Decades after the massacre at Columbine High School, one of the survivors who had been shot on that fateful day has died.
Anne Marie Hochhalter was 43 years old.
Hochhalter was 17 when she was wounded in the 1999 school shooting, The Denver Post reported. The high school junior and clarinet player was shot in the back and was paralyzed.
She lived the past 25 years, as the newspaper said, “on her own terms.”
Frank DeAngelis, who was Columbine’s principal in 1999, said that Hochhalter died of natural causes Sunday at her home, KUSA reported.
The mother of one of the students killed at Columbine said that Hochhalter’s death appeared to be complications from medical issues she had from the shooting, the Post reported.
Sue Townsend, whose daughter Lauren was killed, called Hochhalter her and her husband’s “acquired daughter.”
“She was fiercely independent,” Townsend told the Post. “She was a fighter. She’d get knocked down — she struggled a lot with health issues that stemmed from the shooting — but I’d watch her pull herself back up. She was her best advocate and an advocate for others who weren’t as strong in the disability community.”
Six months after the Columbine shooting, Hochhalter’s mother, who had bipolar disorder, took her own life after asking to look at a gun in a pawn shop and then turning it on herself, KCNC reported.
Hochhalter would speak out against shootings and in support of victims, including appearing at a 2012 vigil for those killed in the Aurora theater shooting and an assembly in 2018 at Standley Lake High School, speaking about school safety, according to KUSA.
Last year, Hochhalter posted on Facebook for the 25th anniversary of Columbine and said that she attended the vigil honoring that day and that she had “truly been able to heal my soul since that awful day in 1999.”
Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot and killed 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves, KCNC reported.
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