Alice Suyama had tears in her eyes as she stood at the bottom of a 60-foot hill overlooking Columbine HS.
Someone had placed a 6-foot-tall wooden cross at the hill’s crest, about five blocks from the main memorial site for the 13 killed there Tuesday.
Suyama stared at the cross as if the people killed by two heavily armed students were nailed to it.
Parents have climbed the snow-covered hill to cry, lay flowers and stare at the school that slapped this area in the face.
“It’s a wake-up call to everyone,” said Suyama, 53. “Parents have to start listening to their children … I don’t think anyone was listening to those two boys.”
Investigators, witnesses and friends say the two killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, blamed their bloody rampage on others – the mainstream students who picked on them for being different.
“If you didn’t follow their [mainstream students’] way and blend in, you got slammed up against a locker,” said Joan Kelly, a coffee-shop worker, who takes the time to listen to outcast students like Dylan and Eric.
The shooting has become a reality check for some of these busy suburban parents who don’t have the time to listen to their own kids and teach them how to act around other people who are different.
Time to teach the outcasts that there are better solutions than violence.
Diane Bishop, 51, said all parents must be aware of those pressures, as she stood in front of the wooden cross weeping quietly with her son, who graduated from Columbine last year.
“I don’t think there is anyone who hasn’t had to deal with it in some capacity,” said Bishop, referring to the pressure that drove Dylan and Eric over the edge. “It’s a human thing and, yes, it’s terrible that they [Eric and Dylan] had to deal with these things.
“They are not the first or the last. And how a child reacts to it is taught at home.”
Bishop thought about her 19-year-old son’s upbringing as she stared at a National Guard military vehicle patrolling the school grounds to protect the crime scene.
Kathleen Gettel stood near the school’s tennis courts about 100 yards away from the hill with her two children, ages 11 and 4.
“All mothers in Colorado have been affected because they are lucky – it could have occurred in the school their children go to,” said Gettel, 30.
“Parents nowadays aren’t willing to put their time and effort to raise moral and respectable children who’ll be a benefit to society.”
Kathy Stassen and husband Bob Pohly delicately tucked a flower in the tennis court fence.
Stassen, 40, cried as she hugged Pohly, 50.
“This has brought us closer together,” said Pohly, describing his relationship with the couple’s six children from separate marriages.
“It has opened up the line of communication between us and the children.”
Stassen then chimed in, “When I was growing up, we always found time to sit down and have dinner together. And that is when we all talked about our day. And it makes a difference.”