumsky, six months after the massacre. Picture: The Denver Post

It would be healing to think that an abiding memorial to the notorious deaths at Columbine High School in Colorado was a reduction in gun ownership across the US.

On April 20, 1999, when Columbine students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 – a dozen students and a teacher – there were about 259 million guns in the US. By 2007 there were 310 million. By 2018 there were estimated to be 393 million. Now there are thought to be more than 500 million firearms held by US citizens – about 1.5 per man, woman and child.

The teenage killers ensured that Columbine became a byword for American school shootings.

And, inconceivable though it was then, other young Americans have modelled themselves on Harris and Klebold, citing them as the inspiration for other mass shootings and sometimes even dressing like them while murdering fellow students.

In December 2024, Natalie Rupnow, 15, who went by the name Samantha, arrived at her school in Madison, Wisconsin, and shot eight people, two of whom died, before turning the gun on herself. She was born a decade after Columbine but had been photographed in an identical T-shirt to one Harris had worn bearing the emblem of German industrial band Kein Mehrheit Fur Die Mitleid (which translates roughly into “No pity for the majority”). This is known in the US as “the Columbine effect”. History records that 13 people had their lives stolen by Harris and Klebold. But only if you stop the clock that day.

The latest victim was Anne Marie Hochhalter, who was found dead at home on February 16, reportedly dying from complications of paraplegia.

Her “classmate” Harris – she barely knew him – had shot her twice that day in 1999. She was eating lunch with friends outside the school building and heard shots but thought them some misguided prank. Then two bullets sliced through her chest, one severing her spinal chord, and penetrating her lungs and liver. She couldn’t move; Harris focused on his next target, probably assuming he had killed her.

He almost had. Immobilised, she watched as her own blood congealed in the heat on the concrete around her. At the time she was a shy, introverted girl who loved playing clarinet in Columbine’s marching band and hung out with the other young musicians. But as a survivor of what was then the deadliest school massacre in the US, she reluctantly evolved into a public face of gun control.

She returned to Columbine in a wheelchair, completed her education and moved into a house remodelled to help her mobility.

Tragedy soon struck again: her mother, always mentally fragile, and now challenged by her daughter’s paralysis, went to a pawn shop, asked to see a handgun, placed in it a bullet she had brought along, and shot herself.

Thereafter her father decided to move what was left of the family – he, Anne Marie and her brother, who still attended Columbine – to a remote home in the mountains, an hour away from friends and familiar streets.

“The time I spent living in the mountains was one of my darkest hours. I say this to give others hope that it’s possible to rebound from such a dark place, but I contemplated suicide in the mountains,” she told US News and World Report on the 10th anniversary of the Columbine massacre.

“I was no longer able to attend school and I was not working. I sat around watching TV all day, and it was awful, but I realise now that I had to go down before I could go back up.”

Using the modest funds victims received from an insurance payout from the shooters’ parents she bought a townhouse and started physiotherapy and completed a business degree. She had formed a strong bond with Sue Townsend, whose stepdaughter Lauren was killed at Columbine, and Townsend would drive the younger woman to appointments.

They shared family dinners together and even holidays, most recently to Hawaii where, floating in a lagoon, Hochhalter was pain free for the first time in 25 years.

When Klebold’s mother wrote a book, A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (all profits from which went to mental health charities), Hochhalter wrote to her with forgiveness.

Hochhalter often counselled other disabled people and those who had been devastated by other mass shootings, including the families of the 13 killed in the cinema massacre at Aurora, Colorado, just 30km away.

She and Townsend agreed that the full lives they now led were born from the losses of 1999. She would say: “It does get better. But it never goes away.”

Anne Marie Hochhalter. Anti-gun violence campaigner. Born Bismarck, North Dakota, December 19, 1981; died Westminster, Colorado, February 16, aged 43.