While Columbine High School shooting survivor Anne Marie Hochhalter’s life was shaped by tragedy, the tenacious woman worked hard to ensure tragedy did not define her.
Hochhalter was 17 when her life shifted from teen clarinet player to among the most injured survivors of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. The high school junior was paralyzed after being shot in the back. She spent the rest of her days in a wheelchair with medical complications.
Six months after the shooting, her mother, Carla Hochhalter, walked into a pawnshop, asked to see a revolver and fatally shot herself.
Amid the media frenzy, medical care and grief, Anne Marie Hochhalter was determined to live life on her own terms. She went on to find her new normal, living independently in a handicap-accessible home with dogs to love and friends to cherish.
Anne Marie Hochhalter, 43, was found dead in her home Sunday.
Her death appears to be complications from the medical issues she suffered from the shooting, said Sue Townsend, stepmother of Lauren Townsend who died in the Columbine shooting. Sue and Rick Townsend reached out to Anne Marie Hochhalter after the tragedy and formed a familial relationship with her, calling her their “acquired daughter.”
“She was fiercely independent,” Sue Townsend said. “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.”
The families, united by tragedy, found joy within each other’s understanding, caring nature. They spent holidays and vacations together and developed a unique, intimate bond knitted together by wounds few else could understand.
“She was fun,” Sue Townsend said.
In 2018, they all took a Hawaii trip and rigged an innertube so Anne Marie Hochhalter could float in the ocean, her legs dangling in the water.
“She said the two hours she was out there she didn’t have any nerve pain at all,” Sue Townsend said. “The ocean was her happy place even though she didn’t get to go there but once.”
Nathan Hochhalter, Anne Marie Hochhalter’s brother, said his big sister was always a straight ‘A’ student who loved learning and reading. She had an affinity for musical instruments, playing harp, piano, clarinet and guitar.
“And she loved her mom a lot,” Nathan Hochhalter said.
Animals — particularly furry, four-legged friends — filled a huge part of Anne Marie Hochhalter’s heart.
She fostered dogs and owned several over the years, doting on them.
“She could probably name every dog in the neighborhood but maybe not the neighbors,” Sue Townsend said, laughing.
Two neighbors, Jan and Dave Anderson, who were a part of Anne Marie Hochhalter’s village, are taking her beloved chiweenie dog, Georgie.
Though Anne Marie Hochhalter was often in pain, she found escape in cinema. Sometimes, she and her friends would call each other, turn on a movie at the same time and watch it silently together over the phone, Sue Townsend said.
More than anything, Sue Townsend said Anne Marie Hochhalter would have wanted people to know she wasn’t a victim.
Her resilience, Sue Townsend said, was driven in part by stubbornness.
“It was this attitude of ‘I’ll show you,’” she said. “‘You’re not going to get me down.’”
In 2016, Anne Marie Hochhalter wrote a letter to the mother of Dylan Klebold who, along with Eric Harris, killed twelve students and one teacher in a shooting rampage at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.
The letter to Sue Klebold coincided with an ABC television interview promoting her book “A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy.”
In the letter, Anne Marie Hochhalter told Sue Klebold she harbored no ill will toward her.
“Just as I wouldn’t want to be judged by the sins of my family members, I hold you in that same regard,” Hochhalter wrote. “It’s been a rough road for me, with many medical issues because of my spinal cord injury and intense nerve pain, but I choose not to be bitter towards you. A good friend once told me, ‘Bitterness is like swallowing a poison pill and expecting the other person to die.’ It only harms yourself. I have forgiven you and only wish you the best.”
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