Day to die, victims taunted

DENVER - A kid in a white shirt heaved something up on to the high school roof, and it exploded in billowing smoke. Student Don Arnold thought it was just a lunchtime prank, a firecracker maybe.

Then bodies started falling.

"One boy was running and suddenly his ankle just puffed up in blood," said Arnold, aged 16. "A girl was running and her head popped open." A bullet had slammed into her skull.

They were the first victims in yesterday's bloody late-morning shooting spree at Columbine High School in affluent Denver suburb of Littleton.

Arnold's girlfriend, Lindsay Hamilton, 15, was inside the school studying for a biology test when she heard shots and explosions.

"It's a good day to die," she said someone yelled at one point. "We want everyone to die."

By early today 15 bodies had been recovered - nine boys, three girls and one adult. Twenty people lay critically ill in hospital, but police fear more victims may lie inside the booby-trapped school.

Hours after the shooting - by two teen killers clad in balaclavas and trench coats who giggled as they sprayed bullets at their fellow students - Columbine High was rocked by two explosions.

Bomb disposal experts were combing the classrooms last night, and had recovered more than a dozen handmade devices, including pipe bombs.

A pipe bomb was also found at the home of one of the killers, whose bodies lay in the library after what police say was a "suicide mission," possibly timed to coincide with Adolf Hitler's birthday.

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were found dead in a room littered with the corpses of mostly ethnic-minority students and popular athletes. The unpopular students were Goths, part of a "Trenchcoat Mafia" who dressed in long, black coats decorated with Nazi insignia.

Many students were in the cafeteria queuing for an early lunch when the shooting began. Food server Karen Nielsen heard someone yell, "Get down!"

Hearing shots from outside, she rushed to a window and saw three bodies.

"I was on automatic," she said. "It was just, `Get to the wounded'."

One of the boys felled outside the cafeteria door had been shot in the face, another was shot in the back. The third looked dead.

Karen Nielsen ran back inside and called 911. But two hours ticked by before police entered the school.

"We had initial people there right away, but we couldn't get in," said Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone. "We were way outgunned."

Students described their attackers as heavily armed - with semi-automatic weapons and an assault rifle, some said - and one student said they appeared to have hand grenades.

When the attackers strode into the cafeteria, said 15-year-old Chris Donnelly, "everyone was trying to crawl at first, but then someone got up and ran, and everybody was running. I saw someone bleeding on the floor."

Other students holed up in classrooms for up to four hours. Eventually they were led out - around puddles of blood - by Swat teams.

Karen Nielsen fled the cafeteria for the teachers' toilets, where a handful of staff cringed as the attackers banged on other doors, shouting, "We know you're in there."

The shooting receded as the gunmen headed towards the library.

Hours later, after police combed through every abandoned backpack and gym satchel for explosives, Sheriff Stone's team reached the library, where the majority of the dead were found.

"It was one of the last rooms we entered, and it was the most gruesome." - AP