“From Surviving the Unthinkable to Unraveling a Legacy: The Inspiring Life of Columbine Victim Anne Marie Hochhalter”
Complications of her paraplegia were a “significant contributing factor” in her death, according to an autopsy report from the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office in Colorado. In the 13-page report, forensic pathologist Dr. Dawn B. Holmes concluded, “The manner of death is best classified as homicide.”
And with that, the two long-dead teenagers responsible for the Columbine shooting — Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris — have claimed another victim.
Anne Marie Hochhalter’s Life After Columbine
Public DomainSecurity footage of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre.
On April 20, 1999, Klebold and Harris took the lives of 12 of their fellow students and one teacher at Columbine High School. The student gunmen then took their own lives before police entered the building.
As NBC News reports, Anne Marie Hochhalter was 17 at the time of the massacre, a junior who was eating lunch with her friends when she was shot in the chest and back. The wounds she suffered left her paralyzed from the waist down and suffering from chronic pain for the rest of her life.
Personal Photo/WTOL 11Hochhalter (center) was paralyzed from the waist down and suffered from chronic pain after Columbine.
But Columbine wasn’t the only tragedy Hochhalter faced that year. Just six months after the school shooting, her mother Carla June Hochhalter, who had already been struggling with depression before the Columbine attack, walked into a pawnshop and took her own life with a loaded shotgun she’d been examining. Her daughter never fully recovered from the loss.
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