“Mom, I’m not afraid to die because I’ll be in heaven… you’d know I was in a better place.”—What Columbine High School victim Cassie Bernall told her mother approximately a week before the shootings.

On the morning of April 20, 1999, Cassie Bernall, a seventeen-year-old junior at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, was a typical teen-ager having a typical day. What neither she nor anyone else knew was that by the end of it, she would be one of thirteen victims killed by two fellow classmates who had stormed the school, guns blazing, with murder on their minds.

It has now been almost six months since this senseless tragedy left our nation searching for answers. Amidst all the news coverage and speculation about why this horrible event occurred, one story that has emerged as a glimmer of hope for today’s youth is that of Cassie Bernall who admitted when asked, that she believed in God, and paid the ultimate price. Much has since been said and written about Cassie – she has been labeled a martyr, even a modern-day Joan of Arc, yet few people truly know the young woman behind those famous last words. That is, until new.

“When death strikes as close as it did to us, it’s almost impossible to go on without it changing the way you look at your life,” Misty Bernall writes. “If the tragedy at Columbine did anything, I’m confident it did at least that. It was like a jolt that stopped us in our tracks and forced us to look up from the pettiness of our daily lives.”

She Said Yes shares many intimate details of Cassie’s troubled teen-age years, her rocky relationship with her parents during this time, and the pivotal chain of events that enabled Cassie to discover her faith as a means to put her life back on track. The book contains “never-before-seen” materials, including:

–letters, essays, and personal notes written by Cassie which reveal, in her own words, the joys and pains of the last years of her life

–disturbing correspondence between Cassie and her “friends” during a rebellious phase that led to an ugly three-month family drama, and Cassie’s eventual enrollment at Columbine High

–a letter sent to the Bernalls by the Klebolds, parents of Columbine killer Dylan Klebold, about a month after the shootings.

While looking in Cassie’s room for a teen bible that she hoped would hold advice to help her win back her increasingly estranged daughter, Misty came across a stack of letters, most of them written by Cassie’s friend “Mona” (not her real name), which conveyed the girls’ desire to kill a teacher at their high school, to injure themselves, and, most startlingly, to kill Cassie’s parents. Cassie, it soon became clear, had written similar letters back to Mona.

Filled with dark rhymes and lyrics, and decorated with lurid images of vampires, drugs, and mutilated bodies, including grisly drawings of a couple labeled “Ma and Pa” strung up by their intestines with daggers hanging from their hearts, the letters indicated that Cassie and her “friends” were experimenting with witchcraft, satanism, self-mutilation, alcohol and drugs.

“…I cannot explain in words how much I hurt. I didn’t know how to deal with this hurt, so I physically hurt myself. Maybe it was my way of expressing my sadness, anger and depression…I would lock myself in the bathroom and hit my head on the counters. I also did this on the walls of my bedroom. Thoughts of suicide obsessed me for days, but I was too frightened to actually do it, so I ‘compromised’ by scratching my hands and wrists with a sharp metal file until I bled. It only hurt for the first couple minutes, then I went numb. Afterwards, however, I stung very badly, which I thought I deserved anyway.”

The Bernalls survived what they say became an “all-out war” with Cassie over the next few months. At times they second-guessed their own strict parenting methods, but they soon felt reassured that enrolling Cassie at Christian school and supporting her involvement in their church’s youth group was the right route to go. Then on March 8, 1997, a day Cassie would refer to as her second birthday, the walls she kept around her finally broke down.

Ironically, Cassie’s positive change and desire to start a new life for herself led to her enrolling at Columbine High School, where she would be killed a little over a year later. In her book, Misty Bernall admits struggling with all of the “what if” questions that have plagued her since her daughter’s death: What if she’d never found Cassie’s letters? What if they hadn’t pulled Cassie out of Beaver High School? Etc. The hundreds of letters of support and admiration for Cassie that Misty continues to receive from people around the world offer a measure of comfort. But in trying to come to terms with her daughter’s death, Misty writes, “the real issue is not what Cassie said to her killers, but the faith that enabled her to face them as she did.” This faith is best expressed by Cassie herself in a letter she wrote to her friend Cassandra just a year before her death:

“I wonder what God is going to do with my life. Like my purpose. Some people become missionaries and things, but what about me? What does God have in store for me? Where do my talents and gifts lie? For now, I’ll just take it day by day. I’m confident that I’ll know someday. Maybe I’ll look back at my life and think ‘Oh, so that was it!’ Isn’t it amazing, this plan we’re part of?