Matthew Kechter, The Football Player With Straight As
A Columbine SiteColumbine shooting victim Matt Kechter was a football player and a straight-A student.
Matthew Kechter had a seemingly bright future. The 210-pound 16-year-old played both the offensive and defensive lines on the school football team, but also prioritized his academics and reliably got good grades.
Born on February 19, 1983, he dreamt of someday being an engineer.
“When I heard he was one of the ones from the library, it only made sense,” Kechter’s friend Greg Barnes said, according to the archives on A Columbine Site. “He was always in the library studying. He always put academics first. He had straight As but he would never brag about it.”
A Columbine SiteMatt Kechter with a dog in an undated photo.
When Klebold and Harris entered the library, Kechter tried to hide from the shooters with fellow students Craig Scott and Isaiah Shoels.
“They came. They were still shooting people,” Craig Scott told CBS News a couple of days after the shooting. He watched as they mocked Shoels — and then opened fire. “I was laying on the ground, and I looked up, and I saw Isaiah, who had been shot, and my friend Matt Kechter, who had been shot, and Matt was smoking from his stomach.”
Though one of the killers then yelled, “Who’s ready to die next?” Scott was able to survive by playing dead alongside his friends. He didn’t find out until later that his sister, Rachel, had been murdered as well.
“It’s still hard. We’ve really lost that joy to life,” Matthew Kechter’s mother, Ann, told The Denver Post a year after the Columbine massacre. “Moving on? I don’t think there’s any such thing. We’re carrying on. We’re redefining our lives and trying to carry on without our oldest son.”
