A former Columbine high school student who only narrowly survived the deadly 1999 mass shooting there – and subsequently spent nearly three decades grappling with complications from her wounds in the attack – has died.

Anne Marie Hochhalter, 44, died on Sunday from what were described as natural causes, according to a statement from the principal at Columbine when the shooting at the Colorado school occurred.

Frank De Angelis’s statement, as reported by Colorado’s Denver Gazette, called Hochhalter “a pillar of strength for … so many” after she fostered a love of dogs and music despite having to live in a wheelchair after the shooting.

“She was an inspiration and exemplified never giving up,” he added in the statement.

Hochhalter, then 17 and a clarinet player, was eating lunch at the cafeteria when she was shot in her back and chest with a semiautomatic pistol on the day of the Columbine shooting. She was among the most grievously wounded of more than 20 people who were injured during the attack, which killed 12 of her schoolmates as well as one teacher.

The two shooters – who were students – then died by suicide in what remains one of the deadliest school shootings in the US’s ignominious history of such cases.

Surgeons managed to save Hochhalter’s life. But, as the Denver Post reported, her wounds left her paralyzed – and they were not the only traumatic ordeal she was confronted with that year. Six months after the shooting, her mother, Carla Hochhalter, walked into a local pawn shop, asked to see a gun and used it to take her own life.

The Denver Post recounted how the younger Hochhalter prioritized living as normal a life as possible amid the media frenzy surrounding the killings at Columbine, which came during one of more than 400 school shootings between then and the day she died.

She lived independently at a handicap-accessible home, showering her love on her dogs and friends. Beside the clarinet, she also loved playing the harp, piano and guitar, her brother, Nathan Hochhalter, said to the Post.

“She never wanted to be called a victim,” Anne Marie Hochhalter’s close friend Sue Townsend – whose stepdaughter, Lauren Townsend, was killed at Columbine – told the Denver Gazette. “She considered herself a survivor.”

Sue Townsend told the Post that she believed Hochhalter ultimately died from complications associated with medical ailments stemming from her injuries in the Columbine shooting. But, in her remarks, Townsend suggested that Hochhalter never stopped battling to overcome the devastation that 1999 had inflicted on her.

For instance, when the mother of one of the Columbine shooters published a book in 2016, Hochhalter wrote the author a letter saying she held no recriminations for her, as the Post reported.

“It’s been a rough road for me, with many medical issues because of my spinal cord injury and intense nerve pain, but I choose not to be bitter towards you,” Hochhalter wrote to Sue Klebold, whose book was titled A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy. “A good friend once told me, ‘Bitterness is like swallowing a poison pill and expecting the other person to die.’ It only harms yourself. I have forgiven you and wish you the best.”

Hochhalter further elaborated on those sentiments in two social media posts, which she published on successive Aprils in 2023 and 2024 – the 24th and 25th anniversaries of the Columbine shooting, respectively.

“Why did I survive and so many others didn’t that horrific day?” she wrote in April 2023, as the Gazette noted. “I think of that often, and I’ve tried to live the best life possible in honor of the 12 students and one teacher we lost 24 years ago.”

A year later, Hochhalter wrote: “I’ve truly been able to heal my soul since that awful day in 1999.”