Leob81 was asking about this guy:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]Here he is:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]He and his mother were interviewed on
Nightline the day after the massacre.
ANNOUNCER: April 21, 1999.
1st RELIGIOUS LEADER: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.
TED KOPPEL, ABC News: (voice-over) As a community in shock struggles to make sense of the senseless...
Long hair
1st COUNSELOR: People who've been through something like this really need to talk about it.
COURTNEY PULLEN (ph): What something like this does is it turns your world view upside down.
TED KOPPEL: (voice-over) What are we supposed to tell our children?
DERRICK HARTMAN (ph): Our schools are supposed to be a safe place and their worst nightmare came true yesterday.
TED KOPPEL: (voice-over) And what can we tell ourselves? Tonight, Littleton, Colorado -- the day after.
ANNOUNCER: From ABC News, this is Nightline. Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.
TED KOPPEL: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were only 18 and 17 years old, but they were ruthless and efficient killers. It is a measure of how much thought they must have given their assault on Columbine High School yesterday that it was late today before authorities finally felt confident enough to remove the victims' bodies from where they lay. Harris and Klebold had shot themselves in the head and it was first believed that they'd booby trapped their own bodies. They were found lying on bombs but these had no triggering mechanisms.
They had brought incendiary devices, pipe bombs and bombs attached to timing mechanisms to the school. One of those homemade time bombs blew up late yesterday, more than 10 hours after the shooting had stopped. That one took no additional victims. Still, it put police on notice and they were painstakingly careful about searching the school building, working around the bodies of the students where they lay.
Sixteen people remain hospitalized tonight. Eleven of those are still in serious or critical condition. So on that level, at least, it's not quite as bad as we first thought yesterday. Initial reports had 25 dead, almost as many injured. There were 15 dead and 16 injured.
Now we begin assessing the other casualties -- the families left behind, the anguished friends, the other students now that the adrenaline has stopped pumping. Nightline Correspondent John Donvan has been in Littleton, Colorado since last night.
JOHN DONVAN, ABC News: (voice-over) We all know by now because we've seen it before that there is a pattern to these things and it always reads like the same sad sorry script. This was day two. Day two means some order has been restored. It means the media has settled in and television has begun to wrap the grief of ordinary people in some extraordinarily slick packages. On day two, the flowers are piling up, the prayer vigils have begun and local people who might never have known they had it in them search for something to say and find words that are actually beautiful.
1st COMMUNITY LEADER: The perpetrators were kids also. They are also our children. Perhaps they had injured souls. They were torn in some way where their hearts were longing for something.
JOHN DONVAN: (voice-over) Kids are still ready to face the cameras.
1st STUDENT: It's true, I've never seen a bigger smile on my mom's face in my life than when I got home.
JOHN DONVAN: (voice-over) And the attention from outsiders still, for some, may soften the pain.
1st PARENT: And even though my sons got, still has a bullet in him and he's, he's in the hospital and he's in critical, I still feel fortunate and some people weren't as fortunate.
JOHN DONVAN: At this point tonight we are days away from all of the funerals, months away from the monument that undoubtedly will be erected at or near the high school and probably years away from the healing that this week everyone will be talking about.
COURTNEY PULLEN: The first stage is going to be kind of a sense of shock and denial. And then it's going to be a roller coaster effect. You'll be in shock and denial one minute and then angry the next minute and then tears and sadness and depression. You're going to have difficulty sleeping, possibly, difficulty eating, difficulty even making sense of life.
JOHN DONVAN: (voice-over) Courtney Pullen is one of several counselors who have volunteered to help talk this community through the next several days and weeks. This was at a local theater in the lobby where the counselors were congregating. We were asked not to tape any of the counseling sessions in the main hall, which was easy because no one showed up while we were there. The food was untouched. Some kids we spoke with today said they don't need that sort of help.
1st COUNSELOR: Have you been to a counselor?
2nd STUDENT: I mean how do you explain to somebody to make them comfort for the loss of friends? I mean there's nothing you really can say. There's nothing that can return the loss or the void.
JOHN DONVAN: (voice-over) That is a predictable sentiment, say the counselors, and it is likely to change. Derrick Hartman is a victims' advocate.
DERRICK HARTMAN: I know there are kids right now who really don't want to talk about it and they probably don't want to talk about it tomorrow. We're expecting next week we're going to be doing a lot more work. That's when a little bit of the reality is set in, the adrenaline has left your body, you're trying to adjust to what's occurred and that's when we all need to be really available.
