Columbine: Chapter 26 Summary & Analysis

Dave Sanders’ daughters are “angry” about the things they’ve heard regarding his “disturbing” final hours bleeding to death inside Columbine while officials refused to breach the perimeter. They begin looking into police reports of their father’s discovery.

Dave Sanders was shot once in the back and once in the neck. The second bullet exited his mouth, “lacerating his tongue, shattering several teeth, [and] open[ing] one of [the] major blood routes to the brain.” The shot in his back clipped another major vein, and Dave bled heavily. Two teachers dragged Dave into Science Room 3, where help was being called. Dave needed assistance immediately, though, and so a teacher went into a nearby lab and asked if anyone knew first aid. One boy named Aaron Hancey, an Eagle Scout, volunteered; Hancey was able to use sweatshirts and strips of other students’ clothes to fashion tourniquets and stanch Dave’s wounds while “execution”-style gunshots, bomb blasts, and screams “like [someone was being] tortured,” echoed in the halls outside the science room.

Dispatchers assured everyone in Science Room 3 that help would arrive “in about ten minutes”—but these reassurances were repeated again and again over the course of more than three hours. Students and teachers showed Dave pictures of his wife and children and grandchildren, begging him to hold on. Dave knew he was not going to make it, and begged his students to “tell my girls I love them.”

As the shooting ended and things within the building calmed down a bit, Dave lost consciousness. His students attempted to rouse him. Those still on the phone with 911 told dispatchers of their plans to throw a chair through a window and lower Dave to safety, where he could get proper medical attention, but they were warned that it was still too dangerous—nobody knew that the killers had already shot themselves. 

At almost 3:00 p.m., the SWAT team burst through the doors of the science room and began evacuating students and teachers. Aaron Hancey begged to stay with Dave Sanders, but SWAT team members, trained to maximize the number of lives saved and recognize when someone is beyond help, urged him out along with his other classmates. Two SWAT officers stayed behind with Dave and called for a medic—but when the medic arrived, he knew there was “nothing he could do,” and quickly moved on to the library.

Many people were angered by Dave Sanders’ story, and some called the SWAT team’s slow response “pathetic.” Members of the SWAT teams who had first entered the school began to respond in the press, urging parents to “understand” that the team had no idea what they were going into, and describing scenes of chaos, carnage, and obstacles such as fire alarms, sprinklers, and multiple unexploded bombs. The Sanders family ultimately “expressed gratitude” publicly to the SWAT teams at Columbine, and invited the full teams to Dave’s funeral. Cullen writes that “all the officers attended.”