SUMMARY: School shootings have become a tragic reality of modern American life. How can school administrators prepare for the worst-case scenario? John Ferrugia of Rocky Mountain PBS in Denver reports on how Colorado’s multiple deadly school shootings in the past 20 years have driven the state to develop new safety protocols -- some of which have been adopted across the country.
Student was fatally shot after pinning gunman to wall in effort to protect his classmates
When a gunman burst into his high school classroom, Kendrick Castillo did not hesitate.
The 18-year-old immediately charged, pinning the attacker to the wall before Castillo was fatally shot protecting classmates, witnesses said. As he charged, so did two other students. One of them, Brendan Bialy, wrestled the gun from the shooter’s hand, and the students subdued him.
It was a moment that encapsulated some of the accumulated horrors of the past 20 years: School shootings, once unthinkable, have become common enough that some students now fight back.
A second shooter was captured by an armed security guard.
Authorities said these acts of bravery helped minimize the bloodshed from Tuesday’s attack, which also wounded eight people.
“We’re going to hear about very heroic things that have taken place at the school,” Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock said Wednesday.
The attackers were identified by law enforcement officials as 18-year-old Devon Erickson and a 16-year-old who prosecutors identified as Maya McKinney but whose attorney said uses male pronouns and the name Alec. The two allegedly walked into the STEM School Highlands Ranch through an entrance without metal detectors and opened fire in two classrooms.
Nui Giasolli was in the classroom during the attack, expecting to have a fun end-of-year session analyzing comedic effect in the 1987 film “The Princess Bride,” when Erickson walked in late, which he often did. She said she didn’t think much of it, until he shut the door, pulled out a gun and told the class, “Don’t anybody move.”
Giasolli froze and went blank. Then she thought it must be a joke. She heard her teacher say something like, “Gun. Get down.”
Then she said Erickson started shooting, and Giasolli saw Castillo and several others lunge to try to get the gun. She ducked under a desk. She didn’t see any hesitation from Castillo, she said. If he had any hesitation, she said, “he threw it out the window.”
When she saw the shooter pinned down, she ran.
Castillo sprang into action against the shooter “and immediately was on top of him with complete disregard for his own safety,” said Bialy, a close friend of Castillo’s who has signed up to join the Marines.
Giasolli wants people to remember those who stepped up to save their classmates, especially Castillo. “He is the definition of what it means to be a hero,” she said. “He gave his life to make sure everyone else would get to go home.”
In a tweet Wednesday, President Donald Trump offered his condolences. In the past, he has advocated for “hardening” schools by adding security measures and for arming teachers to deter shootings.
Because the attack happened only miles from Columbine High School and just weeks after the shooting’s 20th anniversary, questions quickly arose about whether it was inspired by the 1999 massacre. But investigators offered no immediate motive.
A member of the school’s robotics club and a relentless tinkerer, Castillo had an infectious smile and gentle sense of humor, according to friends. He worked part-time at a local manufacturing company that had offered him a job after an internship because he was such a standout employee.
“To find he went down as a hero, I’m not surprised. That’s exactly who Kendrick was,” said Rachel Short, president of the company, Baccara.
Cecilia Bedard, 19, had known Castillo since elementary school and said he was always friendly, modest and excited to help people. He made a point of always joining his father at Knights of Columbus fundraisers and bingo nights.
“He was amazing,” Bedard said. “He was honestly the sweetest kid I ever met. Never said a mean joke.”
Bialy smiled as he recounted the struggle with the shooter to reporters, saying that he wanted to focus on the positive. “They completely and utterly failed in a matter of half a minute,” he said of the attackers.
“What I saw yesterday was the absolute best of people,” he added.
Bialy would not identify the third student who helped subdue the gunman, but the family of Joshua Jones put out a statement saying he was shot twice while disarming one of the attackers.
Most of the wounded admitted to hospitals have been discharged. Two remained hospitalized Wednesday, one in fair condition and one in good condition, said Wendy K. Forbes of Littleton Adventist Hospital.
The security guard who detained the second armed suspect was employed by Boss High Level Protection, a company started by a former SWAT team leader who responded to the Columbine shooting. The owner, Grant Whitus, told The Associated Press the security guard is a former Marine who ran to the area of the shootings and confronted one of the armed students in a hallway.
