Couple faces life after shooting
They reconnected at Thurston High School, and when they started dating in 1998, they were a hot item: He was the towering athlete. She was slender, with blond hair and blue-green eyes. Jake and Jen camped together, clung to each other like Velcro, held hands all the way through "Titanic."
Then everything changed, four years ago yesterday. Freshman Kip Kinkel walked into their school, shot and killed two students and wounded 25 others.
She was shot through the hand, torso and chin. He tackled the gunman and, with the help of five other boys, disarmed him. He was also shot in the chest.
"I wondered, will their relationship survive the trauma?" said Zane Wilson, Jake's pastor at Springfield Lutheran Church. "Here Jake is, getting this kind of attention, this kind of adulation, this kind of hero worship. Is Jennifer going to be able to live with all this?"
At 6-foot-5, Jake was all rough-and-tumble, tight jeans and muscle T-shirts, but alone with Jen he dropped the macho act to say, "Here's what's going on in my life."
By the spring of 1998, they were in love. On the morning of May 21, in fact, Jen was conspiring to crash Jake's 17th birthday party. She chatted up friends in the cafeteria while he worked close by on homework.
Then they heard a pop-pop-pop-pop and students started falling around them.
They no longer dwell on that day. "You start to not necessarily move on, but you recognize that your life can't be lived constantly in the past," Jen says.
After the shootings, Jen lay incapacitated in a hospital bed. She couldn't see or speak. "Am I going to die?" she asked, in a scribbled note.
Jake was at another hospital. They communicated by fax.
Upon his release, Jake went immediately to her bedside.
Darker times followed. Jake struggled with his image as a hero. He blamed himself for failing to save a close friend and didn't see his actions as sensational.
Yet people kept demanding that he play the part.
Wilson, the pastor, recalled a visit Jake and his brother, Josh, made to Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma.
"As I'm watching, a little kid — probably 16 or 17 — he just kind of walked up, and he stood behind some of these guys, and then he kind of sidled around, and the whole time he's watching Jake, and finally he gets over and he just reached out" — Wilson extends his arm reverently — "and put his hand on him, and then pulled it back, and walked away.
Jen was also in turmoil. She lost most of the use of two fingers on her right hand. When people asked, she had to recount the entire traumatizing experience.
She was plagued by survivor guilt.
Jake and Jen also faced the pressure to graduate and chart a course for the future. Then in April 1999, two boys walked into a Colorado high school and started shooting, pulling Jake and Jen back into the madness of a year earlier.
She talked of suicide but found her solace in Jake. They consoled and counseled each other over long walks and painful discussions.
"We had each other to lean on," Jake says, "so we were going to be OK."
Emotional dilemmas and life choices rained down steadily on Jake and Jen, from Thurston to Columbine to the possibility of her taking a job on the East Coast to his enlistment in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves.
Similarly, Diana says, when Jen was offered a TV news internship back East, Jake bit his lip and encouraged her to take it. But she had found something more important: a selfless companion.
He proposed three years ago, while they were alone in her parents' living room.
Wilson married them last October.
On some days, they feel they have been robbed of their time to be young, happy and foolish.
But they found each other along the way. And together, they can sometimes turn back the clock.