Reflections: April 20, 2009: Columbine, 10 years Later (Part 6)

Daniel Rohrbough (Continued)

I interviewed Daniels's mother, Sue Petrone, and his step-father, Rich Petrone, at their home in Littleton. We spoke for about 3 hours. They were very gracious. Daniel was shot and killed on the sidewalk, outside the cafeteria outside at Columbine High School. He and Rachel Scott were the first two students killed on April 20, 1999. Sue and Rich have a beautiful garden behind their house. At their request, the school cleaned the piece of sidewalk on which Daniel died, and they brought it over to their house and set it up in the garden for them. Sue told me that there was a swing that Daniel had love to sit on in their yard. So, she and Rich had it suspended above the sidewalk. After our interview, she took me outside to see the swing and the sidewalk. It's her special place that gives her peace and makes her feel connected to her lost son.

That was one of the most moving moments in all of my interview experiences. I'll never forget it. Sue tells the story of the swing in "A Line in the Sand".

Here is an excerpt of my interview with Sue and Rich:

Sue: Yeah, that's a hard thing to deal with. That's the one thing that I'm having a hard time dealing with. It's just that they left them there so long. You know, you're talking about our kids. Yeah, you couldn't go to them, and Danny was outside, so...

Rich: Yeah, him and Rachel were outside for, geez, over 24 hours.

Sue: They were probably dead by 11:30 on the 20th. Yeah, they were the first to die. Danny and Rachel were the first two that were shot...

Rich: The way the investigators told it.

Sue: Yeah, the way the investigators told us, Danny and Rachel were the first two that died. We don't know which one of them died first. We think it might have been Rachel, but I'm not sure, but they died before 11:30 on the 20th and they didn't take them away from the school. It was Wednesday afternoon about 2:00 or 3:00. So, they were outside over 24 hours, and it was just really hard. I mean that's the hardest thing that I still have been dealing with. It's like they just left them there, I mean, just like they were nothing. I have processed pretty much everything else, but that's the one thing left.

Rich: Well and the thought that they left Danny on the sidewalk, and every time like something was about Columbine that they showed on t.v., kids running out of the school, and they're running right by his body and you see them tripping over him or stepping over him, and you know sometimes they don't show that and it sort of depends on the footage, but it's like, you know it's not their fault.

Sue: Yeah, I mean we're not mad at the kids, it's not their fault. It's just that they should have moved them. They should have taken Danny and Rachel away because they were outside already.

Rich: They pulled the other injured kids away, so why didn't they just pull them away with the injured and then, so the kids, you know then the kids that ran by them saw them...

Sue: And they were hysterical.

Rich: They were hysterical. They saw the kids laying there, Rachel and Danny dead, so they made the kids have to see that too. One day about a month or two months later Sue read a poem that some girl wrote about running by a little boy laying on the sidewalk with his blue eyes looking up at the sky. Remember that?

Sue: Yeah, well his face was kind of blue.

Rich:It was really like, I mean it just caught us off guard.

Sue: It was in the newspaper.

Rich: Yeah.

Sue: It was like oh God...

Rich: She's describing Danny.

Sue: Danny, yeah, and it's like that's the one thing, it's like he went to school that morning so full of life and ambition and hope and dreams, you know just like everybody else has, and then the next time we finally got to see him was Saturday afternoon like at 4:00 in his casket.

Well, I mean, they wouldn't let me see him. I mean, I wanted to go to the morgue, but they wouldn't let me see him there. They said wait until we release his body to, which is probably, from what I heard, because Lisa is a nurse, and she says you probably wouldn't have wanted to see him that way, but I still needed to. I mean, it would have been hard to process, because it's just like we tried to find him that whole day or that whole afternoon, and then we found out the next morning, when Rich saw his picture laying on the sidewalk. That was our confirmation that he was dead.

Rich:That's how we found out he was dead.

Sue: Yeah, around 4:00 that morning, we had gone over to Clement Park to go get him, and they said that we couldn't go near the school. It was like, well, but there are all kinds of media trucks in the park, but they denied us access to the same access the media had. It's like, all I wanted to do was be close, so that when word came if I could go there, that I was right there, but the sheriff's department escorted us all away. It just made me so angry that the news could be in the parking lot of the park, media from all over the world, but yet here I am, and this is my son, and there are pictures, and this is how I found out, but you're denying me the same access, because I don't have a media credential. I wrestle with that a lot. They had their reasons I guess, but I, I, I think it was uncalled for that they left the kids at that school for that long, really.