It's Been Said....

It's been 20+ years now since the school massacre known as 'Columbine'. It is very difficult, even now, to revisit a lot of what happened that day, although I still get asked that question more times than I care to remember. The emotions surrounding the events of that day can be, and sometimes still are, visceral, palpable, raw. They'll likely remain that way for as long as I live. I reference 'events' of the day in the plural form because the massacre was not a single event. April 20, 1999 did not begin, nor did it end, with the onset and cessation of this violent conflagration. Not even close! Even after the last explosive devices were detonated and the last shots were fired, the 'events' of the day continued and multiplied for everyone involved in this incident...families of those who were murdered, families of those who were injured, families of those who were there that day and survived with no outward physical injuries, the Columbine Com...

Three years ago I was asked a series of questions by a high school student from Medellin, Columbia. One of those questions was "How Can People With Suicidal/Homicidal Ideation Be Helped". Because September is  National Suicide Prevention Month , I decided to reprise the blog post I wrote then in response to her question with some revisions/updates. Disclaimer: To be very clear right from the get go on this blog post..... I am NOT a medical professional, nor do I claim to have any medical training in the areas of mental illness and criminology. I'm not a doctor, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a therapist, a social worker, or any other member of the medical community anyone can conjure up. I'm not a member of law enforcement of any kind, either. I am merely someone in the lay community having a modicum of personal experience as a direct result of the near homicide of two of my children and the successful act of suicide of my first wife, Carla. As such, what ...

Emergency management....what the heck is it and why should anyone care? I don't know how many times when people ask me what I do and I tell them I'm an emergency management specialist, they look at me like what planet are you from? Well, in the interest of full transparency, I'm a retired emergency management specialist, but I still get that same look no matter how I couch it. For those who've never really thought about or heard of emergency management it's nothing more, really, than managing emergencies...or trying to as it were. On a broad societal scale, the definition in the graphic above applies and it takes someone with a certain skill-set to be able to 'game the system' in order to make it work. On an individual level, though, we've all done it, and we're all gonna continue to do it....especially if we have accident prone kids or we're responsible for accident prone adults like me. We manage cuts, bruises, scratches, broken bo...

Columbine Memorial Clement Park, Littleton, CO Image From Wikimedia Commons Awhile back, a high school student from Medellin, Columbia asked me a series of questions about 'Columbine' as part of a project she was doing in her English class. What follows is my answer to Question #4 in the Series: Would You Forgive the Shooters? Oh, I don't know.... What time of day is it? What day of the week is it? What month of the year is it? Who am I with, and what are we discussing? Am I 'required' to forgive the shooters? Will forgiving the shooters make me a happy person? Will my forgiving the shooters make a difference in anyone's life, much less my own? I mean, they're dead, right? Seems like the more I tried to come up with an answer to the original question, the more confused, frustrated, and emotional I became. Truth is, English is a very strange language....very strange, indeed. In its proper context, the original question sounds a...

Columbine Impromptu Memorial Clement Park PennLive.com Screen Capture YouTube Video The Columbine High School shooting, April 20, 1999 A few years ago I participated in a four part interview for a website titled It Can Happen Here (ICHH) . ICHH formed not too long after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. Its primary focus was on promoting school safety. Unfortunately the site is no longer active. Because it is no longer active, I thought it might be ok to amend, update, and reboot a newer version of my interviews in that series. This post is the first. The other three interviews will follow at later dates. ================================================================== ICHH : Your daughter, Anne Marie, was shot and severely injured at Columbine April 20, 1999 and your son, Nathan, was in a science room for four hours that day but was physically unharmed. How are you and your family doing these many years later? Ted Zocco-Hochhalter :...

March For Our Lives WIKIMEDIA COMMONS What if, indeed? What if students did become more powerful than the politicians? Back in 2015, I posted a comment in a local message board here in Colorado ( School Safety: To Plan or Not to Plan ) about a meeting I had with a group of Denver East High School students. The topic for discussion was 'campus carry'. Here's the post: Yesterday, March 25, 2015 I had the pleasure of meeting with a group of high school students from East High School in Denver, CO. This is an activist group that has a range of things on their agenda that they hope to address over time. The subject of this particular discussion was "gun violence".  I must admit I was a little apprehensive going in as to what to expect. After all, it's been over 30 years since I last set foot in a classroom at that level and in a "teaching" capacity (although I wasn't there to teach, but, rather, to discuss with them), and I'm not ...

Whitney Cornett is my niece and the daughter of my youngest sister, Belva Palmer, who shared her memories of Columbine in a previous post.  The following narrative recounts Whitney's memories of the Columbine massacre that took place when she was in fifth grade. When she was a junior at Columbine High School, she wrote the following essay as part of a journaling class she was in.  She indicated to me this was spur of the moment, and the topic was of a memory of something that really affected her growing up. "Good, bad, ugly, fun. Whatever came to mind." She chose her memories of Columbine as her topic. I'm glad she did. Some of the details she relates have changed since she wrote this, but her 'story' is the only thing that matters here, and her story is powerful. Every time I read this I have to sit back, collect my emotions, and take a deep breath before going on because Whitney was only eleven years old when the shootings at Columbine High ...