Kate Battan had seen murder before. As a financial crimes-turned-homicide investigator for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department, she had seen her share of gruesome crime, despite the relative quietness of the area just outside Denver. Seeing death didn't bother her. But this kind of death was different.

Battan can't replay those first days after the shootings at Columbine High School like a movie. Instead, she sees what she describes as vignettes or photographs.

The morning after the shootings, 40-year-old Battan entered Columbine High School with two other sheriffs, a lab person and a coroner. They walked the halls in silence.

"The very first time I walked in there, it was one of the most eerie feelings I ever had in my entire life because it was quiet. And schools aren't supposed to be quiet. They're just never supposed to be quiet," Battan said.

Then she noticed the little things that were out of place. Bullet holes in lockers. Ceiling panels removed from where SWAT had investigated. Shoes kicked off by terrified students who were running to escape.

"It's just that feeling of heaviness in your feet and you're thinking, do I have to take another step?" she said.

The five entered the library, where most of the massacre took place. The image of that scene is burned in her mind.

"I'll never forget the first child that I saw. I can tell you exactly what she was wearing. She had on a pink sweater and she had on blue jeans and she had brown boots, and her hair was covering her face, and she had long, beautiful hair," Battan said.

She took a Polaroid photograph of the girl, and used a marker to label it: "# 1."

"It wasn't until probably the next day that I figured out that that was Lauren Townsend. She'll always be the first one I think of. When you read about it in the newspapers they always name them alphabetically; I name them how I met them. So Lauren Townsend will always be number one, and Kelly Fleming will always be number two, and John Tomlin will always be number three, because that's how I met them."

She would keep the Polaroids of the victims with her the for rest of the investigation, and used them to remind her why she would be dedicating the next two years of her life solely to the investigation of the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history.

"I just looked at these pictures and said, 'This is why I'm here. This is my focus,'" Battan said.

The Jefferson County Sheriff's Department had the daunting task of investigating the shootings and piecing together exactly what happened the morning of April 20, 1999 . The investigation's unit needed someone to lead it who had an obsession for detail, a drive to get answers for the victims and the passion to make it her life. Battan, who friends describe as obsessive-compulsive about detail, was the right person for the job.

For Battan, who was named lead investigator soon after the attacks occurred, the job would dramatically alter the course of her life -- and the role of law enforcement in shootings.

Battan left headquarters immediately after hearing that shots were fired at Columbine High School. She remembers the "controlled chaos" of the first hours.

Police and SWAT teams showed up within minutes of the first 911 calls. Students were fleeing. Students were trapped inside. Law enforcement heard reports of one shooter, two shooters, seven shooters and a rooftop sniper. Fire sprinklers were going off inside the school. Fire alarms were going off, causing sirens to wail and lights to flash down hallways and inside classrooms. 

A sheriff who had responded to a diversionary bomb the shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had set off about a mile away from the school just before the attack began reported that there could be motion-sensitive devices throughout the school. The whole building could be booby-trapped. Police contained the situation while they waited for SWAT to go in. But by the time SWAT entered, it was too late. 

SWAT teams entered the cafeteria, wading though the room in ankle-deep water, looking for the shooters, trying to avoid touching the hundreds of backpacks and duffel bags littered throughout the floor -- thinking any one of them might explode. SWAT had to go to every door expecting the shooters -- and nearly every door was locked, with terrified students hiding inside. They had to knock down doors and convince students that they - though dressed in black, like the shooters -- were there to take them to safety.

The teams finally found two dead students that looked like shooters in the library. And they found 10 other students who lost their lives in that room moments earlier.

In the immediate aftermath of the shootings, law enforcement focused on making the school safe. Then Battan went to work making sure that every bit of evidence remained intact. She was convinced there was another shooter who got away.

"I saw the carnage inside the school and could not imagine two people did it," she said.

Once the investigation ramped up Battan led a task force of over 80 investigators from a dozen agencies, breaking them up into seven teams. Through the next months they followed 3,900 leads, combed through 10,483 pieces of evidence and conducted over 5,000 interviews.

It took over eight months to put together, second by second, what happened April 20 and to determine whether anyone else was involved.

Battan credits her supervisor, Sgt. Randy West, for getting her through it.

