Part 1

It was a beautiful spring morning in Littleton, Colorado. The kind of crisp, bright April day where the Rockies stand out against the blue sky, looking like a painting. I was a sophomore, just a kid concerned with popularity and fitting in. My older sister, Rachel, was a junior. We were close, but like any siblings, we had our moments.

That morning, April 20, 1999, started with one of those moments. I was in the bathroom, obsessing over my hair, making us late for school yet again. Rachel was waiting in the car, and I knew she was annoyed. When I finally jumped in the passenger seat, she started getting onto me about my time management. I rolled my eyes, already defensive.

She was listening to some faith-based radio station she loved. I wasn’t having it. I wanted to listen to rap. I reached over and changed the station. She changed it back. We got into this stupid, petty radio station war, bickering back and forth until I finally got my way. I sat there, stewing in my teenage angst, listening to the music I wanted, ignoring her.

When we pulled up to the school, Rachel did something kind, even though I was being a jerk. Instead of making me walk from the parking lot, she pulled up to the front entrance to drop me off. I didn’t even say thank you. I was still mad about the lecture she gave me earlier.

I opened the door, stepped out, and looked back at her. I called her a name—something stupid and mean—and then I slammed the car door shut. Hard.

I watched her drive off to park. That was the last time I ever saw her face.

I walked into Columbine High School, completely unaware that the clock was ticking down on our lives. I went through my morning classes, just a normal day. Later, I headed to the library to study for a biology test. I saw my friend Matt Kechter sitting at a table, so I went over to join him.

Before I sat down, I looked out the window. The mountains looked incredible. I took a deep breath, just taking in the view. It was a moment of perfect stillness. The calm before the storm.

I sat down with Matt. A few minutes later, we heard these strange popping noises coming from outside. It was near the end of the school year, so we all looked at each other and laughed. “Seniors must be pulling a prank,” I thought. “Someone brought fireworks.”

I made eye contact with a friend on the wrestling team across the room. We were grinning, wondering what the joke was.

Then, a teacher ran into the library. She wasn’t laughing. She was frantic, her face pale with terror. She grabbed the phone to call 911 and started screaming at us.

“Get down! Everyone get under the tables! Now!”

I was confused. Was she part of the prank? But then, a student stumbled through the library doors. He was clutching his chest, his shirt soaked in red. He collapsed right near the entrance.

My stomach dropped. This wasn’t a prank.

I scrambled under the table with Matt. Another friend, Isaiah, one of the few Black students at our school, was looking for a place to hide. I called out to him, “Isaiah! Over here!” He dove under the table with us.

The popping noises got louder. They weren’t fireworks. They were g*nshots. And they were getting closer.

Suddenly, the library doors burst open. The explosions from homemade pipe bmbs shook the floor beneath us. The shoters walked in, and the atmosphere shifted from confusion to pure, paralyzed horror. They weren’t just sh*oting; they were laughing. They were having fun.

I squeezed my eyes shut, listening to their footsteps. They were treating it like a video game. I heard them peek under a table and say “Peekaboo” before pulling the trigger. They were taunting kids, mocking them for their fear.

My heart was pounding so hard against the floor I thought it would stop. I tried to be invisible. I tried to be small.

Then, they stopped at our table. They saw Isaiah.

One of the sh*oters, the one who idolized Hitler, called the other one over. They started shouting racial slurs at Isaiah. Vile, hateful words. They tried to drag him out from under the table.

Isaiah was terrified. In that moment, surrounded by hate and violence, he didn’t scream or fight. He just said one thing, his voice shaking.

“I want to see my mom.”

Those were the last words he ever spoke.

They klled Isaiah right next to me. Then they klled Matt.

I was lying there, curled up in a ball, covered in the blod of my best friends. My ears were ringing so loud I thought I was dying. I waited for my turn. I waited for the barrel of the gn to point at me. I thought about my family. I thought about that car door slamming shut this morning.

I thought about Rachel.

Part 2

I lay there for what felt like an eternity, though it was probably only minutes. My world had shrunk to the few inches of carpet in front of my face and the terrifying reality of my friends’ motionless bodies beside me. Isaiah was gone. Matt was gone. And I was covered in their blood, playing dead, praying to a God I wasn’t sure was listening that the next b*llet wouldn’t be for me.

My ears were ringing—a high-pitched, screaming whine that drowned out almost everything else. I actually thought my ears were bleeding. I thought my head had exploded. The smell of gunpowder, acrid and metallic, mixed with the copper scent of fresh blood, filled the space under the table. It choked me. Every breath I took was a shallow, terrified sip of air. I was afraid that if I breathed too loud, if my chest moved too much, they would come back.

