Victim's Parents Celebrate a Life

Tom Mauser has a favorite story about Daniel from his 5th birthday party. A heavy rain hastened the party's end. Mom and Dad were exhausted. Daniel still had energy. He held up a game he received as a gift and asked his dad if they could play it.

"I said, 'Why don't we save this for a rainy day?'" Tom says. "He looked at me and said, 'But, dad, it is a rainy day.'"

Daniel, at age 15, was a thinker, an adolescent intellectual. He read Time magazine and watched "60 Minutes." A straight-A student, he loved to collect facts and had a precocious way of dissecting political and social issues, a skill that helped him on the debate team.

Just a few weeks before the shooting, he told his father there were a lot of loopholes in the Brady gun-control bill. That conversation has buoyed his father's activism.

"I used to kind of tease him and tell him that he was like an encyclopedia," Linda says.

Daniel loved games - board games, computer games, video games. When he got a new one, he devoured the fine-print directions.

"He'd read it all and then he'd just annoy all the kids on the block and say, 'Now on page seven, it says this,'" Linda says, laughing.

Sometimes it wasn't easy being so smart and shy. He was comfortable chatting with his adult neighbors but had a hard time with school-yard cliques. Rather than eat lunch with the rest of the students in middle school, he played chess in a classroom with his next-door neighbor, Monica Lobser, who worked as the school's gifted and talented coordinator. Lobser knew Daniel as the playful boy who she watched grow up, a boy who explained to her son what T-cells were and confided to her how sad he was when his cat, Alfred, died.

"Because he was so bright, so gifted, those kids aren't always appreciated and understood," Lobser says.

Daniel had a best friend - Jeremy Baker, inseparable since the fifth grade. They played games together and had sleep-overs at each others' houses.

"When we were little, he used to know a lot of things that I didn't know," Jeremy says. "We'd be laying there ready to go to bed, and I'd ask him a question, and he'd take an hour to explain it to me. One night I asked him about black holes. I said I didn't really understand how they worked. We stayed up really late and he explained it."

But when Jeremy wasn't around, Daniel kept to himself at school.

In fact, at the time of the shooting Daniel was supposed to be in the cafeteria, where all the students escaped. Because he didn't have any friends in the 'A' lunch period, he often ate his lunch quickly and retreated to the library to read magazines or study. And the library was the wrong place to be on April 20.

Though Daniel was shy, he pushed himself: He joined the debate team, which made him speak in public. He wasn't athletic, but he signed up for the track team. His teammates say he wasn't the fastest runner, but he always smiled as he ran.

Daniel wasn't ashamed to hug his mom in public.

"He was a very gentle, peaceful person," Linda says. "I kind of worried about him because I saw he was a little naive."

Linda worried about Daniel when he went away with the French Club on a trip to Paris in March. But he had a great time. Before he left he asked his mom what he should bring her. She said French chocolates.

Instead he brought her a silver cross.

Daniel's favorite place in France was not one of the typical tourist sights. He was enamored with Mont Saint Michel, a monastery off the coast.

"I thought, here's a kid who goes off to France and stays with a family and sees all these sights, and this very quiet, spiritual place was his favorite place," says Marlene Dallas, Daniel's godmother.

Daniel's mom helped him put a scrapbook together of all the pictures he took in France. He was going to use the photos in a presentation about the trip the day he died.