Life after Columbine

For Brooks Brown, however, a senior at Columbine on that day and a friend of the gunmen, the shootings were an indictment of the school's culture of bullying. He has since written a book "No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine," to try to explain how the authorities missed signs that Dylan and Eric were planning a massacre.

On the day of the shootings, he was leaving school to smoke a cigarette and passed Eric Harris in the parking lot. Brown had been a close friend of both Klebold and Harris and says he knew about the extraordinary isolation and alienation Dylan and Eric felt. About a year before the shootings, Brown and Eric had a falling out but then reconciled.

Brown was not harmed in the attacks. His connection to the shooters, though, later earned him death threats from other students, and school officials asked him not to return when classes resumed.

He finished his senior year on his own.

In the past, Brown has spoken out publicly about bullying and bullying prevention. He calls Columbine "the largest learning experience anyone can have."

He is convinced that Dylan and Eric weren't monsters, or if they were, then "they were made by that school." He claims that a culture of constant bullying and verbal intimidation existed at Columbine, and that, combined with the boys' personalities and Harris's mental instability, created the lethal mix that led to the massacre.

But today Brown says he's done speaking about bullying. He wants to put Columbine behind him and focus on a career in filmmaking.

Like other students who were at Columbine that day, Michael Johnson agrees the experience shaped him, but battles against allowing it to define him. He recognizes, however, that it's hard to escape the notoriety entirely.

"If people ask, I'll tell them," Johnson says, "but I like for them to get to know me first."

Johnson and his family are members of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints. He, along with two other LDS students from Columbine wrote about their experiences in a recently released book, "Surviving Columbine," which emphasizes the role of religious faith in helping them recover.

The reputation of their school, however, remains a concern for some of the students who feel the media offered a distorted image of the school and the town that they knew.

"I never saw any bullying problems," Salmon says. "I'm sure it was there, but I never had any problems. And it wasn't really a violent school. The lines between jocks and different cliques were not as heavy as the media makes it out to be."

But the storm created by the media attention continued to hang over the town, and its return to normalcy was perhaps delayed by further tragedies. In the years following the shootings, two Columbine sophomores were murdered at a Subway sandwich shop, and the mother of one of paralyzed survivors, Anne Marie Hochhalter, committed suicide.

But in some ways, insist the Columbine survivors, there is a positive legacy they carry with them today. They have a perspective on life - and perhaps a passion for it - they could not otherwise have achieved.

Salmon agrees that she was deprived of a "normal" high school experience. "That happened when I was a freshman in high school so my whole high school experience was pretty abnormal."

But today she says she realizes that "Columbine influenced me to make something of my life, and [to] enjoy my life," because she learned she says, "how easily it could be taken away."

Kwerneland says she felt her brother expressed it well when they recently spoke of Columbine.

He told her, "We have witnessed the good and the bad of things. We're different people for what we have seen. That doesn't make us bad and that doesn't make us good. It just makes us different."

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