By COLLEEN SLEVIN (Associated Press)
DENVER (AP) — Shortly after she got away from the Columbine High School shooting, 14-year-old Missy Mendo slept with her parents, still in the shoes she wore when she ran from her math class, to be ready to run again.
Twenty-five years later, and now a mother herself, Mendo still feels the trauma from that terrible day.
It caught up to her when 60 people were shot dead at a country music festival in Las Vegas, a city she visited often while working in the casino industry. Then again in 2022, when 19 students and two teachers were shot and killed in Uvalde, Texas.
Mendo was filling out her daughter’s pre-kindergarten application when news of the elementary school shooting broke. She read a few lines of a news story about Uvalde, then put her head down and cried.
“It felt like nothing changed,” she recalls thinking.
In the quarter-century since two gunmen at Columbine shot and killed 12 classmates and a teacher in suburban Denver — an attack shown on live TV that marked the start of the modern era of school shootings — the traumas of that day have continued to affect Mendo and others who were there.
Some required years to see themselves as Columbine survivors even though they weren't physically wounded. However, things like fireworks could still bring back upsetting memories. The aftershocks, often ignored before mental health struggles were more widely recognized, caused some survivors to experience insomnia, drop out of school, or distance themselves from their spouses or families.
Survivors and other community members plan to attend a candlelight vigil on the steps of the state’s capitol Friday night, the eve of the shooting’s anniversary.
April is particularly difficult for Mendo, 39, who struggles each year. She arrives early to dentist appointments, misplaces her keys, and forgets to close the refrigerator door.
She relies on therapy and the support of an expanding group of shooting survivors she met through The Rebels Project, a support group started by other Columbine survivors following a 2012 shooting when a gunman killed 12 people at a movie theater in the nearby suburb of Aurora. Mendo began seeing a therapist after her child’s first birthday, at the suggestion of fellow survivor moms.
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