Richard Castaldo is a high-school student who was critically injured during the Columbine High School Massacre. He was a friend of Rachel Scott and was eating lunch with her on the day she was killed. Castaldo was shot eight times in the arm, chest, back, and abdomen, becoming permanently paralyzed from the chest down. He witnessed Scott being killed from the corner of his eye during the shooting.
He was born approximately in 1982. He was 17 when the shootings occurred. He has appeared in many documentaries about the shooting, including Bowling for Columbine about Columbine and its connections to youth gun violence and its influences on gun control laws.
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Castaldo was the second victim of the shooting, after Rachel Scott. He was in the grassy knoll outside the cafeteria eating lunch with Rachel. Minutes into their lunch, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold approached them. Harris threw a pipe-bomb that exploded, wounding both Rachel and Castaldo. Harris then killed Rachel and seriously wounded Castaldo with eight shots to the arm, back, chest, and abdomen. He was one of the first evacuted during the massacre, and remained crippled and in a wheel-chair for the rest of his life after the shooting with nerve damages to his left arm. Castaldo was taken to the hospital and remained there for a few months after the shooting.
Castaldo did not have an appearance in Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (nor did any real people from the massacre except Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold), but did provide his outlook on the game in a short interview on a website:
In the early days after the massacre, news localists and magazine reporters allegedly reported that Dylan Klebold killed Scott after she responded to his question of "Do you believe in God?", saying that the story was told by Castaldo. This would start a major controversy as the same conversation was attributed to Cassie Bernall. The conversation actually occurred between Dylan Klebold and Valeen Schnurr, a student who survived the massacre (but was also injured). Castaldo denied that the story about Rachel's killing was told by him in a December 1999 issue of Time.