9 students wounded in Columbine High massacre graduate

GREENWOOD VILLAGE, Colo. - Nine students wounded in the worst school shooting in U.S. history, including two left partially paralyzed, graduated yesterday in Columbine High School's class of 2000.

Richard Castaldo, one of the students paralyzed in the attack, was relieved to receive his diploma.

"Man, there were a couple of good times," Castaldo said this week. "But I'm just glad it's over."

An estimated 5,000 people filed into an outdoor concert venue in this suburb south of Denver for the ceremony, which marked the end of another tragic year for the school and community.

The crowd included parents, teachers, relatives and students from other area high schools.

About 435 students received diplomas in the two-hour ceremony, closed to reporters and the public at the request of students and teachers.

Columbine seniors Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher before committing suicide April 20, 1999.

Several tragedies followed the massacre in the past year.

In October, the mother of Anne-Marie Hochhalter, a student partially paralyzed in the massacre who graduated yesterday, killed herself. In February, in a case that remains unsolved, Columbine students Nicholas Kunselman, 15, and his girlfriend, Stephanie Hart Grizzell, 16, were shot to death while on a date at a sandwich shop. And one week after the first anniversary of the shootings, the school's star basketball player, Greg Barnes, who had watched his coach fatally shot a year earlier, hanged himself.

Yesterday's ceremony followed a Friday event in which three Columbine students seriously wounded in the attack met some of the people who donated blood to save their lives.

Mike Fernandez has donated 18 gallons of blood in his 46 years because he had a cousin with leukemia. His blood went to Hochhalter.

"I owe them my life," Hochhalter said. "I feel very privileged."