Corey DePooter, The Final Columbine Victim
Daniel Mauser Memorial WebsiteCorey DePooter was the final Columbine victim murdered on April 20, 1999.
Shortly before his death, Corey DePooter and his best friend Austin Eubanks had one of the best trips of their lives. Their parents had begrudgingly allowed them to go to Oklahoma to fish and — despite a rough start — the friends ultimately had a blast. Then, on the day of the Columbine massacre, they found themselves huddled together under a table in the library.
“Stay tight,” Eubanks recalled DePooter saying. “The cops will come.”
Born on March 3, 1982, DePooter had a deep faith in law enforcement. He wanted to be a U.S. Marine, and he had shown off some U.S. Marine pamphlets to another friend earlier that day. As Harris and Klebold moved through the library, Eubanks remembered that DePooter seemed fearless.
“I never really saw him scared,” Austin Eubanks later told The Denver Post. “Even under that table, he wasn’t afraid.”
As they hid, Klebold approached and opened fire. He killed DePooter and injured both Eubanks and another student who was hiding with them. Though Eubanks survived the shooting, he struggled with drug addiction in the years that followed and tragically died of a heroin overdose in 2019.
But Corey DePooter was the final Columbine shooting victim. After killing him, Harris and Klebold attempted to detonate bombs they’d hidden in the cafeteria. When they failed to cause a major explosion, they returned to the library — most survivors had fled by that point — and died by suicide.
Public DomainAfter the massacre in the library, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold returned to the cafeteria — then died by suicide.
The Columbine massacre was over.
However, the pain of that day endures. Families lost sons, daughters, and siblings; students lost friends. The story of the Columbine shooting victims is one of tragedy — and of 13 lives that were extinguished far too soon.
After reading about the 13 Columbine victims, go inside the debunked “Trench Coat Mafia” theory that pervaded the media in the aftermath of Columbine. Or, discover the gruesome story of the Beslan School Siege.