The sh*oters continued to roam the library for a moment longer. I could feel the vibrations of their heavy boots through the floor. They were the masters of this hellscape, walking with a casual cruelty that my brain couldn’t process. They walked to the window. They exchanged fire with the police outside. The noise was deafening—the boom of the shotguns, the crack of the rifles.

And then, the room went quiet.

Well, not “quiet” in the normal sense. The fire alarms were blaring, a relentless strobe of sound. There was the low moaning of injured students, the stifled sobs of the survivors still hiding. But the heavy boots were gone. The laughter had stopped.

They had left the library.

I didn’t move. Not yet. My brain was stuck in a loop of survival instinct: Stay down. Stay hidden. Don’t die.

Unknown to me at the time, they had gone down to the cafeteria. They had planted large propane tanks there earlier that morning—b*mbs that were supposed to level the school. Those tanks were directly beneath the library floor where I was lying. If they had detonated, I would have been vaporized instantly. I was lying on top of a volcano, shivering in shock, while monsters tried to ignite it from below.

Smoke began to fill the library. It drifted in hazy gray ribbons, stinging my eyes. That was the catalyst. The fear of burning to death finally overrode the fear of being sh*t.

I was the first student to stand up in that section of the library.

It was like rising from the grave. I stood up, my legs shaking so violently they felt like jelly. I looked around, and the scene was a nightmare brought to life. The room was hazy with smoke. Tables were overturned. And everywhere… everywhere there was the cost of their “game.”

“Come on!” I yelled, my voice cracking, sounding foreign to my own ears. “Let’s get out of here!”

I didn’t know if the sh*oters were just outside the door. I didn’t know if they were reloading. I just knew we had to move.

I started toward the emergency exit, and that’s when I heard a small voice. “Help me.”

I turned around. It was a girl I knew. She was sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth. A shotgun blast had hit her shoulder. It was… it was bad. I won’t describe it, but the injury was catastrophic. She was in shock, unable to stand on her own.

Adrenaline is a strange thing. It numbs the horror just enough to let you function. I rushed over, grabbed her uninjured side, and pulled her up. “You can do this,” I told her, or maybe I told myself. “We have to go.”

A group of us, maybe 30 survivors, huddled together like a frightened herd. We pushed through the emergency exit door and burst out into the bright Colorado sunlight.

The contrast was blinding. Inside, it was dark, smoky, and reeked of death. Outside, the sky was a perfect, piercing blue. The birds were singing. The mountains stood majestic in the distance. It felt wrong that the world could be so beautiful when my life had just been shattered.

“Run!” someone screamed.

We sprinted. We ran across the grassy field toward a police car that was parked in the distance. I was holding the injured girl, half-carrying her. My lungs burned. My legs pumped. I expected to feel a b*llet hit my back with every step. I didn’t look back. I just focused on that white police cruiser—a symbol of safety.

We dove behind the car, collapsing onto the grass. We were a pile of sobbing, shaking teenagers. The officer was using the car as a shield, his g*n drawn, aiming at the school.

“Stay down! Stay down!” he shouted.

And then, the glass of the library windows above us shattered.

They were back. The sh*oters had returned to the library. They were standing in the windows, looking down at us like snipers in a tower. They started firing at the police car.

I pressed my face into the dirt. The dirt tasted like iron. We made it out, I thought, panic rising again. We made it out, and now we’re going to die right here on the lawn.

Next to me was a girl named Val. She had been sh*t, too. She was pale, her skin turning a terrifying shade of gray. Her eyes were fluttering closed.

“I’m tired,” she whispered. “I just want to sleep.”

I grabbed her arm. I remembered seeing in movies that you’re not supposed to let someone with significant blood loss fall asleep. That’s how they slip away.

“No,” I said, shaking her. “Val, look at me. Do not close your eyes. You hear me? Stay awake. Look at the mountains. Look at the police car. Just stay awake!”

I kept talking to her, babbling about anything to keep her tethered to this world, all while listening to the cracks of gunfire hitting the pavement around us.

Eventually, more police cars swarmed in. An armored vehicle pulled up to shield us. They started loading the wounded. It was chaotic—a blur of uniforms, radios, and shouting.

As I was preparing to make a run for the next layer of safety, someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was a guy I didn’t know well. He pointed toward the sidewalk near the school entrance.

“I think there’s a girl that’s been sh*t over there,” he said, his voice trembling.

I looked.

About fifty yards away, lying in the grass, was a body. She was curled on her side. I could see a backpack. I could see hair.

