Isaiah Schoels

Isaiah Shoels (1980-1999), student. Isaiah Eamon Shoels was the second of five children born to a Denver record label executive and his wife. He underwent open heart surgery at the age of seven months to repair a congenital heart defect, and doctors warned that he might not live to the age of five. Despite a childhood of heart-related ailments, he played on his junior high school football team and on the school weightlifting team at Columbine High School in the Denver suburbs. Although Isaiah was only 4’11” and 120 pounds, he set a school record by bench pressing twice his weight. His father later stated that “Isaiah was a winner. He was a pretty rounded kid. That’s why I call him my small warrior. He was small in stature, but he had a big heart.” He and his younger brother were among less than two dozen black students in the school, and he experienced some racial troubles, but he was generally well liked by most. Isaiah also played the keyboard and planned to attend the Denver Arts Institute after graduation with an ultimate goal of becoming a record producer.

In the spring of his senior year, his classmates Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who had been treated for mental illness and been bullied by other students, decided to make a name for themselves. Shortly before noon on 20 April 1999, the duo entered Columbine High with guns and improvised explosive devices. Isaiah was in the library working on a school paper when the shooting began and took cover under a table. Some accounts state that Klebold and Harris yelled “Where’s that little nigger?” as they entered the library, while others state that Klebold discovered his hiding place and called out to Harris, “Reb! There’s a nigger over here.” Both boys offered additional racial taunts before Harris shot Isaiah in the chest, killing him instantly. He was ultimately the sixth of thirteen people to die, not including the two killers, who committed suicide; these deaths and the twenty-seven injuries made the Columbine High School Massacre the fifth-deadliest school killing in American history and the deadliest at a high school. Evidence later emerged that Isaiah, the only black victim, had been targeted not only because of his race but because he was popular and a student-athlete. Nearly 7,000 people attended his funeral in Denver, where he lay in the cap and gown that he would have worn less than a month later at his graduation. At the services, the governor of Colorado declared “We have to resolve to do everything we can, no matter what our color, no matter what our religion, no matter what school we go to, no matter what we have done in the past, that we do what we can to try to say no more.” His parents undertook a speaking tour entitled “Let’s Stomp Out the Hate Before It’s Too Late” before eventually moving to Texas. Investigators quickly learned that Harris and Klebold had illegally purchased several guns, persuaded a friend to buy others for them (they were not yet eighteen), and had illegally modified their weapons for greater concealment, while one of the sellers had failed to keep proper records of the transaction. Despite numerous calls for stronger gun control laws and more effective policies to deal with mental illness, particularly among young males, few concrete steps towards prevention were taken by state or federal legislatures. In the years since Isaiah Shoels’ death, numerous additional mass killings have occurred at schools, theaters, and other locations throughout the country.

©David Brodnax, Sr.