Could He Have Done More?

By John Cloud and Andrew Goldstein/Littleton

The night after principal Frank DeAngelis lost part of his school to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, he got no sleep. In such bleak hours, a man takes account, and DeAngelis wasn't sure he liked the results. "I feel so guilty," he told Jon DeStefano not long after morning came. "I failed myself and my community." Besides being a close friend, DeStefano is president of the school board. Now DeAngelis asked him, "How can you ever trust me with your students again?"

Since that night, DeAngelis has had to grope around in a darkness most of us will never know. The entire nation has wondered why Harris and Klebold did what they did, but imagine wondering whether you could have stopped it. The uncertainties of Columbine will be with DeAngelis forever.

Remarkably, though, those doubts haven't broken him. In a four-hour interview with TIME, DeAngelis said he had shaken off much of the guilt he felt that awful morning. Before he was principal, DeAngelis spent 14 years coaching football and baseball, and these days he seems like a coach again, ready for battle. "People are telling me I should have known. I'm telling you, it's inaccurate," he says. "This harassment by athletes on Eric and Dylan that has been printed time and time again--I never received a call indicating that these people were harassing them. At no time did Eric or Dylan walk into my office and say, 'Mr. DeAngelis, I'm concerned.'"

Like many principals, DeAngelis makes his school his life, a life of after-hours student baseball games and debate tournaments and art shows. These days at least, DeAngelis isn't falsely modest about this commitment: "People are saying I was out of touch with this school. I put in hours and hours and hours at extracurricular activities. I was at the play last year when Dylan was lighting specialist... Ask my wife how many hours I'm gone."

DeAngelis admits that harassment could have occurred without his knowing, without anyone complaining. Kids as troubled as Harris and Klebold aren't likely to stop making bombs one day and decide what they really should do is talk to an ex-jock principal about what's bugging them. And an alienated teen probably wouldn't expose his interior life during a well-attended extracurricular event. But DeAngelis says the official police report on Columbine, set for release in January, will show that the school wasn't a brutish place where cool kids humiliated outcasts every day.

That report may be gratifying, but the search for answers can leave you feeling empty. What progress DeAngelis has made in his search owes something to the support he has enjoyed in Littleton. The day after the massacre, he went to address students and parents at a local church. He felt uncertain, but when his name was announced, the place erupted in a spontaneous ovation. As he had in the past, DeAngelis told the students he loved them.

But DeAngelis remains frustrated. Sometimes he thinks about the final conversation he had with Dave Sanders, the teacher killed April 20. Both men had been coaches. They had been to each other's wedding, had kids around the same age. On April 19 they sat together at a baseball game, and their how-are-you chat turned more contemplative: the long hours they spent, the many challenges of working with teenagers--"Is all the time worth it?" they wondered. They both said yes then. And DeAngelis says yes now.

--By John Cloud and Andrew Goldstein/Littleton