My brain did something protective in that moment. It refused to process the visual data. I looked at her, and I saw a stranger. I saw “a victim.” I didn’t see my sister. I couldn’t see my sister. It was impossible. Rachel was fine. She was probably hiding in a closet somewhere, or she had escaped out the front door hours ago. She was the one who always parked the car. She was the responsible one.

“Yeah,” I said numbly. “Someone needs to help her.”

I turned away. I left her there. I didn’t know. I swear to God, I didn’t know.

A police car finally picked us up and drove us away from the “kill zone.” They dropped us off on a random residential street in a nearby neighborhood. It was surreal. One minute I was in a war zone; the next, I was standing on a manicured lawn in suburbia, covered in blood that wasn’t mine.

I saw a neighbor standing on his porch, holding a cordless phone, looking at us with wide, horrified eyes.

“Can I use your phone?” I asked. My voice sounded hollow.

He handed it to me without a word.

I dialed home. My fingers were sticky with blood, leaving smudges on the keypad.

“Mom?”

“Craig?” Her voice was tight, high-pitched. “Craig, where are you? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay, Mom,” I said. “I made it out. I’m safe.”

I heard her let out a sob of relief. But then the image of the girl in the grass flashed in my mind—a subliminal glitch I couldn’t explain. A pit opened in my stomach.

“Mom,” I said, my voice dropping to a whisper. “I’m okay… but I think there’s something wrong with Rachel.”

I didn’t know why I said it. I had no proof. Just a cold, dark intuition that settled in my bones.

My mom told me to come home. I don’t remember how I got there. I think a friend’s parent drove me. The ride was a blur of sirens and helicopters. The sky was filled with news choppers, circling like vultures.

When I walked through the front door of my house, the reaction was visceral. My family—my mom, my stepdad, my other sisters—they rushed to me. But then they stopped.

They saw the blood.

I was drenched. My shirt, my pants, my arms. It looked like I had been butchered.

“It’s not mine,” I said quickly, seeing the terror in my mother’s eyes. “I’m not hurt. It’s… it’s Isaiah’s. It’s Matt’s.”

The relief in the room was palpable, but it was brittle. Because someone was missing.

The house began to fill up with people. Friends, neighbors, church members. They brought food that no one ate. They sat on our couches, staring at the TV. The news was on every channel. Columbine High School. Massacre. Two shooters. Multiple fatalities.

We sat there, a house full of people, but the silence was deafening. We were waiting for the phone to ring. We were waiting for the front door to open and Rachel to walk in, laughing about how crazy it was, complaining that her car was stuck behind the police barricade.

Every time the phone rang, the room froze. Every time a car door slammed outside, hearts leaped.

“She probably just lost her phone,” someone said. “She’s probably at a triage center and they haven’t processed her name yet,” my stepdad suggested. “Maybe she’s hiding and can’t talk,” my sister hoped.

We clung to these scenarios. We built life rafts out of denial.

I went into the bathroom to shower. I needed to get the blood off. I remember standing under the hot water, watching the red swirl down the drain. I scrubbed and scrubbed until my skin was raw. I wanted to wash away the memory of the library. I wanted to wash away the sound of Isaiah calling for his mom. But the water ran clear, and the memories stayed.

I put on clean clothes, but I still felt dirty. I felt… marked.

Night fell. The news reports were getting worse. They were confirming numbers. 12 students dead. 1 teacher dead. They weren’t releasing names yet.

I couldn’t sleep. I sat in the living room. My mom was pacing. She was a woman of immense faith, a prayer warrior. She was praying storming the gates of heaven, begging God to bring her daughter home. But I could see the cracks forming in her armor. I could see the terror behind her eyes.

I sat on the piano bench, staring at the floor. I went into that state the counselor later called “dissociation.” I wasn’t there. I was back under the table. I was counting the seconds. I was wondering why I was alive.

Why did the shoter aim at Isaiah and not me? We were inches apart. Why did the bmbs not go off? Why did I stand up at that exact moment?

Guilt began to creep in. It’s a heavy, suffocating thing, survivor’s guilt. It whispers to you that you don’t deserve the air you’re breathing.

Around 2:00 AM, the house finally quieted down, but no one slept. We were all just waiting. Waiting for the hammer to drop.

The morning of April 21st broke gray and heavy. The phone rang early.

It wasn’t Rachel.

It was the Sheriff’s department. They asked to speak to my parents.

My mom and stepdad went into the other room. I sat on the edge of my bed, my hands clasped together, squeezing so hard my knuckles turned white. I knew. The moment the phone rang, the tiny flame of hope I had been nurturing all night was snuffed out.

I heard a sound from the other room. It wasn’t a scream. It was worse. It was a guttural, broken noise—the sound of a mother’s heart ripping in half.

