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Sarah recognized the girl squeezed next to her in the tight, suffocating room. "I knew her from Bible club. She said, 'Let's pray together,' but there were more gunshots, so we stayed quiet."

Four hours later, the students heard a pounding on the door. "It frightened us, because we didn't know for sure who it was," Sarah says.

A voice shouted to them from the other side of the door, "This is the police. Open up." The SWAT team had finally come to rescue them.

Sarah was shocked at what she saw as she left the building. "We started walking out, and it was just amazing what had happened to the school. Every window that I saw had bullets through it—there was broken glass everywhere. In the cafeteria, there was ankle–deep water because the sprinklers had gone off. The ceiling was blackened from explosions."

As Sarah and the other students exited the building, they couldn't keep their eyes from drifting off to the side where the body of a student who had been shot and killed still lay on the sidewalk.

"That was when I realized how bad it really was," she says softly.

For five years, Sarah has had to cope with the trauma she experienced. She was particularly affected by the death of Dave Sanders, who had coached softball, basketball, and track—all sports in which Sarah participated. "He saved so many lives because he stayed and made sure everyone got out of the cafeteria," she says. "He is a hero, because he cared for the safety of his students."

What caused Harris and Klebold to act as they did? Sarah can't begin to understand the motivation, but she says with certainty, "When people don't have the Lord, evil can creep into their lives."

The years since then have been difficult. "It was hard to return to school and go back to classes where students were missing." To Sarah, Columbine felt more like a crime scene than her school. The year following the shootings was mired in even more tragedy.

"It was just an awful year," Sarah recalls. "Two students were murdered on Valentine's Day [by robbers at a fast–food restaurant], and one of our basketball players committed suicide that spring. I had thought it was over, and it would all be downhill from April 20th, but it seemed like things were getting harder. I was afraid that bad things were going to keep happening. I had nightmares, and I still have them once in a while."

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