The guard drew his weapon and apprehended the person, Whitus said.
“He doesn’t even realize how many lives he saved by stopping a school shooting,” Whitus said.
About 2,000 people held a vigil at a nearby high school Wednesday night to honor the victims and survivors of the attack.
McKinney, like Erickson, was a student at the school. Neither suspect was previously known to authorities, Spurlock said.
Erickson made his first court appearance Wednesday and kept his head down. His black hair, streaked with purple dye, covered his face as he nodded in response to most of District Court Judge Theresa Slade’s questions. At one point, the judge requested a verbal answer to whether he had any questions about the proceedings. Erickson simply replied “No.”
McKinney, who has a short brown haircut, made eye contact with the judge and answered questions in a clear but quiet voice, saying “Yes, your honor” and “No, your honor.”
District attorney George Brauchler said he has not decided whether to file adult charges but added that McKinney is old enough to be charged as an adult without a judge’s review.
Formal charges were expected to be filed by Friday. Brauchler said he could not discuss any motive or weapons used in the attack.
A message left at a phone number listed for Erickson’s home was not immediately returned.
Josh Dutton, 18, said he was close friends with Erickson in middle school but had not seen him for four years while attending a different high school. On Sunday, he spotted Erickson at a local light rail station and said he was shocked at how much his friend had changed.
Erickson wore all black and was significantly thinner and did not seem interested in talking.
“He said he’d just turned 18 and he owned rifles,” Dutton said.
The shooting took place exactly a week after a gunman killed two students and wounded four at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. In that case as well, one of the fatalities was a student who charged the attacker.
The Colorado attack unfolded nearly three weeks after neighboring Littleton marked the anniversary of the Columbine attack that killed 13 people. The two schools are separated by about 7 miles in adjacent communities south of Denver.
Brauchler said the community remains resilient in the face of multiple shootings, including Columbine, the 2012 theater shooting in the Denver suburb of Aurora, and the 2013 shooting at Arapahoe High School.
The attacks are “aberrant acts” although they might seem otherwise to the rest of the world, he said. “Who we are is a kind, compassionate, caring people, and this does not define us.”
Foody and Banda write for The Associated Press. The Washington Post contributed to this report.
SUMMARY: Denver public school teachers went on strike Monday for the first time in 25 years. Much of the fight comes down to a pay system known that involves a complicated merit and bonus system, and that teachers say is vastly outdated. For more, Amna Nawaz is joined by Madeline Will of Education Week.
SUMMARY: Despite years leading troops and managing equipment on the front lines, soldiers returning to school may have to start from the beginning, alongside teenagers who have never held a similar level of responsibility. Now, a new Colorado law awards college credit for military experience--and requires that the state's schools accept it. Hari Sreenivasan reports.
Hari Sreenivasan (NewsHour): This year, Colorado legislators embraced Pikes Peak's model by passing legislation to help all Colorado military and veteran students.
Colorado's new law says any state-funded institution has to be able to evaluate the knowledge or skills that a student might have picked up in the military. And if that student can earn credit for it, those credits have to be transferable to every state institution.
SUMMARY: In a blistering editorial, journalists at the Denver Post sounded the alarm about years of devastating job cuts and took the newspaper’s own hedge fund owners to task, begging to be sold. Amna Nawaz speaks to Chuck Plunkett, editorial page editor of the Denver Post, who co-wrote the editorial.
SUMMARY: Some high school students in Colorado may get prime jobs even before they get their diplomas. That's because CareerWise, the nation's first statewide youth apprenticeship program, links students to industries and addresses manufacturers' demand for skills, while offering employment, academic credit and support for college. Hari Sreenivasan reports as part of our Rethinking College series.
SUMMARY: In downtown Denver, a recently built public housing project is designed to foster healthy living, with access to nutritious food, access to doctors and ease of exercise. Jeffrey Brown reports.
SUMMARY: In our NewsHour Shares moment of the day, Nura Afia went from watching YouTube videos as a young mother, to becoming a fashion video blogger with an international following, to being named CoverGirl's first Muslim brand ambassador.
SUMMARY: Following a fatal explosion in a Denver suburb in April, Colorado is taking a closer look at all oil and gas operations across the state. Colorado's governor has set a Friday deadline for companies to complete inspections of oil and gas lines near homes and businesses. Dan Boyce with public media's Inside Energy reports on the tension between drilling and growing suburban development.
