Columbine (+ Update)

There are quite a few major events I remember, but for this writing, I’m going to focus on the first one I lived through.

I was 23 years old attending my fifth year of college and working full-time for a company called Mecon, Inc. as the project lead for the 100 Top Hospitals Project. Mecon was bought out by GE Medical Systems a few months later, but the event I’m recalling happened while under Mecon.

 The office was quiet, with just a couple of rows of cubicles. My cubicle was in the second row, right in the middle. I think there were about three other cubicles to either side of mine. The row across from me was empty, as were a few behind me. All the empty cubicles were the result of a layoff after a buyout by the previous company, HCIA. In other words, HCIA had purchased Mecon and then later changed its name to Mecon. They had let go of about half the employees just before announcing the “purchase.” [Thinking back to it, that was a cruel move.]

All that information doesn’t really have anything to do with the event itself. The point is, the office was mostly empty and quiet. This is so you can get a sense for where I was in my life at the time.

On this ordinary day, I had come to work as usual. I sat at my desk and turned on the computer to start working on the project. There was some commotion or whispers or talk going on, but I was so focused on my work that I didn’t think much of it. Then my coworker, in the cubicle next to mine, stood up and said, “Did you hear? There was a shooting at Columbine and they’re on lockdown.”

                  I looked up at her, confusion clouding my mind, and she probably saw it on my face. I had no idea what she was referring to.

                  “What’s Columbine?” I asked.

                  “The school,” she said. She always had this sweet smile on her face, and she was wearing it when she spoke.

                  “Oh,” I said. “What’s a lockdown?”

                  “It’s when they close the school to outsiders.”

                  “What kind of school is it?” I asked.

                  “High school,” she said. Yes, she was giving me bits of information. I’m not sure why. I think that’s just how we talked back then, or maybe she was allowing me to finally recognize the situation.

                  “That’s scary,” I said. It still hadn’t occurred to me how serious it was. “Where is the high school at?” I asked, not realizing that Columbine was in the same state where I lived.

                  “Littleton,” she said. “Can you believe, it’s not very far from here.”

                  I always thought Littleton was far from the Denver Tech Center (a pretty large business hub where Mecon was located), so when she said it wasn’t very far, I was a little confused.

                  “How far is it?”

                  “About twenty minutes.”

                  “Yeah, that’s pretty close,” I said, but I wasn’t feeling it. Twenty minutes to me was still pretty far.

                  “It’s all over the news,” she told me.

                  “Wow,” I said. My mind wasn’t really focused on the shooting. I was too stressed about my work project to worry about some school problem, but I was concerned for the kids. I hoped everyone was all right.

                  “It’s so sad,” she said. “Some of those kids were shot.”

                  “Oh…wow,” I said, finally realizing how tragic the situation was. “That’s really sad.”

                  Later, at the apartment I shared with my sister, I watched the news and saw all the footage. I felt numb. It was like a dream—like it didn’t really happen. It was hard to make sense of it because I had never experienced anything so horrific and so close by. After thinking about the distance, I did come to the realization that twenty minutes wasn’t really that far.

                  When my sister came home from work, we talked about it. Strangely, she said she’d had a dream about it, and it happened exactly as all the footage on the news.

                  Little did we know, this was only the beginning of all the horrendousness to come.

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Update 10/23/2025: Actually, my first memory of a historical event that I lived through (and will never forget) was the Challenger explosion on January 28, 1986. I was ten years old and in the 3rd grade. We were doing the spelling bee while watching the shuttle lift off. It was exciting, until it wasn’t. We continued with the spelling bee as the shuttle exploded into pieces. I was too young to make a lot of sense out of it, but I felt sad. It was only when I got older that I grieved the lost lives.