A few minutes later, my door opened. My mom walked in. Her face was swollen, her eyes red, but she had this look of terrifying strength. She walked over to me. She didn’t have to say the words, but she did.

“We just got the call,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Rachel was k*lled.”

The world stopped. The axis tilted. Everything I knew about safety, about love, about God, felt like it was shattering.

I looked at my mom. She looked so small, so broken. And in that moment, amidst my own crushing grief, a strange resolve took over me. I realized that if I fell apart now, she might not make it. If I let this destroy me, it would destroy her too.

I stood up. I put my hands on her shaking shoulders. I looked her in the eyes, fighting back the tears that were burning like acid.

“Mom,” I said, my voice steady, surprising both of us. “I’m going to be okay.”

It was a promise. It was a lie. I wasn’t okay. I was broken. I was traumatized. I was furious. But I needed her to know that she hadn’t lost both of us.

We later found out that Rachel was the first one k*lled.

Remember how I said she parked the car? She and her friend Richard were eating lunch on the grass outside the school entrance. The sh*oters didn’t even make it inside before they started. They saw Rachel. They saw an innocent girl sitting in the sun.

They sh*t her from a distance.

And the girl I saw? The “victim” in the grass that I walked away from? That was her. I had looked right at my own sister’s body and didn’t recognize her. That image—her backpack, her hair, the way she was curled up—would haunt my nightmares for years.

But that morning, as I held my mom, I didn’t know the details yet. I just knew that the annoying big sister who lectured me about being late, the girl I slammed the car door on, was gone.

And the last thing I ever gave her was my anger.

That realization hit me harder than any b*llet could. I had no chance to say sorry. I had no chance to say I love you. The finality of death is a cruel teacher. It teaches you that every moment is precious, but it teaches you too late.

In the days that followed, our house became a shrine. Flowers piled up on the lawn. Letters poured in from around the world. But amidst the chaos of the media and the funerals, a cold, hard stone began to form in my chest.

It was hatred.

I hated the shoters. I hated them with a pure, white-hot intensity. I wanted them to suffer. I was glad they were dead, but I wished I could bring them back just to kll them myself. I watched the news, and they started talking about how the sh*oters were “bullied,” how they were “victims” of the school culture.

I sat there, shaking with rage. Victims? I saw them laugh. I saw them play peekaboo with a dying girl. I saw the joy in their eyes as they ex*cuted my friends. They weren’t victims. They were monsters.

And I decided, right then and there, that I would never forgive them. I would hold onto this hate. I would let it fuel me. It felt like armor. If I was angry, I didn’t have to be sad. If I was hateful, I didn’t have to feel the crushing weight of the loss.

But I didn’t know then what that hate would do to me. I didn’t know that it was a poison I was drinking, expecting the other person to die.

I was 16 years old. I was a survivor of the worst school sh*oting in American history. I had lost my sister and my best friends. And I was about to enter the darkest battle of my life—not against a gunman, but against the bitterness growing in my own heart.

Part 3

The weeks following the sh*oting were a blur of funerals, candlelight vigils, and an endless parade of cameras. My house, once a sanctuary, felt like a train station. People came and went—friends, relatives, strangers dropping off casseroles. My sister Rachel’s car, which was still parked where she left it, became a mound of flowers and teddy bears. It was beautiful, yes. But to me, it looked like a grave.

I was treated like glass. Everyone walked on eggshells around me. “How are you doing?” they would ask, their heads tilted to the side with that pitying look.

“I’m fine,” I would lie. “I’m holding up.”

But inside, I was rotting.

The sadness I had felt in the first few days—the crushing grief of losing Rachel, Matt, and Isaiah—was slowly being replaced by something harder, hotter, and much more dangerous.

Rage.

I became obsessed with the news coverage. I sat in front of the TV for hours, watching pundits and psychologists try to dissect the minds of the two monsters who had destroyed my life. And what I heard made my blood boil.

The narrative began to shift. The media started painting Eric and Dylan as “troubled outcasts.” They were the victims of a cruel high school hierarchy, the experts said. They were bullied. They were misunderstood. They were pushed to the brink.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to smash the television screen.

Bullied?

I was there. I saw their faces. I saw the look in their eyes when they peeked under the table and said “Peekaboo” before pulling the trigger. That wasn’t the look of a victim. That was the look of a predator enjoying the hunt. They weren’t fighting back against bullies; they were executing innocent girls who had never said a mean word to them. They were mocking Isaiah because of the color of his skin.

The injustice of it ate at me. It felt like the world was making excuses for evil. And the more I watched, the more I hated them.

I hated them for klling my sister. I hated them for klling my friends. I hated them for taking away my innocence. And I hated them for d*ing.