SUMMARY: In the heart of one of Denver's poorest neighborhoods, parents hoped for a new preschool. Instead they got much more. The Dahlia Campus for Health and Well-being is a preschool, urban farm, dental office and mental health care center, all in one. William Brangham visits to see how it's supporting the community.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): After years of neglect, parents in one of Denver's poorest neighborhoods hoped that a new preschool would be built in their community. Instead, they got much more.
William Brangham recently visited there, and he is back again with this report.
It's part of our weekly series Making the Grade.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM (NewsHour): Fish swim in giant tanks. Collard greens grow in abundance in a massive greenhouse. Down the hall, there's a dentist's office, as well as a mental health center. And at the other end of the building, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds run around like mad.
Some might say it's an unusual mix here in the heart of one of Denver's poorest neighborhoods, but not according to the woman who runs the place.
LYDIA PRADO, Vice President, Mental Health Center of Denver: It's taking a new approach to community well-being.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: Dr. Lydia Prado is the driving force behind this place. It's called the Dahlia Campus for Health and Well-Being.
LYDIA PRADO: My initial conversations were with two folks who had — together, they have over 80 years of residence in this community.
And just floated the idea, I want to take integrated care to the next level. I want to think comprehensively about health. I want to be able to talk about mental health, and went to talk to them about it, and it's like, what do you think? And they're like, OH?
But, you know, they were very honest about it. There are going to be challenges, but if anybody's going to give it a shot — and we're behind you.
SUMMARY: Thirteen young Mexican-American artists explore the ideas of "home" and "place" in the American West in an exhibit called "Mi Tierra" at the Denver Art Museum. Artists tackled topics of immigration, identity struggle and colliding worlds. Jeffrey Brown reports.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): At the Denver Art Museum recently, an emotional moment for artist Ramiro Gomez and his parents.
WOMAN: I'm very proud of him.
JEFFREY BROWN: He'd brought them here to see his newest work, called 'Lupita,' an installation that pays homage to a janitor who worked at these galleries.
It was particularly poignant. Gomez's parents themselves are laborers, his mother a janitor, his father a truck driver.
RAMIRO GOMEZ, Artist: I wouldn't be here without their labor. I wouldn't be here without their sacrifice.
JEFFREY BROWN: Today, Gomez is an up-and-coming artist in Los Angeles featured in galleries and exhibitions for work that captures a life of work by immigrants and others, not typically the subject of art.
RAMIRO GOMEZ: It's important for me to highlight these people that are not going to be recorded in our history.
JEFFREY BROWN: In Denver, Gomez was one of 13 young Mexican-American artists chosen for an exhibition called 'Mi Tierra,' their assignment, to create a new work that explores the idea of home and place in the American West.
There were smaller paintings and large installations, videos about the land before Europeans settled here, and a garden that looked like a giant pinata.
Many of the artists tackled the politically charged topic of immigration. This piece contained an actual panel of the U.S.-Mexico border fence.
RAMIRO GOMEZ: For me, place becomes a very difficult word to focus on, just because place is never permanent. We're constantly moving. It's constantly shifting.
I'm an American-born child to Mexican immigrants. So, I'm at once Mexican and American. I'm in between. That in-between space, that in-between place that I occupy is something that is constantly changing within myself.
SUMMARY: What do Americans think of President Trump's time in office so far? Judy Woodruff asks newspaper editors from around the nation -- David Bradley of the St. Joseph News-Press, David Haynes of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Lee Ann Colacioppo of The Denver Post -- to weigh in on what they are hearing from their readers.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now that we're one month into the Trump administration, we wanted to get a sense of how different parts of the country are assessing the president's time in office.
To do that, we have asked newspaper editors from three states to tell us what they're hearing from readers in their communities. And they join us now.
Lee Ann Colacioppo is the editor of The Denver Post. David Haynes is the editorial page editor for The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in Wisconsin. And David Bradley is the editor of The St. Joseph News-Press in Missouri.
And we welcome all of you to the NewsHour.
David Bradley, I'm going to start with you.
Missouri is a state that went heavily for Donald Trump. He won by something like 20 points. What are you hearing right now from your readers about how he's doing?
