Students play basketball on Dave Sanders Court at Fountain Central High School. Sanders, a 1969 graduate, was the teacher killed in the Columbine High School massacre 20 years ago.
A plaque recognizing Dave Sanders hangs outside the gym of Fountain Central High School, where Sanders graduated in 1969.
VEEDERSBURG — When Greg Lighty goes to a basketball game at Fountain Central Jr.-Sr. High School, he doesn’t buy a ticket until spending a moment with one of his best friends.
Outside the gym, he pauses at the memorial plaque for Dave Sanders, the teacher killed in the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado 20 years ago on Saturday, and taps the etching of his senior portrait.
“It’s my way of saying hello,” Lighty said.
Sanders, who grew up in Newtown, is remembered for herding as many as hundreds of students away from the gunfire as the shooting began before he was struck by bullets. He bled to death in a classroom surrounded by students who used their own shirts as tourniquets.
The massacre claimed the lives of 13 students and injured 24 others, becoming the nation’s deadliest high school shooting until the rampage in Parkland, Florida, in 2018. The two gunmen killed themselves.
“The distance between Littleton and Newtown narrowed this week,” read a Journal Review editorial days after the shooting, as Fountain Central lowered its flags to half-staff and a local state representative drafted a resolution proclaiming Sanders a hero.
But another small Midwestern community was bound by the grief. Sanders was born in Eldorado, Illinois, and moved to Fountain County as a young child after his father’s death.
At Fountain Central, he went out for basketball, baseball and cross country, bonding with Lighty over a love for sports. The friends became inseparable, going on double dates with girlfriends and shooting hoops in the Veedersburg park.
“I call Dave one of my best friends, but I think the whole school thought Dave was their best friend because that’s how special he was,” said Lighty, who graduated in 1970, a year after Sanders.
During Sanders’s senior year, the baseball team won the sectional and he was named the most valuable player. He served as co-captain of the baseball squad and helped the cross country team clinch a perfect record.
“He was a very good player, but more importantly, he was a very good leader,” said Al Harden, the head basketball and cross country coach.
Sanders was among nine of Harden’s Fountain Central basketball players to earn college scholarships. He continued his athletic career at a junior college in Nebraska before going on to Chadron State.
With a diploma in hand, Sanders called Harden, who had left Indiana to coach basketball at the University of Denver.
“He said, ‘I’m marrying a girl from Nebraska and I want you to help get me a job in the Denver area,’” Harden recalled.
Sanders was soon a finalist at Columbine and one other high school in the Denver suburbs. He accepted the offer from Littleton in 1974, teaching business classes and coaching numerous boys and girls sports, including track and field, softball and basketball.
Lighty and Harden kept in touch with Sanders over the years. Lighty, who also became a schoolteacher, visited the family in Colorado shortly after Sanders started at Columbine. (Sanders was married to his second wife, Linda, at the time of his death.)
The last time Harden spoke with his former player, the girls softball team was advancing in the state tournament.
“He didn’t think they could win the state championship, but [he thought] they could win one or two more games when I talked to him,” Harden said.
After 25 years at the school, Sanders was ready to retire. On April 20, 1999, two boys dressed in long black trench coats and armed with guns and pipe bombs opened fire on students.
Sanders heard the gunshots from a faculty lounge and rushed to the cafeteria where students were eating lunch.
“Get out! Get out! They’re shooting!” Sanders yelled, according to media reports. He ushered about 200 students toward upstairs classrooms before he was shot in the neck and shoulder.
Another teacher helped Sanders into a science classroom. Students tossed their shirts into a pile to use for staunching the wounds. Someone posted a sign in the window reading, “1 bleeding to death.”
Police later said they noticed the message but didn’t send rescue crews inside for several hours because they believed the shooting was ongoing. The gunmen had killed themselves in the school library less than an hour after beginning the attack.
As Sanders grew weaker, students tried to keep him awake by taking out his wallet and holding up photos of family members.
“I’m not going to make it. Tell my girls I love them,” Sanders reportedly said.
Back in Indiana, Lighty received a call from his wife, who was watching television reports of the shooting and asked where Sanders taught. Lighty contacted the family, who said Sanders was still unaccounted for.
“I knew immediately that he had stayed behind to help students because that’s what he always did. He always put other people in front of himself,” Lighty said.
Harden’s wife was also watching the coverage.
“When she said Columbine, that only means one thing to me. God bless everybody at Columbine, but I’m only interested in one thing,” Harden said.
“And she said there’s been a teacher that’s been shot and it’s a man. And I thought the odds of it being Dave Sanders is minimal, but he is there.”
Sanders died as rescue crews evacuated him from the classroom, according to news accounts. More than 2,000 people, many wearing blue and silver ribbons symbolizing the school colors, attended his funeral at a local church. The crowd filled the sanctuary and two overflow rooms.
Lighty, Harden and Jim Robinson, who was Sanders’s assistant baseball coach at Fountain Central, traveled to the service.
“When you got off the plane, you could just feel the grief in the air,” Lighty said.
At Columbine, Sanders is remembered with a softball field that was renamed in his honor. Thousands of high school runners gather in a Littleton park every year for a memorial cross country invitational.
Fountain Central honors Sanders with a scholarship for students pursuing a teaching career. Five years after the massacre, Lighty and Harden led an effort to rededicate the school’s basketball court for Sanders. His name is painted on the floor and on a sign in the gym.
“Every time you come out and use the gym, you see this, and it just helps people to remember,” Lighty said.