They had taken the “coward’s way out,” turning the g*ns on themselves before the police could get them. They escaped justice. They escaped prison. They left me here, in this wreckage, while they checked out early. I had nowhere to direct my anger, so it turned inward. It began to poison me.

I started having nightmares. Every single night.

I would close my eyes and be back in the library. But in these dreams, I wasn’t hiding under the table. I was standing up. I was holding a wapon. The shoters would walk in, and I would fight them. It was violent, graphic, and terrifying. I would engage in hand-to-hand combat with the ghosts of the boys who klled my sister. Sometimes I won. Sometimes I ded.

I would wake up in a cold sweat, my sheets twisted around me, my heart hammering against my ribs. And I would wake up angry.

Imagine starting every single day with a level 10 rage. I was snapping at my parents. I was distant from my friends. I was walking around with clenched fists, ready to fight the world.

There was a youth pastor, a mentor of mine, who saw what was happening. He came over one day when the house was full of mourners. He found me sitting on the piano bench, staring into space—that “zombie mode” I told you about.

“Get your shoes on,” he said. “We’re going for a walk.”

He didn’t take me for ice cream. He just walked with me. And for the first time, he didn’t ask me how I was doing. He just let the silence hang there until I couldn’t take it anymore. I exploded. I told him everything. I told him about the library, the blood, the sounds, the smell of gunpowder. I told him about leaving Rachel behind.

He listened. He turned ghost white, but he listened.

That walk helped. It was like lancing a boil—some of the pressure was released. But the infection was still there. The hatred was still coursing through my veins.

I carried that hate for two years.

By the time I was 18, I was exhausted. Hate is heavy. It takes so much energy to maintain that level of bitterness. It’s like carrying a backpack full of rocks everywhere you go. You think the rocks are weapons you can use against your enemy, but really, they’re just crushing your own spine.

I needed to escape. I needed to go somewhere where nobody knew who “Craig Scott, the Columbine survivor” was. I wanted to be just Craig.

So, I signed up for a mission trip to South Africa.

It was 2001. I got on a plane and flew halfway across the world. I landed in a place that was drastically different from the suburbs of Littleton, Colorado. We were working in poor villages, areas that had been ravaged by poverty and the legacy of apartheid.

But the first thing I noticed wasn’t the poverty. It was the joy.

The people we met—people who lived in tin shacks, who had almost nothing materially—were vibrant. They sang constantly. Not just in church, but everywhere. On the bus, in the fields, while cooking. These deep, resonant harmonies that seemed to vibrate in the air.

It annoyed me.

I know that sounds terrible, but I was a cynical, wounded American teenager. I looked at them and thought, What do you have to be so happy about? Your life is hard. You have nothing. I have a nice house and a car and a future, and I’m miserable. How dare you be happy?

Our guide for the trip was a Zulu man. Let’s call him Stephen.

Stephen was the most joyful person I had ever met. He had this infectious laugh that made his whole body shake. He drove our bus, and every morning he would greet us with a song. He was always smiling, always serving, always checking on us.

I watched him like a hawk. I didn’t trust him. Nobody is that happy, I thought. It’s an act.

One night, we were camping out in the bush. I had another nightmare. The same old tape playing in my head—gunshots, screaming, the face of the killer.

I woke up around 4:00 AM, agitated and angry. I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I crawled out of my tent and started pacing around the dying embers of the campfire. The African sky was huge, filled with more stars than I had ever seen, but I couldn’t appreciate it. I was kicking the dirt, fighting off the demons in my head.

Stephen was awake. He was sitting by the fire, nursing a cup of tea. He saw me pacing.

“Craig,” he called out softly. “Everything okay?”

I sighed, frustrated that I wasn’t alone. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just… bad dreams.”

He motioned for me to sit next to him. “Come. Sit.”

I sat down on a log, pulling my jacket tighter around me. The air was cool.

Stephen looked at me, his face illuminated by the faint glow of the coals. “You seem to carry a great weight, my friend. I see it in your eyes. You smile, but your eyes… they are angry.”

I felt defensive. “I’ve been through some stuff,” I muttered.

“I know,” he said gently. “I heard you were at that school. The shooting.”

I stiffened. I didn’t want to talk about it. But there was something about his voice—no pity, just a calm curiosity—that made me open up.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was there. My sister was klled. My two best friends were klled right next to me.”

I started to rant. The floodgates opened again. I told him about the injustice. I told him about the sh*oters. I told him how much I hated them. I told him about the nightmares.

“I hate them,” I spat out, poking the fire with a stick. “I hate them for what they did. I hate them for leaving me here. And I don’t think I’ll ever stop hating them.”