JOHN DONVAN: (voice-over) Hartman was there yesterday at the elementary school where parents waited to see if their kids would come alive off the buses. So was Jo McCormick, who did speak with some of the kids who were at the shooting itself and were already worrying that they should have been braver.
(interviewing) So that's going to be a concern for them, that they maybe didn't do the right thing when they were in there?
JO McCORMICK: Oh, they're already stating that, you know, maybe we should have tried to stop the gunmen. These are, these are children. They shouldn't have to face this terror to begin with.
JOHN DONVAN: Does a kid necessarily have to have been there and seen it to be suffering from this?
COURTNEY PULLEN: Not at all. I think the reverberation will go out to tens of thousands of people in the Denver community.
JOHN DONVAN: (voice-over) In fact today we were allowed to listen in on a counseling session for workers at the U.S. West phone company office miles from the school, a room full of adults who did not have kids at Littleton, but who still seemed dazed, wounded and worried.
2nd COUNSELOR: They need to talk about it and process it because they're trying to understand it.
But on coping skills for stress, you want to do all the things that are healthy.
JOHN DONVAN: I would imagine that it's not just the kids who were overwhelmed by this, but the parents who the kids are looking to for guidance and what are the parents supposed to say or do?
COURTNEY PULLEN: Absolutely. I think, I would contend that parents are going to be almost as traumatized by this. I mean I know my reaction as a parent when I heard about this from my clients yesterday was I wanted to run home and grab my elementary kid schools and keep them safe and protected.
JOHN DONVAN: (voice-over) Everybody knows that talking is supposed to be good. Derrick Hartman says it is not going to be enough.
(interviewing) What should the parents of these kids be doing and saying to them?
DERRICK HARTMAN: Parents should be making sure that their kid feels safe and that is determined by the kid. It might mean that their curtains are drawn or shut for weeks to come, the TV is always on, the radio is always on. Maybe the kids want to have the locks changed. Those things are real important to address right now.
JOHN DONVAN: They're very small things but they're...
DERRICK HARTMAN: Very small things but they're incredibly important.
JOHN DONVAN: (voice-over) And the harsh reality, says victim Randy Sausito (ph), is that in a way you don't ever really put it all behind you. He knows that because at the age of 14 he saw his mother murdered and he himself was shot in a domestic crime.
RANDY SAUSITO: There are those families that I have dealt with personally in my own jurisdiction that I've actually had to tell them when they've asked me, Randy, will this ever heal? And I tell them sometimes it never will. Sometimes you have to, you know, just, you know, have the demons inside of you.
JOHN DONVAN: Do you still have the demons inside you?
RANDY SAUSITO: Yes. I mean there are those, there are those nights, yes, that I do wake up still in the middle of the night and yes, there are those times that I, you know, see this person walking towards me, you know, firing at me and firing at my family.
JOHN DONVAN: (voice-over) Tonight, Littleton continues to follow the script. Tonight, the candles came out. Tonight, the relatives of one of the suspected shooters issued a statement of overwhelming sorrow. Tonight, the hymn they chose was "Amazing Grace."
1st RELIGIOUS LEADER: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound...
JOHN DONVAN: Except it is not a script. What's happening here is not a movie. No matter how many times America chooses to replay these scenes, they are real, all too real each and every time.
I'm John Donvan for Nightline in Littleton, Colorado.
TED KOPPEL: When we come back an 18-year-old eyewitness who was part of that scene, his mother, who is a clinical psychologist, and researcher who studies children and violence.
(Commercial Break)
TED KOPPEL: Joining us now live from our bureau in Denver, Adam Dressel is a senior at Columbine High School. He witnessed yesterday's events. He is with his mother, Susan, a clinical psychologist who has a private practice near Littleton, Colorado. James Garbarino is a professor of human development at Cornell University and the author of Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them. He joins us from Ithaca in New York.
Adam, I'd like to begin with you and I'd like to turn your attention back to something that was just in John Donvan's report, one of the young people, one of your classmates saying, in effect, I really don't need to talk to any counselors. I don't want to talk to any counselors. I don't see any particular point in talking to a counselor right now. Can you relate to that?
