The Death of Cassie Bernall:

She Said Yes at Columbine High School

by Leslie Boughers

for Advanced Composition, ETSU, April 2007

About the author: Leslie Boughers is in her fourth year at East Tennessee State University studying to become a high school English teacher. She hopes that she will never have to face what happened at Columbine High School 8 years ago. Leslie can be reached at lrbles00@aol.com.

Since 1981, over two hundred students and teachers have been killed in America as a result of a school shooting. Approximately another two hundred have been injured, and many more have been affected by the violent acts. The most recent of these acts only happening a few weeks ago as thirty-three people were killed at Virginia Tech by a fellow student, becoming the “single most deadly civilian gunfire incident in American higher education history. Just eight years ago the same was being said about Columbine High School where twenty-four were injured and thirteen were killed, including one teacher. This is the story of one of those students, Cassie Bernall, who lost her life on that unfortunate day.

Cassie Bernall, Age 17

“Mom, I really don’t have time to do my chores tonight. I have tons of homework I have to finish up by tomorrow,” Cassie Bernall says to her mom as they are finishing up dinner.

“Alright, but they better be done tomorrow,” her mom, Misty, replies as she takes the dishes from the table to wash.

Cassie takes her plate to the sink and walks up the steps to her room, dreading the homework that waits for her. She brings all of her schoolwork back downstairs to the kitchen and takes over the entire table to start on her assignments. She still is not finished with all of her work as she sleepily walks up the steps to her bedroom to go to sleep.

The morning of April 20^, 1999 was like any normal morning for seventeen-year-old Cassie, who was, as usual, running late for school. She quickly grabbed her things, told her mother she loved her, and raced out the door behind her brother, Chris, and ran towards school, which was only a hundred yards away, just beyond her back yard. After arriving at school she went about her day as normal, worrying about her homework that she was still behind on. She handed her friend Amanda a note and went on with her day as usual. Amanda opened her note to find these words written to her.

“It’s so frustrating to be patient and wait for God’s perfect timing. It’s so hard to remember that his timing is not our timing. That he knows best. I need to learn to trust, be faithful and trusting…and choose his will. P.S. Honestly, I want to live completely for God. It’s hard and scary, but totally worth it.”

At 11:15 Cassie decided to head to the library to work a homework assignment for her English class. She walked the hallway towards the library, having her backpack hung over her shoulder, like every other student, and entered the library looking for a place to sit and finish up her homework. She sat down and started working on her assignment on Macbeth.

Around 11:25am Ms. Nielson came running into the library yelling, “There are kids with guns in the hallway!” Senior pranks, Cassie thought, and ignored the threats. “Relax, it’s just paint balls,” she heard her friend Seth say from the next table. Cassie went back to her homework as a shot fired from down the hall. She now realized that this was not a prank after all. Mrs. Nielson started yelling for everyone to get under the tables but no one listened. A student came struggling in the door with blood all over his shoulder and Cassie, although staying calm, quickly got underneath the table.

Cassie clasped her hands and began praying as Eric and Dylan walked into the library, dressed in long, black trench coats, guns in hand, shooting and yelling, “We’ve been wanting to do this our whole lives!!” Cassie watched as they happily went around the library knocking over chairs and cheering after every shot they made. Cassie was stunned as she watched Eric shoot out a display case for no apparent reason. Evan Todd, who was hiding underneath it, was injured.

Cassie heard Eric yelling. “Get up! Everyone with a white cap or baseball cap, stand up! All jocks stand up!”

No one moved. No one knew exactly what to do. They figured that if they stood up they would be shot, but they also knew if they stayed sitting underneath their tables they would probably be killed also.

“Fine!” Eric yelled. “I’ll start shooting anyway!”

Cassie stayed underneath her table and continued to pray as she heard the gunshot that killed Kyle Velasquez. She looked up and saw Dylan and Eric set their bags down and reload their guns. Many thoughts were running through Cassie’s head. She was hoping they would leave, hoping and praying her life would be spared. She was probably thinking of the passage she underlined just weeks earlier in the book “Discipleship: Living for Christ in the Daily Grind” that she had been reading, “All of us should live life so as to be able to face eternity at any time.”