DAVID BRADLEY, St. Joseph News-Press: I think people are fairly well satisfied with what Donald Trump is doing now.
I think he's done a lot of things that he said he would do. He's made a few misstatements over the last few weeks, but what he's done, I think, has been pretty impressive.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Lee Ann Colacioppo, what about your readers in Denver around Colorado?
LEE ANN COLACIOPPO, The Denver Post: We're getting a lot of really mixed results, mixed phone calls.
We have got people calling up really upset, angry with the Trump administration, angry with us when we have editorialized in the vein of he's lying. And then we have got a lot of people who are — so we're really hearing from both sides.
JUDY WOODRUFF: OK, we are going to pursue that.
David Haynes, what about in Milwaukee? What are you picking up from your readers?
DAVID HAYNES, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Well, Judy, it always depends on who you talk to.
Liberals in our state don't have much use of Donald Trump. Independents are a little bit divided, although they are concerned about what has been reported as some of the chaos in the White House. Conservatives in Wisconsin didn't support Donald Trump in the primary. They went for Ted Cruz, and so they're still a little wary and worried that the agenda of Paul Ryan, who is from our state, may not get passed in the way they'd like.
But what I hear from Trump supporters, mostly, is you in the media need to let him get his administration organized. And I often hear them saying that, you know, Bill Clinton didn't exactly have an easy transition either, but, in the same breath, they often will say, but, gosh, I wish he would stop tweeting at 3:00 in the morning.
SUMMARY: For six years, the Colorado Family Planning Initiative has been providing free long-term birth control to teens and low-income women. The program has reduced unplanned teen pregnancies by 39 percent, and the abortion rate by 42 percent. The group has been lobbying for state funding, but Republican lawmakers have said no. Special correspondent Mary McCarthy reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Next, a Colorado birth control program is losing its funding, despite a remarkable track record.
Special correspondent Mary MacCarthy has our report from Denver.
MARY MACCARTHY (NewsHour): Victoria Garcia was just 22, with big career plans, when she found out she was pregnant. The news, she said, was jolting.
VICTORIA GARCIA, Colorado: Motherhood wasn’t a stage in my life that I was ready for. I was in college. I was focused on school and getting my degree.
MARY MACCARTHY: Garcia said she had wanted to use a long-acting birth control method, but couldn’t afford it.
VICTORIA GARCIA: When you’re young and you’re in college and you’re barely making ends meet with food and rent and other menial costs, $500 or $550 for an IUD or an implant out of pocket is — it’s outrageous. It’s too much.
MARY MACCARTHY: Garcia had the baby, a son, Liam, and still managed to graduate from college. She credits her mother and husband for helping her. But there’s something else she says that had been critical for her success.
VICTORIA GARCIA: The day I got my IUD placed, the midwife handed this card to me and she said, you don’t have to come back until January 2022. This IUD has been life-changing for me. It really has.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Finally tonight, building bridges across the generation gap and the technology divide.
The “NewsHour's” Mary Jo Brooks has our report.
COURTNEY KERSHAW: You got it?
DOROTHY STONE: Yes. Yes.
COURTNEY KERSHAW: You work out for the day?
(LAUGHTER)
MARY JO BROOKS (NewsHour): Twice a week, 24-year-old Courtney Kershaw and 89-year-old Dorothy Stone head out on errands. On the day we visited, there was a trip to the nail salon and the grocery store.
Kershaw works for Denver-based concierge business called Capable Living, which provide services for senior citizens who live in their own home. Fees start at $1,000 a month. What’s unique is that the employees are all young people, so-called millennials who were born at the end of the last century.
The goal of the company is not only to provide services, but to build bridges between a generation obsessed with smartphones and selfies with one that was raised in an entirely different era.
COURTNEY KERSHAW: Some of my favorite things were you telling me about when you were my age and how you would fill up the car for 10 cents and go driving around all day.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): We just heard about how immigration may affect the coming election in a number of states, including Colorado. Well, it turns out there is another issue that could have a significant impact in the state of Colorado, fracking.
Communities there are engaged in a battle with the state to get more control over oil and gas drilling.
Rocky Mountain PBS’ Dan Boyce reports from the town of Longmont.
KAYE FISSINGER: I found out that they were going to be fracking all around Union Reservoir.