ADAM DRESSEL, Columbine High School Student: (Denver) Yeah, I haven't really, I mean I haven't noticed any of my friends, you know, most of them I know are OK and I haven't really felt all the effects of what's going on. I mean, I still just can't believe it.
TED KOPPEL: How close to it were you? Were you an eyewitness or an ear witness or what?
ADAM DRESSEL: I was, I could definitely hear it. I was in my physics classroom at the time, which is right next to the main hallway. And all of a sudden we heard a bunch of people screaming and running down the hall. Shortly after we heard a loud explosion or gunshot and started trying to get out at that point and later on we heard another one and they were probably some of the pipe bombs or something like that.
TED KOPPEL: Was there anyone among either the victims or among the two shooters whom you knew or knew particularly well?
ADAM DRESSEL: I haven't heard of who the victims were yet. The shooters I knew of them. I never really talked to them all that much. I had friends who were their friends but that was about the closest I got to them.
TED KOPPEL: Susan Dressel, in a sense I think your son is probably quite typical in his reaction at the moment and it is a little bit like the reaction that we heard in John Donvan's piece of young men in particular, I don't know whether young women are different in that regard, saying ah, I'll be all right. I'll be just fine. Are they right?
SUSAN DRESSEL, Clinical Psychologist: (Denver) I think for young men it's a little more difficult to admit that it's important to talk and share feelings. But I also noticed that my son did a lot of talking to his friends in the last couple days. We've talked. He's talked with his dad and his brother. I don't think he, I mean to me that's all therapeutic. There's a lot of work going on and healing with young people sharing the stories of what happened to each other and sharing a lot of support and caring for each other.
TED KOPPEL: Maybe I'm being a little too formal in, in talking about healing and therapy. You know, I mean on the one hand it's perfectly natural that people who have been through a traumatic experience would want to talk about it, especially with one another if it's been a shared experience. I'm talking about a level of therapy and healing that may be a little more formal than that. Do you think that is going to be necessary? Or is it on only necessary for those who request it?
SUSAN DRESSEL: I, well, it's hard to make someone go to therapy that doesn't want to. I think what we're going to find is that after the, you know, the days pass by that I think at that point the children, the students who witnessed the more grizzly experiences, saw people shot, those are experiences that will haunt them for years. I mean my experience with little children is, is very much the same thing. They flash back. They associate sounds and visions with what happened in the past and it's not something that goes away easily.
TED KOPPEL: Dr. Garbarino, you and I first met on a plane flying into Kuwait just after Desert Storm and it's when Kuwait was first liberated after the war and you were going in to deal with young children who had suffered great traumatic stress. You've done that in a number of places, I know. How similar is a war time situation like that to a single event like the one that we, that we just witnessed in Littleton, Colorado yesterday?
JAMES GARBARINO, Cornell University: (Ithaca, New York) Well, there's some superficial similarities, of course, because there's the horror, there's the blood, there's the carnage. But, you know, war typically takes place with a sense of meaningfulness. There's an enemy, there's your allies and that helps people make sense of it in the long run. The problem for many people here is finding the sense in it. And, in fact, I think that's a good place to start because remember, the boys who commit these kind of outrages don't think they're doing something bad. They think of themselves as doing something good. They're righteous in their, in their anger and their violence and...
TED KOPPEL: How do you know that? I mean how do you know what they thought? How do you know what they felt? How do you know they didn't think they were doing something bad and did it quite deliberately?
JAMES GARBARINO: Well, you know, from talking with quite a few boys in prison for committing murders, for committing acts of really extreme and horrific violence, at the time, like most people who commit violence, whether they're soldiers or terrorists or, or murderous kids, they think they're dealing revenge to those who've hurt them. They think that they're, they're providing some kind of a pay back to people who've humiliated them. So I think that's an important place to start if we're going to really deal with this in the future. Almost everybody who commits a severe act of violence thinks they're doing it for legitimate reasons.
TED KOPPEL: Folks, we've got to take a short break. When we come back, I'd like to get into short-term consequences, long-term consequences and how you deal with each. We'll be back with more in a moment.
(Commercial Break)
TED KOPPEL: And we're back live with Susan Dressel and her son Adam from Denver and Professor James Garbarino from Cornell University.
Professor Garbarino, I'm not sure to what extent we have simply developed a greater sensitivity over the years or whether what we've developed is sort of a post-traumatic syndrome industry. What do you think?
