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Columbine survivor’s death ruled a homicide, 26 years after shooting

By Carol McKinley March 13, 2025 | updated 5 months ago

The Columbine High School shooters claimed their 14th victim last month in the opinion of those who were close to Anne Marie Hochhalter.

And now officially, according to the Jefferson County Coroner.

For 26 years, everyone knew that 12 students and a teacher died on April 20, 1999, the day of the Columbine massacre. 

However, that death toll changed on Thursday as the Jefferson County Coroner declared Anne Marie Hochhalter’s February death a homicide.  

“The manner of death is best classified as homicide,” according to the report.

Doctors who operated on her wounded liver, lungs and diaphragm were overjoyed that she survived — describing the odds of her recovering as “a million-to-one.”

Hochhalter, who was paralyzed from the waist down after being shot twice, died because of sepsis, with complications of paraplegia due to two gunshot wounds considered a significant contributing factor, according to the autopsy.

“If she had not been injured at Columbine, barring any kind of catastrophic events, in my view it’s no different than being killed in a circumstance not related to the gunshot,” said her brother, Nathan Hochhalter. “In my opinion, it’s safe to say she’s the fourteenth victim.”

The 43-year-old was one of 23 people injured in the Columbine massacre, but her wounds were especially catastrophic. 

In an April 20, 2022, Facebook post explaining what happened to her that day, Hochhalter recalled a “tunnel surrounded by a brilliant golden light” as she came close to death. She wrote that as she lay dying on the sidewalk, paralyzed by two bullets, she survived a pipe bomb that exploded over her head and said that  gunshots that came from the second-floor library windows missed her and a hero paramedic who saved her life. 

She was outspoken during her post-Columbine 26 years, adamant that the names of the gunman should never be mentioned. 

At lunchtime, Hochhalter was shot in the back and chest by a semi-automatic TEC-9 as she ate with friends in the Columbine High School cafeteria. According to the FBI report, two students entered the school at 11:19 a.m. and started shooting and setting off explosives. They had researched and found that this was when the lunchroom was the most crowded.

By 11:35 a.m., 13 were dead and by noon, the shooters had killed themselves in the upstairs library.

Hochhalter and her little brother, Nathan — who was a freshman at Columbine and was in a science classroom when the bullets started flying — recently reignited their relationship, which “delighted her” said a family friend, Sue Townsend, whose step-daughter, Lauren, was killed in the library. 

Nathan Hochhalter said that he and Anne Marie just wanted to live normal lives despite the fact that the shootings defined a “super weird” situation.

“She was a survivor and she would say that she didn’t want to be inspirational but she was,” he said. 

 

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Carol McKinley

Reporter

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