DAN BOYCE, Rocky Mountain PBS: Seventy-year-old great grandmother Kaye Fissinger is a busy woman these days. She’s been fighting for the last three years to protect the town she loves from fracking, the technique of pumping pressurized water deep underground to fracture rock and extract oil and natural gas.
KAYE FISSINGER: So, we don’t have drilling and fracking yet here, and that’s because of the ban.
DAN BOYCE: Fissinger was eager to show us this reservoir at the edge of Longmont, where companies have been trying to put in a series of gas wells.
KAYE FISSINGER: There will be fracking all around here, where people play.
DAN BOYCE: She’s worried it will soon look like so many other places along Colorado’s Front Range, with drill towers and wellheads cropping up next to homes at an unprecedented rate.
Activists like Fissinger in a handful of communities just north of Denver succeeded in keeping this boom away from their doorsteps by lobbying at the local level. The Longmont City Council voted to restrict where wells could be built a couple of years ago.
A few months later, residents took it a step further, passing a ban on fracking altogether. The state government immediately launched two lawsuits against Longmont for this, and it fired up a grassroots citizens movement for a statewide initiative to give local communities more control over fracking.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): The song is called “Little Rain,” but it’s about a very big rain and its aftermath, the flooding of the town of Lyons, Colorado, in the foothills of the Rockies last September.
K.C. Groves is in the band Watermills, formed after the disaster.
K.C. GROVES: We were trying to address what happened and also represent, you know, the — our strengths and even strength of spirit and our joy even that we still had in this town, but still express the gravity of what happened.
JEFFREY BROWN: What happened is something that no one here had ever seen, the St. Vrain River jumping its banks. Video shot by local residents captured the scene, as the river divided Lyons into a series of islands, cutting off this small town of 2,000 from the world for three days.
One person died; 200 houses were damaged.
Musician David Tiller talked to the NewsHour just after he was evacuated.
DAVID TILLER: Seeing the faces of the houses blown on and realizing that there was nothing salvageable, really, that — nothing of the house that I could tell that may be salvageable, I don’t even know how to describe it.
A new study by NASA and University of California, Irvine, scientists finds more than 75 percent of the water loss in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin since late 2004 came from underground resources. The extent of groundwater loss may pose a greater threat to the water supply of the western United States than previously thought.
This study is the first to quantify the amount that groundwater contributes to the water needs of western states. According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal water management agency, the basin has been suffering from prolonged, severe drought since 2000 and has experienced the driest 14-year period in the last hundred years.
The research team used data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission to track changes in the mass of the Colorado River Basin, which are related to changes in water amount on and below the surface. Monthly measurements in the change in water mass from December 2004 to November 2013 revealed the basin lost nearly 53 million acre feet (65 cubic kilometers) of freshwater. That's almost double the volume of the nation's largest reservoir, Nevada's Lake Mead. More than three-quarters of the total -- about 41 million acre feet (50 cubic kilometers) -- was from groundwater.
"We don't know exactly how much groundwater we have left, so we don't know when we're going to run out," said Stephanie Castle, a water resources specialist at the University of California, Irvine, and the study's lead author. "This is a lot of water to lose. We thought that the picture could be pretty bad, but this was shocking."
Water above ground in the basin's rivers and lakes is managed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and its losses are documented. Pumping from underground aquifers is regulated by individual states and is often not well documented.
"There's only one way to put together a very large-area study like this, and that is with satellites," said senior author Jay Famiglietti, senior water cycle scientist at JPL on leave from UC Irvine, where he is an Earth system science professor. "There's just not enough information available from well data to put together a consistent, basin-wide picture."
Famiglietti said GRACE is like having a giant scale in the sky. Within a given region, the change in mass due to rising or falling water reserves influences the strength of the local gravitational attraction. By periodically measuring gravity regionally, GRACE reveals how much a region's water storage changes over time.
The Colorado River is the only major river in the southwest part of the United States. Its basin supplies water to about 40 million people in seven states, and irrigates roughly four million acres of farmland.
"The Colorado River Basin is the water lifeline of the western United States," said Famiglietti. "With Lake Mead at its lowest level ever, we wanted to explore whether the basin, like most other regions around the world, was relying on groundwater to make up for the limited surface-water supply. We found a surprisingly high and long-term reliance on groundwater to bridge the gap between supply and demand."