JAMES GARBARINO: Well, you know, when we made that trip to Kuwait it was pretty clear from the interviews I did with kids then that they had experienced this kind of widespread trauma and there was a real resistance there and then to doing the kind of mental health services that are being provided. A year later when I went back they were really seeing the folly of that omission and I think it's really important that we recognize that this is costly to kids and if we don't deal with the costs and give them an opportunity, it gets worse rather than better in the long run.
TED KOPPEL: Very quickly, very quickly, tell me how you were able to, how were you able to quantify that folly when you went back to Kuwait?
JAMES GARBARINO: Well, a year later at the anniversary of the, of the liberation of Kuwait they were reporting higher levels of problems than they had been seeing in the first few days and weeks because they didn't do the kind of psychological first aid that's being done in Colorado now. And of course, you know, in the long run a lot of the kids who commit the most violent acts, maybe not these boys, but a lot of the boys have traumatic unresolved events in their history and it's important for everybody's future safety to really deal with these now as best we can.
TED KOPPEL: Adam Dressel, I know that there is some concern among kids about going back -- and I gather the fire alarm is going off there in the studio again so if you need to you get up and you leave -- but I gather there's some concern about reopening Columbine High School. Let me just ask you, would you have any problems about going back there, obviously not this week, but if they opened it a few days from now, next week?
ADAM DRESSEL: Well, personally I don't think right now I'd have any problems with it. It would be nice to be able to see all my classmates again and make sure my friends are OK because most of them I don't know their telephone numbers. But I don't really want to go in there and see a bunch of broken up walls or explosion marks or anything. I can understand...
TED KOPPEL: Ms. Dressel, do you think it would be a bad idea for the youngsters to go back to the school? I mean even they clean up the debris, they paint the, they paint the walls, they fix the windows, whatever it is that needs to be done to make it the way it was before, is it still a bad place to go back to?
SUSAN DRESSEL: I think for a number of the students it's going to be very difficult to go back. I've talked to a few of them today and yesterday and a lot of them were expressing concern about going back and what that's going to feel like and were they going to have to go back. I think the issue is partly what's going to help make them feel safe. But I do think they're going to need to come together and deal with this as a community of students because they need to start looking at what they might be able to do to make something better to counteract this in the future.
TED KOPPEL: One more quick question to you and then I'll feel better if you and Adam get out of there and let's make sure there's, let's make sure there's nothing going on in the studio there. What's most important here, short-term, medium-term, long-term or all put together?
SUSAN DRESSEL: Well, I think for some students it's going to be all put together. There are some who are not going to be that affected by this. They didn't see much, their friends weren't particularly affected but so many of the students have someone who was hurt and injured and their world view is now changed. It's, it's changed forever. They will never feel as safe as they did before this happened.
TED KOPPEL: Dr. Garbarino, we've only got a few seconds left. Give the parents watching a few tips as to what they should be on the alert for. In other words, as they watch their youngsters, anything they need to watch for.
JAMES GARBARINO: Well, I think in general you have to understand that kids who are troubled for some other reason will piggyback whatever bad things happen in the larger world to them. So that's as true in Kuwait as it is in Colorado and of course it's true of the boys who commit these acts, that they're vulnerable, sad boys and they take on the weight of the culture and they're attracted to the dark side in our culture and it's always these vulnerable boys who show us the worst that can happen in any of these situations.
TED KOPPEL: And that's where we're going to have to leave it. Dr. Garbarino, Susan Dressel, Adam, thank you very much for joining us.
I'll be back with a program note about a special edition of Nightline tomorrow night.
(Commercial Break)
TED KOPPEL: We hope you'll join us tomorrow for an extraordinary town meeting. As the nation tries to come to grips with the tragedy of Littleton, we turn to people who've been through the same experience. That's Jonesboro, Arkansas: Lessons Learned, a special edition of Nightline beginning at 10:00 P.M. Eastern and simulcast on abcnews.com.
That's our report for tonight. Good night.
Subject: Tie-dye guy 
Thu Jul 30, 2015 4:15 am
Thanks for posting that. I did wonder about that guy because he reminded me of my own awkward early college days (before I made some friends) more than I tend to admit, with how he didn't really seem to be with anyone and the left hand side of him was noticeably barren of people, unusual for such a crowded photo. Good to read (at least from that) that he had friends.