After a few seconds, Eric and Dylan started shooting again and Cassie looked to see where they went. She spotted them over next to the windows, shooting down on the people outside that were trying to escape the school and the police officers that were trying to assist those in need. Dylan quickly turned around and randomly fired at a table. Cassie saw three of her fellow classmates injured by his shots. Cassie kept her eyes on Dylan as he took off his trench coat and pulled out his shotgun. Cassie’s ears rang as Dylan, without looking, shot underneath a table and killed Steven Curnow and Kasey Ruegsegger.

As she sat there underneath her table praying so hard for her fellow classmates the boys walked up to her table. Cassie’s heart jumped as Eric slapped the top of her table twice with his hand. She looked up and saw Eric knelt down right in front of her.

“Do you believe in God?” he said.

She paused for just a second, just long enough for her to realize that this was her chance to stand up for what she so strongly believed in. Although she was scared, her voice remained strong.

“Yes,” was all she said.

“Why?” was the next question that came from Eric, but before she had time to answer his 12-gauge shotgun was at her head and she quickly brought her hand up to shield the shot. Cassie died instantly as Eric and Dylan continued their shooting spree. In the course of an hour, Eric and Dylan killed 12 students and one teacher and injured 24 before ending their own lives.

Cassie’s family did not know until the next day that Cassie was not alive. The police had secured the area and did not allow anyone to go in to the school until an investigation of the school was done for bombs and some details came together about the situation. Her family was shocked, angry, and completely broken by Cassie’s death. Slowly information about exactly what happened came together and Cassie’s family soon found out what she had done. Cassie’s friends that were in the library with her let her family know what happened and grieved right along with her family. Misty, her mother, wondered, “Would I have done that? I might have begged for my life. Cassie didn’t. She may have been seventeen, but she’s a far stronger woman than I’ll ever be.”

Her family finds comfort in knowing that Cassie stood up for what she so strongly believed in and her youth pastor, Dave, from her church said this about her death just two weeks after she was killed:

“Cassie struggled like everyone struggles, but she knew what she had to do to let Christ live in her. It’s called dying to yourself, and it has to be done daily. It means learning to break out of the selfish life….It’s not a negative thing, but a way of freeing yourself to live life more fully. The world looks at Cassie’s ‘yes’ of April 20, but we need to look at the daily ‘yes’ she said day after day, month after month, before giving that final answer.”

Annotated Bibliography

The book I found most helpful in writing this paper was “She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall” written by Misty Bernall and published in 1999 by Pocket Books, New York. This book, which is told from her mother’s point-of-view, tells the life story of Cassie and goes into detail of the day that the shootings at Columbine High School as told by the survivors of that horrific day. This book, which was written just weeks after Cassie’s death, has pictures throughout of Cassie as she is growing up and it also has many quotes that either came from her journal or from notes she had written to her friends. I found the first chapter, entitled “Tuesday”, to be most helpful in writing this essay. This book gives the stories of students who were in the library with Cassie when she died. These are how I knew what Cassie was doing and how she reacted when she was in the library just minutes before her death.

I also used an article entitled “Awakening at Littleton” written by J. Bottum which was published in the journal First Things in August/September 1999 on pages 28-32. The website for this article (www.firstthings.com/ftussues/ft9908/articles/bottum.html) talks not only about the shootings that occurred that day but also showed their reasoning as to why Eric and Dylan killed whom they did. This article was not as much about Cassie as it was about the reasons why Eric and Dylan may have went on their killing spree in the first place. I found the article helpful and I also thought it was interesting to read about Eric and Dylan and the issues they had.

Another article that I found helpful in writing this essay was on the internet site Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre) entitled “Columbine High School Massacre.” This article, which I last accessed in April 2007, was very detailed when it came to the happenings of that day. This article laid everything out from the time the day began to the time the shootings ended. It even has pictures of that day and pictures of the killers, and this is where I found the pictures of the school. This article laid out everyone that was injured and killed that day and it even includes other resources available for one to look at about that horrific day.

I also used the Wikipedia article “List of School Massacres” to get my information on the number of people injured and killed in school shootings. The website (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_massacres) is very detailed and gives a complete list of every school shooting around the world.

I was able to find the picture of Cassie on the website http://www.weblinker.com/gervais/foreword.html which is a forward to an article, written by Cassie’s mother and father. I did not get any other information for this page, except for the picture.