LITTLETON, Colo. (AP) -- Patricia Nielson can still see the teenage gunmen laughing before they started shooting at teachers and students in Columbine High School.
"I can't get it out of my mind," she said in an interview published in Saturday's Denver Post. "It's there."Nielson, 35, a part-time art teacher and mother of three, related a terrifying account of the attack to a 911 dispatcher on April 20 as Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on their rampage. Twelve students, one teacher and the gunmen were killed.
At about 11:20 a.m., Nielson was standing in a hallway near 16-year-old Brian Anderson.
They heard "pops" from the stairs outside the building and saw a man in black through the double glass doors but thought at first the sounds were from a cap gun.
"Just as we got to the second set of doors, (Harris) turned around and looked straight at us. . . . He smiled at me and pointed the gun."
As Harris fired, Nielson says she spun around and saw a bullet hole in the glass door. Anderson was hit in the chest -- he was later treated for a superficial wound -- and she felt her back burning. A bullet had grazed her.
"I didn't know what it was, maybe the glass from the door. The second I looked at the kid, (Anderson) he arched and dropped, and I screamed."
She pushed Anderson back through the doors, and they sprinted around a corner into the crowded library.
"Get down. Get under the tables," she hollered before grabbing a phone and calling police.
"Yes, I'm a teacher at Columbine High School, and there is a student here with a gun. The school is in a panic, and I'm in the library. I've got students down. Kids under the table. My kids are screaming," Nielson told the dispatcher. "We need police here."
"I could hear shots, and I could hear bombs," she says now. "I felt like we were going to die."
She whispered to the dispatcher: "They're in here. They're killing kids. I need to go now." She left the phone off the hook and crawled beneath the desk.
Nielson couldn't see the shooters, but she could hear them.
They called black teenager Isaiah Shoels a racist name. "Then they killed him," she said. The shooters ordered any jocks in the room to stand up. Two who were identified were shot.
When one girl, Cassie Bernall, said "Oh God, Oh God!" one of the gunmen asked her: "Do you believe in God?" When she said she did, she was shot, Nielson said.
At one point, one of the shooters said: "Look at that head blow up. I didn't know brains could fly."
Shots were fired into the desk where Nielson was hiding, but she was spared by inches.
One of the pair walked over -- "He stopped in front of me, and I'm thinking 'I'm dead' " -- then smashed a chair atop the desk.
After Klebold and Harris went away, Nielson didn't dare move although most of the students ran out.
After several minutes she crawled from behind the desk and hid inside a cupboard, while praying and looking in vain for a pencil. "I wanted to write down a record of what went on, and I wanted to leave my husband a message telling him how much I loved him," she said.
At about 4 p.m., library aides approached the cupboard and told her to come out. Police officers pulled her into the hallway, ordered her to put her hands behind her head and frisked her.
She never looked around at the bodies and didn't know that Harris and Klebold were among them.