A student who lived through the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado later returned to the school as a teacher.
Mandy Cooke was a sophomore when two students opened fire at the school on April 20 and killed 12 of her classmates and a teacher.
Twenty years after the shooting, she's now a teacher there.
Cooke recently sat down with former Columbine teacher Paula Reed to discuss the lasting impact of the shooting, in a StoryCorps interview that was shared by NPR.
"You know, I never wanted to come back to Columbine to teach. I know there's people out there who never stepped foot back into that building," she said. "It was hard."
Cooke didn't realize how much she was affected by being back at Columbine until a threat was made against the school.
"They put us on lockdown and I could see police coming down the street, nobody could get in or out of the neighborhood, and I was doing ok," she said. "But throughout the day, it just kept getting longer and longer. And then all these kids were like, 'Miss Cooke, what's going on?' And I said, 'You know, I don't know. But f--k this person. Whoever did this to us.' As you know, I don't curse at school. But I was pissed off."
It was a huge turning point for Cooke.
"That's that moment I went right back to my 16-year-old self. I was so broken that day, I could never envision what am I going 20 years later, or I couldn't see that far," she said. "And now looking back, I weirdly feel proud that I walk into Columbine every day. I'm doing the job that I've always wanted to do and I get to teach some of the best kids in the world."
At memorial in 2019 marking two decades since the tragedy, Cooke addressed the crowd and admitted that although it's hard to put the vivid memories of that day behind her, moving forward is the only thing she can do.
"Twenty years ago seems like a lifetime ago. At other times, it feels like yesterday... I remember feeling confused walking out of Columbine thinking we were evacuating for a fire drill," she said, according to KUNC. "Each one of us has our stories, but in the days, months and years following April 20th, 1999, we gradually found our new normal."
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