Eight years ago, she was a freshman at Columbine High School in Colorado when two classmates, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, came in armed to the teeth and bent on murder.
She was in the cafeteria, the epicenter of the attack, but was one of the lucky ones who managed to escape the building even before the first calls went out to police. Twelve students died in that assault.
And now, on Monday morning, it was happening again. Rohde wasn’t in the direct line of fire, but she knew that a gunman was on the prowl, and she found herself experiencing the same emotions as she had in 1999.
“It was a lot of the same reactions. ‘What’s going on? Who’s hurt? Where do we go?’ — the same kind of questions that we asked ourselves” at Columbine, she said.
Oddly, she didn’t immediately connect the two experiences. “For some reason, I didn’t really go back to that day eight years ago until quite a bit later,” she said.
i resemble that cat