Stephen listened quietly. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t offer cheap platitudes like “God has a plan” or “Time heals all wounds.” He just nodded, absorbing my pain.

When I was finally done, breathless and shaking with adrenaline, he took a sip of his tea and set the cup down.

“I understand,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” I shot back. “Nobody understands unless they’ve been there. You live here, man. You don’t know what it’s like to have your life destroyed by two psychopaths on a random Tuesday.”

He looked at me, and his expression changed. The smile was gone, replaced by a deep, ancient sorrow.

“I do understand,” he said softly. “I have a story too.”

I stopped. I looked at him.

“Many years ago,” Stephen began, staring into the fire, “during the apartheid violence, there was a war between tribes. Political violence. It was chaos.”

He paused, taking a steadying breath.

“One day, I was away working. When I returned to my village… it was silent. Too silent.”

He turned to look me in the eye.

“A rival group had come through with machetes. They didn’t use g*ns. They used blades. It was intimate. It was brutal.”

My stomach turned.

“I went to my home,” he continued. “And I found my family. My wife. My children. My brothers. My cousins.”

He held up his hands, counting.

“Seventeen,” he said. “I lost seventeen members of my family in one day. Slaughtered.”

I sat there, frozen. The air left my lungs. My tragedy—Columbine—was horrific. It was a national nightmare. But this man… this man sitting next to me had lost everyone. Seventeen people. Hacked to death in his own home.

I felt a wave of shame wash over me. Here I was, the privileged American kid, thinking I owned the market on suffering.

“I… I didn’t know,” I stammered. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not a competition,” he said gently, waving his hand. “Pain is pain. Your loss is terrible. My loss is terrible.”

“But…” I shook my head, trying to process it. “How? How are you sitting here? How are you singing on the bus? How are you smiling? If that happened to me… if I lost everyone… I would have hunted down the men who did it. I would have k*lled them with my bare hands. I would be dead or in prison. I certainly wouldn’t be singing.”

Stephen nodded. “I wanted to do that. For a long time, I was like you. I was consumed by fire. I wanted revenge. I wanted blood. I hated them with every fiber of my being.”

“So what changed?” I asked. “Did you find them?”

“No,” he said. “I realized something. I realized that my anger wasn’t hurting them. They didn’t know I was angry. They didn’t care. They were sleeping fine at night.”

He leaned in closer, and this is the moment that changed the trajectory of my life.

“My anger,” he said, touching his own chest, “was k*lling me. It was rotting me from the inside out. It was stealing my joy, my future, my relationship with God. I was the one drinking the poison, hoping they would die.”

He looked deep into my eyes.

“Craig,” he said. “Forgiveness is like setting a prisoner free, and finding out that the prisoner is you.”

The words hung in the air like smoke.

Forgiveness is like setting a prisoner free…

I had always thought forgiveness was a weakness. I thought forgiving the sh*oters meant saying what they did was okay. I thought it meant betraying Rachel. I thought it meant letting them off the hook.

But Stephen wasn’t saying that. He wasn’t saying the men who k*lled his family were good men. He wasn’t saying justice shouldn’t happen.

He was saying that he refused to let them control him anymore.

“I chose to forgive,” Stephen said. “Not for them. But for me. I released them to God. And when I did… the weight was gone. The nightmares stopped. The song came back.”

I looked at the fire. I thought about Eric and Dylan. I thought about the power I had given them over my life. Even in death, they were still the puppet masters, pulling my strings, making me angry, making me fearful, making me bitter.

I was their prisoner. And I was the only one who held the key.

Tears started streaming down my face. Not tears of grief, but tears of exhaustion. I was so tired of being angry. I was so tired of the heavy backpack.

“I don’t know if I can,” I whispered. “I don’t know how.”

“It is not a feeling,” Stephen said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “It is a choice. You make the choice today. And you might have to make it again tomorrow. And the next day. But you start by opening the cage.”

I sat there as the sun began to rise over the African horizon. The sky turned a brilliant orange and pink. It was a new day.

I closed my eyes. I pictured the library. I pictured the sh*oters.

I forgive you, I thought.

It felt fake at first. It felt wrong. My brain screamed, NO! They don’t deserve it!

But I pushed through. I forgive you. Not because you deserve it. But because I deserve to live.

I took a deep breath, and for the first time in two years, the air reached the bottom of my lungs. The ringing in my ears seemed to quiet down. The tightness in my chest loosened just a fraction.

I looked at Stephen. He was smiling.

“You look lighter,” he said.

I was.

I didn’t know it yet, but that conversation in the dirt of South Africa was the turning point. It didn’t fix everything instantly. I still had work to do. But the chain was broken. I was no longer just a victim of Columbine. I was a survivor who was taking his life back.

