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Columbine High School 911 Calls
With the growing popularity of mobile phones, many people were able to place calls from inside the school during the shootings. Others used hall payphones and office phones to call 911, family and friends. All around the school, neighbors called the police to alert them to the tragedy unfolding. Call after call flooded the emergency lines. The most chilling of the lot: A call made by an injured substitute teacher calling from the library just before the shooters entered and started killing people. The following is taken directly from the F.B.I. report, which was marked by the F.B.I. as Classified material on 07-16-99. It was Declassified on 01-15-02. Misspellings are as they appear in the original report.
F.B.I. report excerpt about the Library 911 call:
"On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot and
killed twelve students and one teacher at Columbine High School Littleton,
Colorado. During the incident, teacher Patty Nielson placed a call to
911 Emergency. Neilson was in the library when she placed the call. The
911 operator answered the call stating "911" AT 11:27:47 a.m. The phone
call lasted 26 minutes. During the call, noises including
gunshots, explosions, screaming, and yelling can be heard. The initial backround
noises heard come from the hallway just outside of the library. Four minutes
and ten seconds into the call, Harris and Klebold entered the Library
and begin shooting. They left the Library eleven minutes and forty-five
minutes into the call. The remaining gunshots and explosions heard on
the tape occur in the Cafeteria, Science classroom area or the hallways
of the school."
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The audio clip from the Library 911 call cuts off right after the shooters enter the library. If you listen closely you can hear their voices in the background, toward the end of the clip. Refer to the transcript to see what they are saying as it's difficult to understand on the recording.
FAQ - The audio clip from the Library call that's hosted here is the longest clip publicly available. While a longer copy does exist, it has never been released to the public and probably won't ever be, due to the fact that people were being killed while the dispatcher was still recording the call.
Below are linked several files having to do with Patti's 911 call, as well as other calls placed by individuals who were inside Columbine High School during the shootings. The content is rather disturbing - look and listen with care.
Columbine High library 911 phone call from Patricia "Patti" Nielson
+ Audio File: Patti Nielson's 911 call from the library
This call was made from the library right before Dylan and Eric entered it for the first time. The call lasted about 20 minutes though Patti was only on the phone for about 4 minutes of it. The rest of the recording is the sound of the shooters destroying the library and killing people. This wav clip captures only the first 37 seconds of the call.
+ Audio/Video File: Patti Nielson's 911 call from the library - "full" version
40.1 mb - right-click and save to your desktop
This file starts at the beginning of Patti's call and goes for over 4 minutes, ending when the shooters enter the library. Someone subtitled it so you can read what's being said when it gets hard to understand due to the sound gunfire and smoke alarms going off. Unfortunately not all of the subtitling is accurate: If you want to read what was really said, refer to the transcripts linked below.
+ Transcript of Patti Nielson's 911 call from the library*
Documents the call the injured teacher made up to the point when the shooters entered the library. Hearing what the teens were shouting and having already been shot at once, Patti left the phone laying on the floor and crawled off to find a better hiding place where she stayed for several hours.
+ Minute-by-minute F.B.I. transcript
Picks up where the last transcript leaves off. This is the portion of the call that has not been released to the public, in audio format. Time-stamped and denotes which victim was shot when. Ends when the shooters leave the library.
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* Transcripts provided by Associated Press
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