"He would just grab me after a meeting and say, 'Let's go for a drive.' And he would take me to a coffee shop and say, 'Let's talk about something other than this.' Because it's all -- it's what I drank, it's what I slept, it's all I talked about," Battan said.

She says her friends got tired of hearing about the investigation -- so she just stopped talking to her friends.

"Randy would make me go have dinner with my friends," she said. "He would just say, 'Focus on this like it was any other case, because it is any other case in terms of how we do the best job we can and we try to answer all the questions that we can.'"

Time went on, and Battan started letting her friends back into her life. She took her first day off. She was briefly assigned to another homicide -- which she said was oddly refreshing -- before her supervisors pulled her off of it and said they needed her back full-time on the Columbine investigation.

Less than a year into the investigation, accusations leveled against the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department for its actions surrounding the tragedy came to a head. Several victims' families brought lawsuits, which included allegations that the Department failed to investigate warning signs from Harris and Klebold prior to the attacks and that police had botched their on-scene response. The lawsuits were all settled or dismissed, though a 2004 grand jury investigation did reveal the Department had withheld information from the public, including the existence of a 1998 draft search warrant for Harris' home that had never been filed. 

Although Battan was never directly named in a lawsuit, families no longer knew whom to trust, and several of the families refused to communicate with investigators. It was devastating to Battan, whose work was motivated by working for the victims and their families.

"I was robbed of that. I'm not blaming them -- they were doing what they needed to do," Battan said. "But in every homicide before, and every homicide since, I have personal relationships with the families of the deceased, because it's so important to me and everybody on my team ... It was a hard pill to swallow because we couldn't build those relationships. And we were starting to build them when things started to get a little crazy with all the lawsuits and it just stopped.

"I still have good relationships with several of the injured and the deceased's families, but it's almost a secret relationship, because they don't want the other families to know they're talking to me. And that's not always the case, but it's certainly kept quieter than it normally would have been," she said.

"I will never say that we were perfect, or that anything is perfect, because it isn't. We can always learn from our experiences and if we don't, shame on us. We can always learn from them," Battan said.

"But I will also always, until the day I die, be proud of the guys who went into that school and that worked on this case and the unsung heroes of this school. Until the day I die I will be proud of them."

 

On April 20, first-responding officers did what they were trained to do: seal the perimeter and contain the situation until SWAT arrived. But by the time SWAT entered the school, it was too late.

Because of what happened at Columbine, the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office was instrumental in creating a new response plan for street cops during active shooting situations. The Jefferson County and Los Angeles SWAT teams helped establish RAID training for police - rapid and immediate deployment - which trains street cops in SWAT tactics when dealing with active shooters.

Now law enforcement agencies around the country no longer "contain the situation" -- they go directly after the bad guy.

It's part of the good that's been done after Columbine, Battan says, which also includes changes in laws, school policies and other legislation.

Battan knows the Columbine case will define her work until she retires. She says she has answered all that can be answered: Harris and Klebold acted alone. Their killing rampage lasted just 17 minutes. In it, they killed a teacher and 12 students. A few minutes later, they killed themselves.

The boys had intended to kill hundreds. But many of their explosive devices didn't detonate: Neither of the propane tanks bombs Harris and Klebold placed in the student cafeteria went off as planned, which would have likely killed all 458 students inside.

Both Klebold and Harris' cars, which were booby-trapped to explode once paramedics, media, and law enforcement personnel had gathered in the parking lot, failed to explode as well.

The day was a massive failure for them. That much Battan knows.

But she can never answer why it happened.

She still works for victims' families during homicide investigations. Columbine didn't change that. But in every investigation before or since then, her relationship with the families has been the touchstone of her work.

Her interactions with the Columbine victims' families that she does talk to now are bittersweet and sad because she's reminded of what they lost. She'll see some of them around town, or they'll call her to clarify something about the case. She doesn't want to intrude on their lives, so she waits for them to reach out to her.

She hopes she can rekindle the relationships with some of the victims' families that were lost early on.

"In terms of those relationships with the families that were damaged, I would sit down with them tomorrow. I would sit down with them 10 years from now," she said.

She said the 10-year anniversary will be a day of reflection.

"April 20th will always be a hard day for me," Battan said. "I don't think the numbers, whether it's one year, or 10 years, or 100 years is going to make a difference."