For DiManna, the moments after she heard screaming followed like this: A teacher pulled a fire alarm to evacuate the building. Her sister, Kim, who was a senior, found her and DiManna told her to leave — but she did not do so herself until after helping evacuate the math department’s classrooms.

DiManna found her sister again outside, where they saw an injured student near a stoplight before going into a house across the street, which is where she called her husband.

Residents opening their doors to students and staff fleeing the shooting isn’t the only thing DiManna remembers. She also recalls youth ministries helping care for students in the days that followed no matter whether they were members of their churches or not.

“I don’t know how many communities could take care of kids as ours did,” she said.

At the time, the shooting at Columbine was the deadliest at a K-12 school in U.S. history. There hadn’t yet been massacres at schools in Newtown, Connecticut, Parkland, Florida, or Uvalde, Texas.

In other words, there weren’t many people who knew what the survivors of the school shooting experienced and how it would affect them in the years that followed. They couldn’t understand how, for Columbine survivors, routine fire drills can be a trigger, how lockdown drills can create a panic, or how each year when April rolls around, so, too, comes anxiety about what might happen, DiManna said.

That’s also why DiManna stayed at Columbine. The support that the community provides didn’t end 25 years ago, she said.

Christy, the school’s principal, checks on the staff members who were at Columbine in 1999 each time there’s another school shooting or something else happens that could upset them, DiManna said.

“We just pick each other up,” she said. “You always knew if you were having one of those days, or something happened, you had someone to talk to.”

The reason DiManna returned to Columbine after the shooting is also simple.

“I wanted to teach,” she said.

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