The story does not give her exact cause of death, but hinted that it was due to her 25 years of paraplegia. She should be considered the 16th fatality.
Her mother committed suicide 6 months after the shooting, but she said it wasn’t because of that.
There’s not much on her wiki page.
➤ Anne Marie Hochhalter ➜ Anne Marie Hochhalter - Wikipedia ■
• the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High
• She was shot in the spine and paralyzed during the attack at age 17
• Six months after the Columbine shooting, Anne Marie’s mother Carla, who had been suffering from depression and mental health issues previously, shot and killed herself in a pawn shop after asking to see a revolver.
• Hochhalter was found dead at her home in Westminster, Colorado on February 16, 2025 at age 43.
•
This CNN article says the same thing the OP’s linked article says. It’s a word-for-word quote:
• Hochhalter was found in her home in suburban Denver on Sunday. Her family suspects she died of natural causes stemming from her injuries in the 1999 shooting in which 12 students and a teacher were killed.
➤ CNN article ➜ Anne Marie Hochhalter: Columbine survivor who forgave gunman’s mother dies at 43 | CNN ■
This isn’t the first time the survivor of a mass shooting died decades later. A man who was shot in the back in the 1966 tower shooting, which destroyed his only kidney, passed in 1999; he was on dialysis most of that time, except for a short time when he had a kidney transplant. That kidney rejected and he didn’t want to go through anything like that again.
When James Brady died years after the attempt on Reagan’s like it was said to be from health problems of his injuries.
An autopsy revealed that her death was due to sepsis, secondary to her paraplegia, and should be ruled a homicide.
https://kdvr.com/news/local/coroner-report-columbine-survivors-death-best-classified-as-homicide/