Losing Cassie 
Losing Cassie 
(Page 1)
On April 20, 1999, during their lethal rampage through Columbine High Schoo, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris asked 17-year old Cassie Bernall if she believed in God. She answered honestly, even though she knew it would probably cost her life. Here, in a powerful excerpt from the memoir She Said Yes, Cassie's mom, Misty Bernall, talks about how Cassie's tragic death came just at th time when her broken life was on the mend
The funeral home wanted us to bring a "really nice dress" to lay Cassie out in. She did have a formal or two, but she rarely wore a dress. In the end I decided on a blue shirt that she wore all the time, a pair of faded jeans, a puka shell necklace and her Doc Martens. That was Cassie.
Perhaps the cruelest irony of losing Cassie the way we did was the fact that she never would have been at Columbine in the first place had my husband, Brad, and I not tried to rescue her by pulling her out of another high school.
Three years ago, about two weeks before Christmas, I was feeling blue about my inability to connect with Cassie. I remembered that my brother and his wife had once given her a teen Bible, a New Testament with a study guide giving young readers insight into dealing with their parents. Hoping to gain some tips myself, I wondered into Cassie's room and began looking through her drawers for it.
I found the Bible all right, but before that I came across a stack of letters that froze me in my tracks. A letter addressed to Cassie from a friend opened with several lines of unprintable sex talk and ninth-grade gossip, and went on to discuss a teacher at the high school, Mrs. R., and invited Cassie, "Want to help me murder her? The letter ended with a reminder about a "neat spell", drawings of knives, vampire teeth and a caricature of Mrs. R. lying in a pool of blood, butcher knives protruding from her chest.
There was endless talk about the "fun" of alcohol, marijuana and self-mutilation, and the adventures of a classmate whose girlfriend went to "this satanic church, cult thing where you have to drink a kitten's blood to get in." Still another depicted a crudely drawn knife dripping with "parents' guts" and headstones for "Pa and Ma Bernall." I called my husband at work and said I need him to come home right away.
We waited for Cassie. When she breezed in from the school she was then attending, we told her we had found the letters. At first, she played it down: "Oh, it diddn't mean anything bad..." Then, once she realized we were not about to let her off the hooks, she flew into a screaming rage. We were overrecating: She had never been serious about killing us or anyone else, and would never dream of doing such a thing. We had trampled on her rights by going through her bedroom without her permission. And since it was obvious that we had no love for hers, he would relieve us of the burden by running away or killing herself.
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