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NOAH ADAMS, host:
This is NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Noah Adams.
President Clinton has offered $1 1/2 million in federal aid to help pay for funerals, medical expenses, lost wages and counseling for those affected by Tuesday's shooting in Littleton, Colorado. Our colleague Linda Wertheimer is there, has spent the past two days talking with people who lived through the massacre.
LINDA WERTHEIMER REPORTING:
Littleton is on Denver's southern edge. Once an agricultural community, it's now a substantial suburb with housing developments sprawled over what not so long ago was rangeland. Lockheed Martin and America West are nearby, as is every big-box suburban store, every franchise restaurant -- everything prosperous Americans spend money on is for sale in one of Littleton's many malls arrayed along commuter routes. The town is filled with families and children. Columbine, the high school, named for Colorado's state flower, has nearly 2,000 students. Beth and Alex Lagerborg sent all three of their sons to Columbine. Their youngest, Andrew, is a junior. On Tuesday, Beth Lagerborg had a day of business meetings planned with out-of-town publishers. Her husband, Alex, an investment manager, had one meeting and planned to take the rest of the day off.
MR. ALEX LAGERBORG: We had completed that meeting, and I was driving back, and I thought that, well, there's some things I want to look at at Wal-Mart. You know, I like Wal-Mart.
WERTHEIMER: Drew's day at Columbine started in a normal way. Drew's a big guy; he played football and he lifts weights.
ANDREW LAGERBORG: I have weights class first on my list. I had math and then I had English class and then history, you know, one's chemistry, and then I just heard a huge explosion from where I was. At first I thought it was like a live experiment gone wrong, you know, by one of the teachers, and I thought it might have been a senior prank. So some people ran out into the hall and then they ran back in because they're like, `A gunman's out in the hall.' So now two rooms kind of like interlocked. There's--the computer room right next to the chemistry room, so a lot of people ran into that room and tried to go...