Famiglietti noted that the rapid depletion rate will compound the problem of short supply by leading to further declines in streamflow in the Colorado River.
"Combined with declining snowpack and population growth, this will likely threaten the long-term ability of the basin to meet its water allocation commitments to the seven basin states and to Mexico," Famiglietti said.
The study has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, which posted the manuscript online July 24. Coauthors included other scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado. The research was funded by NASA and the University of California.
For more information on NASA's GRACE satellite mission, see: NASA Grace and University of Texas Grace
GRACE is a joint mission with the German Aerospace Center and the German Research Center for Geosciences, in partnership with the University of Texas at Austin. JPL developed the GRACE spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Two weeks after the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, Republican in Virginia, went down to a stunning primary defeat, the establishment struck back Tuesday night.
From Mississippi to New York to Colorado, there were plenty of close races for incumbents, but they all survived.
The NewsHour’s political editor, Domenico Montanaro, is back with us to decipher what happened.
So, Domenico, what did happen? This was supposed to be comeback night for the Tea Party, Mississippi.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, Political Editor: Maybe, right?
I mean, we were wondering whether or not the Eric Cantor race would be an aberration or whether or not it would be the start of some kind of anti-incumbent trend. And what it certainly looked like last night is that it really was just an aberration for Cantor, because there were some other issues at play where he ignored his district.
There were plenty, like we said in the intro, of very close races, Mississippi being one of them, but Thad Cochran, the incumbent senator there, longtime senator, eked out a win by just less than 2 percentage points over his Tea Party opponent. And he did it in a very unique way.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, talk about that, because there’s a lot of discussion — and you have been looking into this today — about what happened in some of these heavily Democratic parts of the state.
DOMENICO MONTANARO: Well, if you told me three weeks ago that a Republican would wind up winning a Republican primary by appealing to Democrats and black voters, I would have said he’s done.
And I think that’s why a lot of the political community was fairly skeptical that Thad Cochran and his team, with the Haley Barbour machine really in Mississippi, being able to pull that off. And that’s exactly what they wound up doing.
SUMMARY: In May, Colorado became the first state to pass a so-called 'right to try' law, allowing terminal patients access to experimental drugs without FDA approval -- and Missouri is about to follow suit. NewsHour Weekend examines the issue by speaking with the Missouri bill's sponsor and his daughter, who is suffering from cancer.
STEPHEN FEE (NewsHour): In early 2013, Kristina Brogan was pregnant with her fifth child when she began experiencing excruciating pain — and her obstetrician didn’t know why.
KRISTINA BROGAN: Finally my mom went with me to an appointment and said you got to find out why she’s hurting so bad. So they did a level two ultrasound at St. Luke’s and admitted me immediately.
STEPHEN FEE: Why? What did they find?
KRISTINA BROGAN: They found the tumor. And they’d found it had gone up into my liver.
STEPHEN FEE: Kristina, at the age of 39, was diagnosed with stage four colorectal cancer.
STEPHEN FEE: What was that like?
KRISTINA BROGAN: Scary.
STEPHEN FEE: What was running through your head?
KRISTINA BROGAN: I can’t say I had a – a normal thought in my head. I was just scared. Scared for my baby. Scared for me. Scared for my family.
STEPHEN FEE: Her doctors needed to take aggressive measures to fight the disease and chose to perform a C-section, just 28 weeks into Kristina’s pregnancy. Today, her son Evan is a happy and healthy one-year old. Kristina however is battling a disease with dispiriting odds even with regular chemotherapy treatment.
SUMMARY: As Colorado and Washington begin selling legal marijuana, questions remain about the practical process of changing drug policy. NewsHour travels to the Netherlands -- the one nation that's been openly selling pot for over forty years -- to see what might be in store for the United States. Correspondent Wiliam Brangham and producer Saskia de Melker report.
WILLIAM BRANGHAM: When you first visit Amsterdam’s famous coffee shops (that’s what all the marijuana shops here are called), the thing you notice is how normal it all seems.
It’s not unlike a quiet café or Starbucks in the U.S.: people, mostly foreign tourists, sitting around, sipping coffee, all the while openly smoking the marijuana they bought right there in the shop. What could easily get you arrested in most American cities, here, it’s just fine.