I realized that the greatest revenge I could have against the darker forces of this world wasn’t to add more darkness. It was to live a life full of light. It was to be happy. It was to do exactly what Rachel would have wanted me to do.

I left Africa a different person. I went there to escape my story, but instead, I found the power to rewrite it.

Part 4

Coming back from Africa was harder than I expected.

You would think that after a spiritual epiphany on the other side of the world—sitting by a fire with a man who lost 17 family members and learning the secret of forgiveness—I would come home cured. I thought I would float back into Littleton, Colorado, on a cloud of peace.

But reality has a way of punching you in the gut.

I landed back in the US, and the noise returned. The media was still buzzing. The lawsuits were flying. The wounds in our community were still gaping wide open. I walked back into my house, and the silence where Rachel used to be was louder than ever. Her room was still there. Her clothes were still in the closet. The car she drove me to school in was still parked outside.

The “high” of the mission trip faded, and I was left with the daily grind of grief.

Stephen’s words—“Forgiveness is setting a prisoner free and finding out the prisoner is you”—became my mantra. But saying it is one thing. Living it is a war.

There were days I woke up and the anger was back, sitting on my chest like a demon. I would see a news report about the sh*oters’ parents, or read a conspiracy theory online, and the rage would flare up. I had to choose forgiveness over and over again. It wasn’t a one-time transaction. It was a daily habit. I had to wake up, look in the mirror, and say, “Today, I will not let them control me. Today, I choose to be free.”

But something else happened when I got back. Something that shifted my focus from surviving to living.

My family began to go through Rachel’s things. We were terrified to do it. It felt like an invasion of privacy, touching the artifacts of a life that was cut short. But we needed to know. We needed to feel close to her.

We found her journals.

Rachel was a writer. She wrote constantly. Diaries, essays, prayers, notes to friends. When we started reading them, we got chills. It wasn’t just teenage angst or gossip about boys. It was profound. It was spiritual. It was… prophetic.

In one of her final essays, written just weeks before she was k*lled, she wrote this:

“I have this theory that if one person can go out of their way to show compassion, then it will start a chain reaction of the same. People will never know how far a little kindness can go.”

A chain reaction.

She didn’t know she was about to die. She didn’t know she was about to become the face of a tragedy. But she was already thinking about legacy. She was thinking about how kindness spreads like a virus, jumping from person to person.

But the thing that stopped my heart—the thing that made me drop to my knees in her bedroom—was what we found behind her dresser.

We were moving furniture, cleaning out her room. We pulled her heavy wooden dresser away from the wall. And there, traced on the back of the furniture in permanent marker, were the outlines of two hands.

Inside the outlines, she had written: “These hands belong to Rachel Joy Scott and will someday touch millions of people’s hearts.”

I stared at that writing until my vision blurred.

She had written that years before she d*ed. She was just a kid when she traced those hands. How could she know? How could she predict that her life—and her death—would reach millions?

It felt like a mandate from heaven. It felt like she was speaking directly to me from beyond the grave. Craig, this is what you have to do. You have to be the hands. You have to start the chain reaction.

That was the moment I stopped being just a “survivor” and started being a messenger.

My dad started an organization called “Rachel’s Challenge.” The goal was simple: take Rachel’s story, take her essay about the chain reaction of kindness, and bring it to schools.

I was terrified. I was a wrestler, a jock, a guy who liked to hide in the back of the class. I wasn’t a public speaker. The idea of standing on a stage in a gymnasium, looking at a thousand high school students, and talking about the worst day of my life made me want to vomit.

But I looked at those traced hands. And I got on the plane.

The first few times I spoke, I was a wreck. I stood there, microphone shaking in my hand, stumbling over my words. I told them about the argument in the car. I told them about the slammed door. I told them about the library.

I told them: “I would give anything—anything—to have five more seconds with my sister. Just five seconds to look her in the eye and say, ‘I love you.’ But I don’t have those five seconds. You do. You have them right now with your parents, your siblings, your friends. Don’t waste them.”

And something incredible happened.

I watched the “cool kids”—the guys wearing the varsity jackets, the ones acting too tough to care—start to crack. I saw the girls in the front row wiping away tears. I felt the room shift.

At the end of the assembly, we issued a challenge: Start a chain reaction of kindness. Go sit with the lonely kid at lunch. Apologize to someone you’ve bullied. Tell your parents you love them.

After the talk, a line formed. Students wanted to talk to me.

I’ll never forget a girl who came up to me at one of those first schools. She was wearing long sleeves, even though it was hot. She had her head down, hair covering her face.

