Grief becoming unfortunately familiar

By Bill Duryea
St. Petersburg Times

LITTLETON — Grief looks the same no matter how many children die.

The memorial ribbons might change color to match the school, the flowers in the bouquets might change with the season and the names on the hastily penned signs that go up in store windows, of course, must change.

But teen-agers don't cry any less because a classmate killed only three of their friends instead of 12. The God whose guidance is sought in Mississippi is the same one who is turned to in Colorado. How many different ways are there to say, "You are in our prayers?"

Pearl is Paducah is Jonesboro is Springfield.

Is Littleton.

On Tuesday, this prosperous Denver suburb, so golden that even people who live outside it identify themselves as residents, joined a list that no one would ever want to be on — the towns where schools have become killing fields.

And yet Littleton is strikingly different, too. Different in ways that have changed the national reaction to the horror that unfolded here. Perhaps it is the number of dead. Perhaps it is the town's enviable demographics. Perhaps it is the timing.

Unlike the aftermath of the incidents in Paducah, Ky., Jonesboro, Ark. and Pearl, Miss., there is no sense that the nation is pointing a finger at Littleton, no hint that the killings manifest an evil unseen.

"Littleton represents any community in the United States," said Mary Allman, director of the Littleton Historical Museum. "It's not isolated in Mississippi or Arkansas. It's something that can happen in a middle-class, highly educated community, and that may have had an even greater effect on the nation."

If this town has failed, then so has all of America.

And that is just what the speakers said Wednesday evening at a candlelight vigil held at the civic center in downtown Denver. Gathered in the Greek amphitheater, a fitting place for the body politic to express grief of classical proportions, several thousand people listened as politicians and religious leaders deftly mourned the dead and damned the culture.

Steven Foster, rabbi of Temple Emmanuel, was blunt.

"We failed you," he told the young people in the audience. "If we do not change, then all 15 — yes, including the two men — will have died in vain."

But several other speakers laid the blame for the killings at the feet of the gun lobby. Indeed, the National Rifle Association earlier in the day had announced it would drastically scale back its activities for its convention in Denver next week. A proposed law to permit concealed weapons was pulled, and the legislator who proposed it said he had been inundated with calls blaming him for the shootings.

Even the black trench coats, death-obsession and neo-Nazi leanings that defined the killers' identities were not unfamiliar to the nation. Some described them as Goths, members of a youth subculture with pagan overtones and a taste for black clothing that is so prevalent across America that it is parodied on Saturday Night Live in a fictional cable access show set in Tampa called Goth Talk.

The connections were harder to make with the murderous children of Pearl, Paducah, Jonesboro and Springfield.

The youthfulness of the Jonesboro boys, 10 and 13, was baffling. At that age could they appreciate that they had killed real people and not characters in a video game? Crying in their cells, asking for their mothers and wondering when they could go home made it harder to blame them and easier to look for fault in the community.

Kip Kinkel, the disturbed 15-year-old in Springfield, Ore., is accused of killing two classmates and wounding 20. This came, police said, after he killed both his parents, described by friends as doting parents who struggled to check their son's violent impulses. But why then had they given him a gun? The only explanation Kinkel offered police was as senseless as the deaths themselves: "I had no other choice."

Throughout it all, Littleton has felt the support of the region. An illuminated highway sign near the airport, which most often indicates traffic delays, said Wednesday, "Colorado joined in grief."

Speaking at the candlelight vigil Wednesday, Denver Mayor Wellington Webb put it this way: "There are no boundaries in this state. ... If your kids hurt, our kids hurt."

In Clement Park, next to Columbine High School, which has been closed indefinitely, teenagers wandered Thursday from one mound of flowers to another. Reporters milled among them, sometimes appearing more numerous than their subjects. Crisis counselors did not lack for people wanting to talk. If it weren't for the snow blanketing the ground, the scene could have been Paducah, or Jonesboro or Springfield. It seems now they're all just the same.