For more than 25 years, these facts haven’t changed: 13 people — 12 students and a teacher — were killed in a shooting at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.
But on Sunday, the death toll grew when Anne Marie Hochhalter, one of 22 people wounded at Columbine, was found dead in her Colorado home. Paralyzed from the waist down since the shooting, Hochhalter, 43, is believed to have succumbed to medical complications stemming from her injuries.
Hochhalter’s life since the shooting had been consumed with staying ahead of persistent, debilitating nerve pain, a vestige of the two bullets that struck her when she was 17. “My co-workers make fun of me because I’m popping all the pills all the time,” she told The Trace in 2016. Her profile was the first entry in a series about gunshot survivors and the hurdles they face. Some are left with lifelong injuries — and some, like Hochhalter, eventually die of them.
Last September, 18 years after a shooting in an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania left five children dead and four others wounded, Rosanna King, 23, died of her injuries, marking the tragedy’s sixth death. She had been shot in the head in the 2006 attack and relied on others for her care and mobility. Baba Punjab Singh, 72, died in 2020 of wounds he sustained in the 2012 Sikh temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, which had killed six others. The 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas claimed its 59th and 60th victims in 2019 and 2020, when Kimberly Gervais and Samanta Arjune died of what law enforcement officials refer to as a “delayed death.”
The most well-known case of a delayed death from gunshot wounds is probably James Brady, the White House press secretary who was wounded in the 1981 attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life. The shooting left Brady partially paralyzed, and he needed continuous home nursing care before his death in 2014. These are high-profile examples, but any shooting can result in a delayed death. A “nonfatal” shooting doesn’t always retain that designation.
When someone dies decades after they were shot, the culprit is often infection, a Chicago official told me in 2017, when I was looking into the delayed gunshot deaths of two men in the city. Other complications include pneumonia, blood clots, and osteomyelitis, a bone infection common in paralysis patients that can spread to the bloodstream.
Once the medical examiner makes a determination, we’ll know for sure whether Anne Marie Hochhalter’s death was a direct result of the 1999 shooting. What is certain is that her life was derailed by it. “She can’t work full-time, often has to cancel plans with friends, can sleep only in snatches,” former Trace reporter Elizabeth Van Brocklin wrote in 2016. Hochhalter said she feared the pain would eventually kill her.
Last spring, we co-produced a podcast that sought to explain how guns became America’s political third rail, and we opened the first episode with the Columbine shooting. The high school’s principal at the time, Frank DeAngelis, told us that he began every day by reciting the names of those who died that day, referring to them as “my beloved 13.”
Now it’s 14.
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