Austin Eubanks became addicted to painkillers after the 1999 shooting. Lean in to the pain and grief, he says – don’t try to escape it

Nineteen years ago, Austin Eubanks hid under a table in his high school library as two students opened fire on their classmates. He and his friends had been ready to get lunch when they first heard gunshots outside. They had not recognized the sound and thought the bangs were construction noises. Then a teacher ran into the library and screamed at them to hide.

When the shooting stopped, Eubanks ran through the smoke out of the library, and out of the school. He was 17, with gunshot wounds in his hand and knee, and he had just witnessed his best friend killed in front of him.

Hours after the latest school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Eubanks, now 36, spoke about the vivid parallels between Wednesday’s school shooting and the Columbine shooting on 20 April 1999.

“The similarity here, just in the images coming out in the media, with Columbine, is pretty surreal: the students rushing out with their hands above their heads and the armored vehicles and the police cars and the ambulances on the grass,” Eubanks said. “This one is really close to home.”

“The primary emotion for me these days is anger,” he said. “That’s because I see the aftermath of what happens.”

Eubanks, who works at a long-term residential treatment center in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, now speaks publicly on the links between mass shootings and other violence and America’s growing opioid crisis.

“We’re dealing with a problem of massive proportions with the rise in mass violence, and I think there’s a direct correlation with the rise in addiction,” he said.

When he was 17, injured and grieving the death of his friend, Eubanks did not know how to process the trauma he experienced. Instead, he tried to hide from the pain.

Within months of Columbine, Eubanks, who was prescribed opiate medication for his shooting injuries, was addicted to painkillers, and used medication to avoid dealing with his grief. It took him more than 12 years of damaged relationships, and multiple arrests for fights, theft and impulsive behavior, to get sober.

His advice for the survivors of Wednesday’s school shooting is to lean in to the pain and grief that they are feeling, and not try to escape it.

“You can heal physical pain while you’re medicating it. You cannot heal emotional pain while you are medicating it,” he said. Survivors look for something in their lives that allows them to detach from the pain – substance abuse, negative relationships, technology – but that’s the wrong choice, Eubanks said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Austin Eubanks with his girlfriend during a community wide memorial service in Littleton, Colorado, on 25 April 1999, for the victims of the shooting rampage at Columbine High School. Photograph: Laura Rauch/AP

“In order to heal emotional pain, you have to feel it,” he said. “You want to feel better immediately, [but] you have to have the courage to sit in and feel it, and if you can do that long enough, you will come out on the other side.”

Along with post-traumatic stress, Eubanks said, there is also the potential for post-traumatic growth. “That doesn’t imply you will ever be the same person again. After a trauma, you will be changed forever.”

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At Columbine, 12 students and one teacher were murdered, and two dozen injured, before the two perpetrators killed themselves. In Parkland, after two decades of Congressional refusal to pass stricter gun laws, the death toll is even higher, with at least 17 people dead, including a football coach. The Parkland shooting is the deadliest high school shooting in contemporary American history, according to statistics compiled by Mother Jones, which has tracked incidents going back to 1982.



But the effect of a shooting like Columbine or Parkland cannot be measured only in the number of those injured or killed, Eubanks said. The students who witnessed the shooting, the ones who lost friends, the first responders, the family members – all of these people are affected, and the impact of the trauma and grief can be passed along to their partners and their children, particularly when survivors turn to substance abuse to cope.

“The trauma, it ripples through society,” he said. “What would initially start as a few hundred directly affected will become thousands, and, in 10 years, tens of thousands just from this one shooting.

“These are massive, massive traumas, and it’s like an earthquake, it ripples. That’s what I want people to see.”