Victim's Parents Celebrate a Life

A four-part series about a Colorado family whose only son was murdered in the Columbine High School shootings, coverage that explored the long-term effects through survivors in Peducah and Jonesboro. Originally published in the Denver Post in June, 1999.

Peace comes slowly and surely to the Mausers.

Tom and Linda Mauser were on their way to the cemetery to bury their only son when something jolted them out of their numbness.

The morning was cold and rainy, less than a week after Daniel - innocent, gentle, shy Daniel - was killed at Columbine High School. As the funeral procession rounded a corner on C-470, the sun poked through the clouds and spotlighted a grassy area on the east side of the highway.

There they were: deer. A whole herd of them. In the middle stood a buck with majestic antlers. They must have crossed the busy highway to get there. It was as if they were looking at the Mausers.

"We are not people who have to see miracles to have faith," Tom says. "But to see deer, given Daniel's innocence and gentleness - to be a herd like that, it was amazing. It really told us that Daniel was in a better place. God took him by the hand and he was OK.''

The Mausers have held onto moments like those as they have felt their way through the painful blur of the past seven weeks, since the day two suicidal classmates of Daniel's turned Columbine into the site of the worst school shooting in U.S. history.

Their struggle to inch toward healing and forgiveness - he through public political activism and she through private mourning - is emblematic of the different ways a heartbroken community is learning to cope with the April 20 tragedy.

Shortly after his son's death, Tom emerged as a national figure, a crusader for gun-control policies. While other families withdrew, Tom took his cause to the steps of the state Capitol and the White House, carrying a sign with Daniel's boyish face on it. "My son Daniel died at Columbine. He'd expect me to be here today," the sign read.

Tom rallied to close loopholes in gun laws during the National Rifle Association's May 1 convention in Denver, and his emotional speech was televised around the world. With first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton at his side in Washington, he told America on the eve of Mother's Day: "Enough is enough." When Colorado's two U.S. senators voted against gun-control laws five days later, Tom picketed outside their offices, carrying the sign with his son's picture, now with new words: "Shame on you, Sen. Allard. Shame on you, Sen. Campbell."

Though many Americans wrote the Mausers with their prayers and condolences, a few accused Tom of being a publicity-seeking zealot, a pawn of anti-gun forces. One irate gun owner phoned the Mausers' 13-year-old daughter, Christie.

The Mausers, both 47, were worried about the family's safety. But Tom persisted.

"It was difficult because we're still grieving," he says.

"But it was something I had to do."

Linda supported Tom's activism but grieved more privately. At first she was so shattered she had a hard time getting up in the morning. It took all her strength to comfort her daughter and answer the door as neighbors brought over so many casseroles that a friend had to supply a second refrigerator.

She kept a journal and prayed. She wrote countless thank-you notes to those who donated to Daniel's memorial scholarship fund.

Now she's at a point where she's taking time each day to sort through Daniel's mementos in his bedroom - little bowls he made in preschool, stories he wrote in elementary school, a baby picture of diapered Daniel and his dad wearing Groucho Marx schnozzes. She looks at Daniel's picture every night before she goes to sleep. Often, she cries.

"You try so hard your whole life to protect your kids," Linda says. "We didn't do anything but send him off to school that day. If he'd had a car accident, we would have said, "We should have gotten him more driver's ed. We should have taught him those turns.' I just never conceived that he'd be shot in a library."

Tom gets choked up every time he walks by the family Foosball table. Daniel used to beat him all the time. Daniel knew his dad wasn't much of a challenge, but he was a good sport when his dad asked him for a game.

There are memories everywhere.

"What we have to deal with now is missing him," Tom says.

"It's not anger. It's not questioning God. It's just really, really missing him."


Part 2

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.


Part 3

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.


Part 4

Tom and Daniel used to play a game where they'd try to scare each other. Whoever caught the other more off guard got points. Daniel usually won by catching his dad at the bottom of the basement stairs. Every now and then, Tom feels like Daniel is going to pop out at the bottom of those stairs.

"Logic and reason tell me he's gone," Tom says. "But I know that in a week, or a month or a year from now, I'll still be thinking that this was a bad dream and he'll come back."

The stairway leading up to the second floor of the Mausers' Littleton home is covered with baby pictures and school portraits of Daniel and Christie. Upstairs in Daniel's room, a poster still hangs above Daniel's bed. On it, a chubby cat is frowning, standing above the words, "I AM smiling."

But the room now is filled with piles of newspapers and grocery bags stuffed with sympathy cards.

There is an empty place at the dinner table.

The Mausers are a family that eats dinner together, says grace together, goes to the movies together. They know their children's friends, their teachers.

"They are the kind of parents who know what their kids are reading, what their thoughts are on social issues, like Daniel saying there are a lot of loopholes in the Brady law," says Marlene Dallas, who introduced the Mausers to each other.

Linda went to Utah for Memorial Day weekend with Christie and Marlene just to take a break. It was an annual "girls-only" trip that they had scheduled before the tragedy.

"Under the circumstances, they all seem to be doing really well," Marlene says. "I'm no grief counselor, but I can see the different stages - alternating between the anger and the sadness and sometimes back into the shock like we all do."

The Mausers have relied on their Catholic faith. They have talked about forgiveness, but it's still a little early for that.

"No one can judge another, and I don't know what the circumstances in those boys' lives were and what they were influenced by," Linda says of the gunmen. "I can't judge that. But I can't be so glib as just to say, 'I totally forgive everything.'"

"I'm just in a place where I'm working on it."

But there are angry, lingering questions about parental responsibility.

"It's difficult for me to comprehend that one day your kid is just an average kid and the next day they're a homicidal maniac," Linda says. "It's hard for me to figure that there weren't some signposts on the way."

More than anything, Tom and Linda are focusing on celebrating Daniel's life. They feel there has been too much talk of the gunmen and not enough about the victims. They don't want Daniel to become a statistic.

"I think we gave him 15 really good years, and he gave us 15 wonderful years," Tom says. "That's what we have to reflect on."

Like some of the other families of Columbine victims, the Mausers have created a Web site - www.danielmauser.com - in their son's memory. A computerized photo album shows Daniel as a newborn in his mother's and father's arms in the delivery room, Daniel and Christie giving toothy grins as toddlers with their blond hair shining in the sun and Daniel playing video games with Jeremy.

Other sections include memories of Daniel's life, pictures of the other Columbine victims and information about fighting gun violence.

"It's one thing to lose a child in an auto accident, but this is such a public thing, and the courage Tom and Linda have shown has been so admirable," says Erik Koskinen, one of Tom's co-workers who helped design the Web site. "I really wondered if I would have shown the same courage and strength in the face of something like that."

It helps that when Tom and Linda look back on Daniel's life, they know they did the best job they could as parents.

"One comfort we have is this: I think the kid had a pretty wonderful life," Linda says.

And when the sadness seems overwhelming, the Mausers remember Daniel's innocent smile, his playfulness.

They think about the deer in the sunlight watching them from afar. And they feel peace.