She walked up, looked me in the eye, and pulled up her sleeve. Her arm was covered in cuts. Fresh ones. Old scars.

“I was going to end it tonight,” she whispered. “I have the letter written. I have the pills.”

My heart stopped.

“But then I heard you talk about Rachel,” she said, tears spilling over. “I heard you talk about how much you miss her. And I realized… my brother would miss me that much. My mom would miss me that much. I don’t want to do that to them.”

She handed me a folded piece of paper. It was her su*cide note.

“I don’t need this anymore,” she said.

That was the first life Rachel saved through me. There have been thousands since.

For the last 20+ years, I have traveled the country. I’ve spoken to millions of people. I’ve been to the White House. I’ve been on Oprah. But none of that matters as much as those moments in the gymnasiums, seeing the lights come on in a kid’s eyes.

It hasn’t been easy. Every time there is another school sh*oting—Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde—it tears the scab off my wound.

I get the alerts on my phone. Breaking News: Active Shoter.*

And instantly, I’m back in the library. I can smell the gunpowder. I can feel the table vibrating. I feel the panic rising in my throat. It’s a trauma that never fully goes away; you just learn to carry it differently.

People ask me all the time about gun control. They want me to take a side. They want me to be a political pawn. “Banning guns is the only way!” or “More guns is the only way!”

I tell them this: I am all for laws that keep weapons out of the hands of dangerous people. Absolutely. But if you think legislation alone will fix this, you are missing the point.

Eric and Dylan didn’t kll people just because they had gns. They k*lled people because they were broken. They were filled with hate. They had lost their value for human life.

You can pass every law in the world, but you cannot legislate the human heart. You cannot pass a bill that makes a kid feel loved. You cannot vote for kindness. That has to come from us. That has to come from the culture.

That’s why I do what I do. I’m trying to fix the soil so the weeds don’t grow.

We live in a culture now that is even more isolated than it was in 1999. Kids are drowning in social media, comparing their behind-the-scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel. Bullying follows them home in their pockets. The pressure is immense.

I tell them about the sh*oters. I tell them about Dylan. Dylan was suicidal. He kept a journal too. He wrote about how much he hated himself, how he felt no one loved him. He was a follower who got sucked into a vortex of hate because he didn’t have a solid foundation of self-worth.

I tell the students: “Don’t let the darkness win. You have value. You are here for a reason.”

I am in my 40s now. I’m not the scared kid under the table anymore.

I have a life. I have joy. I work in the film industry now, telling stories. I love making movies. I have a community of friends. I laugh—loudly and often.

That, I realized, is the ultimate victory.

The sh*oters wanted to cause death and destruction. They wanted to ruin lives. If I had spent the rest of my life as a bitter, angry, broken victim, they would have won. They would have claimed one more life—mine.

But by being happy? By forgiving? By creating a legacy of kindness? I defeated them.

I don’t think about Rachel every single day anymore. Time does that. It softens the edges of the grief. It turns the screaming pain into a dull ache.

But I still have my moments.

Just yesterday, I was driving into New York City for a meeting. I was alone in the car. The radio was playing—not rap this time, just something soft. I looked out at the skyline, and suddenly, she was there. Not physically, but I could feel her.

I turned down the radio.

“Hey Rach,” I said out loud. “Are you watching?”

I imagined her sitting in the passenger seat. I imagined she wasn’t 17 anymore, but a grown woman, laughing at my gray hairs.

“Did I do okay?” I asked her. “Did I make it count?”

I thought about the girl with the cuts on her arm. I thought about the millions of hands that have touched the outlines of hers on the back of that dresser. I thought about the schools that have changed their culture because of her essay.

I felt a warmth wash over me. A sense of peace.

Yeah, I thought. We did okay.

I still regret slamming that car door. That will never go away. I would give anything to go back to that morning and hug her. I would give anything to tell her she looked beautiful. I would give anything to listen to her Christian radio station without complaining.

But I can’t go back. We can never go back. We only have now.

That is the lesson of Columbine. That is the lesson of my life.

You think you have time. You think you can say “I love you” tomorrow. You think you can apologize next week. You think that petty fight doesn’t matter.

But you don’t know. The clock is ticking for all of us.

So here is my challenge to you, reading this on your phone right now.

Don’t wait.

If you are holding a grudge, let it go. Not for them, but for you. Set the prisoner free. If you love someone, tell them. Scream it. Text them right now. If you see someone hurting, don’t look away. Reach out. Be the chain reaction.

My sister’s life was short, but it was wide. She touched more people in 17 years than most do in 80.

I am just the messenger. I am just the brother who survived. But I am carrying the torch.

And now, I’m passing it to you.

What will you do with it?

THE END.