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Cassie Bernall's faith at gunpoint reverberates nationally,
globally
By Art Toalston
� LITTLETON, Colo. (BP)--As Jesus fed the 5,000 with five loaves
of bread and two fish, "Cassie fed the world with one word,
'Yes,'" said Dave McPherson, youth minister at West Bowles
Community Church, Littleton, Colo., the Sunday after Cassie
Bernall was slain at Columbine High School.
� Cassie's "Yes" came in response to the question, "Do you
believe in God?" posed by one of the two deranged classmates who
shot her to death, along with 11 other students and a teacher,
and wounding nearly two dozen others, before taking their own
lives in a April 20 melee at the 1,900-student school.
� "Yes, I believe in God," Cassie, 17, told the gun- and pipe
bomb-wielding gunman.
� "Why?" he mused rhetorically without giving Cassie a chance to
respond before pulling the trigger.
� "Bernall entered the Columbine High School library to study
during lunch. She left a martyr," the Denver Rocky Mountain News
stated.
� Cassie's answer came after a long pause.
� "I think she knew she was going to die if she said that," one
of her friends, Kevin Koeniger, a member of Cassie's youth group
at West Bowles Community Church, told National Public Radio's
"Morning Edition."
� "That's why she waited so long. She didn't wait determining
whether to say yes or no. But she knew that if she said yes, she
would die," Koeniger said.
� "I think if there's one way to die, a good way of doing it is
dying for your faith," said another of the 200-member youth
group, her name indistinguishable on the NPR broadcast. "I think
she's awesome."
� "I can't even explain like the joy that comes from my knowing a
person that would die for my Lord," another friend, Erika
Dendorfer, told NPR. "I'm sad that she had to go in the way that
she did with two killers, but I'm happy that she went dying for
Christ."
� The intent of the gunmen (Columbine students Eric Harris, 18,
and Dylan Kelbold, 17) to kill a Christian "backfired," said a
youth whose name also was indistinguishable on the NPR broadcast.
"People around the world have heard about this, the girl who died
a martyr," he said.
� Cassie's witness for Christ in death indeed has gone global.
One of the earliest reports of her fateful affirmation was on
CNN's "Larry King Live." In addition to the NPR segment, she was
described on ABC's "20/20" newsmagazine April 26 as a "modern-day
martyr" who "refused to renounce her faith." The headline of a
story about her death in The Boston Globe April 24 read, "A
martyr amid the madness," while The Washington Post also employed
the concept of martyrdom in an April 27 story.
� The Globe noted, "Accounts of the final moments of Cassie's
life echo with the history of early Christendom, when a
profession of faith could be a fatal act."
� Cassie spoke of her faith in a youth group video just two days
before her death.
� "You really can't live without Christ. It's, like, impossible
to really have a really true life without him," she said.
� In living as a Christian, she said, "I just try to not
contradict myself, to get rid of all the hypocrisy and just live
for Christ."
� Nearly 2,500 people attended Cassie's funeral April 26 at West
Bowles Community Church.
� "Cassie went to a martyr's death," pastor George Kirsten told
the mourners, "and we're going to celebrate that because she's in
the martyr's hall of fame."
� McPherson, the youth minister, said in his message, "What the
church has talked about for 2,000 years, what every church in
this world has talked about on a daily basis, Cassie, you did
it."
� Several years earlier, Cassie had been a troubled middle-school
student who, as The Denver Post put it, was "enthralled by
witchcraft, suicide and a view of life so dark that her desperate
parents dragged her" to meet with McPherson.
� McPherson told The Post he well remembers meeting with the
sullen youth who spoke in monosyllables. "There's no hope for
that girl," he admitted thinking afterward. "Not our kind of
hope.''
� A few weeks later, however, Bernall hurried up to him after a
Sunday service. "You'll never believe what happened,'' she said
of her new faith in Christ.
