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Yet, not a hundred yards from the Hula-Hoop Kiss event sat a police officer, parked in the school parking lot to turn away gawkers and trespassers. I had heard some locals complain that tourists had made Columbine one of their vacation stops, just like the Rocky Mountain National Park or the Chatfield Arboretum. But I saw us more as pilgrims trying to come to terms with what happened here.

I went onto school property through a small opening in the barricade. There, under a tree, was another makeshift memorial with 13 American flags and all manner of ribbons, flowers, stuffed animals, and balloons.

"You're not supposed to be on school property," said the woman in the police cruiser, leaning out her window.

"Could I leave a note at the memorial?"

"It's not a memorial. But go ahead, and then please leave."

I scribbled a note, tucked it under a sprig of dried flowers, and returned to Clement Park.

It struck me how the people here went along as though things were normal and that the events of that school, right next to the park, were all a bad dream. What else could they do? It wouldn't help anything to declare a moratorium on Little League Baseball or weekend barbecues.

T he first clue pointing toward that "something bigger" that transpired at Columbine High School emerged during my visit with John and Doreen Tomlin, whose son John, 16, was killed in the library.

The Tomlins didn't have their family devotions on April 20, a day that unfolded in slow motion as they waited to hear news from John, a sophomore at Columbine. The first they knew something was wrong was when their son Pat, who is home-schooled, caught news on his portable television that "there was trouble at Columbine." Doreen's first instinct was to call her sister in Wisconsin and ask her to pray.

"Within 15 minutes the story just kept getting worse," she recalls. "I called my sister three times within a half an hour." Parents were told to go to the Leawood Elementary School, near the high school, to get word of the whereabouts of their children. There, lists were being posted of kids who had been accounted for, and kids were being sent there by bus.

"That was difficult in itself, because you were stuck in traffic, and sirens were going off, and there were helicopters and ambulances. It didn't seem real," says Doreen. "Cell phones were going off constantly."

"The students would pass on a stage at Leawood," she says. "We were looking for John, and he was never showing up. I was getting envious of parents finding their kids and screaming out their names. I thought, If only I could cry out John's name.

"I remember [at one point] sitting in the back of the room. There were still busloads of kids going across the stage, and I just didn't get up anymore. I had no enthusiasm to jump and look for him. I think the Lord was settling it in my heart that John was probably dead."

"When the buses stopped, things didn't look good," adds John's father, also named John. "I said, 'Doreen, if they ask us to get up and go into a different room, it's not a good sign.' Then they asked us to get up and go into a different room."

"They said there was another bus," says Doreen. "We were all clinging to that hope that one more bus would be there."

"I don't know why they did that," says John, "because there was no other bus. After we came out of that room they had us fill out descriptions of our kids."

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October 4 1999, Vol. 43, No. 11