Remembering The Horror Of The Columbine Shooting 20 Years On

Littleton, United States, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 18th Apr, 2019 ) :One of them saw the killers, while the other just heard the gun shots, one after another, that killed 13 people at Columbine High School and wounded more than 20 others.

Twenty years after that massacre of 12 students and one teacher in Colorado, two survivor have yet to heal their wounds, and these gashes rip open again every time there is another mass shooting in America.

Amanda Duran, who was 15 at the time, told AFP that subsequent mass killings, like the one in Las Vegas in 2017 at a country music festival and the school shooting in Parkland, Florida last year, "really get me freaked out." "I spent 19 years before that just being sad and broken-hearted, but now it has just turned to angry," said Duran. "I started to get angry because it's like nothing has changed at all." Duran recalls that nightmarish day of April 20, 1999 vividly. She had an appointment with a school counselor because she was having personal problems at school.

She was in the library, waiting for her meeting, when she started hearing "popping noises." Then two heavily armed students burst into the library.

They were Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, whom she did not know.

She scrambled under a table to seek shelter.

"I hear this 'boom' right next to me, when they'd shot the girl next to me," she remembers.

"I went deaf at that point and I thought for sure that I was going to be next." "So I curled up really, really tight, put my arms above me like this and just kinda held my breath, braced myself to get shot in the ribs. Just waited, waited." At about the same time, Alisha Basore, 17, was walking to her art class. The blasts from the guns sent students scrambling. Coincidentally, Basore had suffered a gunshot wound in an accident four months earlier, so she had trouble running but managed to get away.

"I don't have any bullets whizzing past my face or somebody holding a gun to my face, nothing like that," Basore recalled.

"But, unfortunately for me, that doesn't stop the trauma or what was to come over the next few weeks, years, the funerals, the finding out your friends were killed, finding out somebody you just spoke to yesterday was one of the victims, you know."