� Among other vignettes from Cassie's life and death:
� -- Attending her funeral were numerous members of Victory
Outreach, a storefront church in one of Denver's roughest
neighborhoods, where Cassie and her friends shared dinner every
few weeks with prostitutes and drug addicts who are part of the
inner-city congregation.
� -- Cassie's younger brother, Chris, found an almost-prophetic
poem the night of her death which she had written the previous
Sunday, The Boston Globe reported.
� Cassie wrote:
� "Now I have given up on everything else -- I have found it
� to be the only way to really know
� Christ and to experience the
� mighty power that brought
� him back to life again, and to find
� out what it means to suffer and to
� die with him. So, whatever it takes
� I will be one who lives in the fresh
� newness of life of those who are
� alive from the dead."
� -- Cassie had planned to cut her corn silk-colored hair that
hung halfway down her back "and give it to someone who makes wigs
for kids who are going through chemo," her aunt, Kayleen Bernall,
told The Denver Post. Cassie had planned to have it cut "really
short," her aunt said, quoting Cassie as saying, "I want enough
hair for two or three kids, as many kids as possible."
� -- Cassie had wanted to go to medical school, become a doctor
and do medical work in England and Scotland, her aunt said.
Cassie also wanted to become better at the nature photographs she
loved to take.
� Incidentally, Cassie was not the lone Christian killed at
Columbine High April 20.
� According to the Internet site ReligionToday, Rachel Joy Scott,
17, who was also killed in the library, had led a weekly prayer
and Bible study group of fellow teens the past year and a half at
Orchard Road Christian Center, an Assemblies of God congregation.
The ReligionToday report was drawn from the Assemblies of God
news service.
� "We consider her [Scott] to be a Christian American martyr,"
the church's youth minister, Barry Palser, told The Washington
Post. Her April 24 funeral was attended by nearly 2,000 people.
Rachel, a fun-loving participant in drama and forensics, had told
friends she was considering graduating early to travel with a
Christian drama team and perhaps later to become a missionary or
to work with troubled youth, the Denver Rocky Mountain News
reported. And she had promised her prom date, Nick Baumgartner,
to give up her occasional smoking.
� John Tomlin, 16, another victim, attended a Baptist church
twice a week to participate in a youth ministry, Boyd Evens, his
pastor, said, according to ReligionToday. Tomlin had traveled to
a small town in Mexico last year as part of a ministry that
helped build a house for a poor family who had been living in a
shack. He had planned to enlist in the Army after graduation.
� Two of the victims, teacher William "Dave" Sanders and student
Danny Rohrbough, were shot while helping others escape from the
gunmen.
� Sanders, whose April 26 funeral was at Littleton's Trinity
Christian Center, herded students to safety when gunshots broke
out in the school cafeteria, The Denver Post recounted. Sanders,
47, who had taught at Columbine 24 years, then went upstairs to
aid other students, dragging one who had been wounded in the leg
to safety, before being shot twice in the chest. According to the
Associated Press, Sanders staggered into a classroom where
students tore off their T-shirts and pressed them to his wounds.
They pulled out Sanders' wallet and held it open so he could see
pictures of his wife and three daughters. His dying words were,
"Tell my girls I love them."
� Rohrbough, 15, whose April 26 funeral was at Littleton's Grace
Presbyterian Church, was shot in the back while holding open a
door to let others escape from the gunfire. His lifeless body was
among the first TV images broadcast live to the nation the
afternoon of the tragedy.
� The church's pastor, Dwight R. Blackstock, said Rohrbough might
still be alive "if he'd have made a little different choice. Yet
he chose to stay there and hold the door for others so that they
might go out before him and make their way to safety. They made
it and Danny didn't," according to an account of the funeral in
the Denver Rocky Mountain News. Blackstock noted that Rohrbough's
heroic act, "in the last few moments of his life on this earth,
was the kind of thing Jesus holds up as an example to us all.
Jesus said, 'Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down
his life for his friends.'
� "That's what Danny did."
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