Victim's Parents Celebrate a Life

The before-school hours of April 20 were in some ways like any other day. Daniel got his own breakfast, and Linda, a full-time mom, went through her daily spiel: Did you brush your teeth? Do you have your lunch money?

But before Daniel walked out the door for school, "He just turned around, gave me a smile and said, 'I love you,'" Linda says. "And what was really unusual is he told his sister he loved her, too."

He always told his mom he loved her. Though Daniel and his sister were close, he usually reserved an affectionate "I love you" for Christie for special occasions. But there was nothing special about April 20 - at least not then.

Hours later, Daniel was in the library when a teacher with blood on her shoulder rushed in and shouted for everyone to get under the tables. Many huddled together as they screamed and cried, hearing gunfire and voices outside the door. Daniel crouched by himself under a table in the middle of the library.

A student later told the Mausers that Daniel comforted an hysterical girl under a nearby table, telling her to "talk to God."

Then the gunmen entered the library shooting and laughing. They killed nine students and wounded many others before they came to Daniel's table. Eric Harris fired at Daniel and hit him. Wounded, Daniel pushed chairs at Eric and ran toward him. A second shot hit Daniel.

"That was the end of him," Linda says.

Then the gunmen left the library.

When the Mausers heard about the siege at the school, neither panicked right away. The earliest reports said seven people were injured. Tom went through the numbers in his head: nearly 2,000 students, seven hurt. The odds were good that Daniel was OK. And Daniel had never even been in a fistfight. Surely he wouldn't be in the middle of a gun battle.

Linda drove up Pierce Street. She always picked up Daniel and Jeremy from school and thought they would head home together if they got out of school early.

"I never dreamed the scope of it," she says.

The street was blocked and police were routing traffic to Leawood Elementary School, where hysterical parents wandered the gym looking for their kids.

Daniel wasn't there.

"I still hadn't panicked," she says. "I thought, 'I'll go home. He'll call me.'"

She picked up Christie at middle school, and the two waited. The phone kept ringing. Each time she was hopeful as she picked up the receiver, but it was only friends, neighbors and Tom asking if Daniel had called.

Tom, who manages the transit unit at the Colorado Department of Transportation, was supposed to speak at a conference in Pueblo that day. When the news out of Columbine got more grim, he drove straight to Littleton.

"I heard on the car radio that they were taking kids to hospitals," Tom says. "There was a 15-year-old boy injured, and I thought, 'This could be my son.'"

That's when panic set in.

When he got home, he and Linda decided she would wait by the phone while Tom went to Leawood. At the school he saw Jeremy with his father. Daniel wasn't with them.

"I'll never forget that vision of kids walking out of the school with their parents crying tears of joy, tears of relief," Tom says.

Later, school officials ushered the waiting families into a room full of counselors and victims' assistance workers. Then someone made an announcement that one last bus was coming.

They waited - 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes. The person who made the announcement was wrong. There was no last bus.

"It's around that time that they were asking for ..." Tom pauses and continues quietly, "information, identifying marks. I lost it."

He tried calling Linda, but the lines were jammed. He ran to his car. He was so upset and driving so erratically that a police officer pulled him over.

"He said, 'You have to get ahold of yourself. Take some deep breaths. You don't want to kill yourself,'" Tom says.

When he got home, Linda was surrounded by friends and neighbors who were trying to remain hopeful. Monica Lobser was calling hospitals to see if Daniel was there. Christie had gone to a friend's house on the block to spend the night.

Tom was mad and frustrated. No one at the school could give him answers.

Monica's husband, Greg, suggested that he, Tom and another neighbor go back to the school to see if any more information was available. But there wasn't much.

Monica Lobser remembers the shock of Tom's phone call.

"Linda answered it, and we see her grabbing the phone book, and then we heard her say, 'Here's the phone number for Daniel's dentist.' We all turned white."

Tom returned home to be with Linda.

At 11 p.m., deputies went through the school with bullhorns yelling that the coast was clear, the gunmen were dead and anybody who was hiding should come out. No one did.

Though formal confirmation didn't come until the next day, everyone knew that Daniel had died. The neighbors left so Tom and Linda could be together.

They both lay in bed and couldn't sleep. Tom was so distraught he went into the basement.

"I was crying and screaming so loud, Linda heard me," he says. "We sat there and tried to comfort each other."

The next day they walked over to the neighbor's house to get Christie.

"I'll never forget that moment," Tom says. "We just kind of looked at her, and we all started crying. And she knew."

Christie wrote a letter to her brother and left it on his pillow that night.