by Jeff Kass
As the crowds filtered out of Columbine in the following months, one fundamental question, which became the genesis for this book, remained—why had school shootings seemed to suddenly be occurring across the country with greater frequency? It was a trend Columbine had now cemented in the national psyche. But where did this come from? And when the shootings seemed to taper off, that just begged the question as to why. Then they exploded all over again.
Traditional theories of juvenile delinquency would not do. School shooters did not come from abusive homes or bad neighborhoods. In fact, it was just the opposite.
An editor once called me “pathologically optimistic.” I think it’s a good trait. And armed with it, I believed that if I got to the right people, read the right stories, and uncovered the right documents, I could find the answers. I hope I got some of them.
When faced with a list of names, a sort of journalistic trick is to go in alphabetical order so that no one person is considered first. As if the random order of the alphabet conveys equality. At Columbine, there was a different random order: the one in which thirteen innocent victims were shot before they died:
Rachel Scott
Dan Rohrbough
Dave Sanders
Kyle Velasquez
Steven Curnow
Cassie Bernall
Isaiah Shoels
Matt Kechter
Lauren Townsend
John Tomlin
Kelly Fleming
Daniel Mauser
Corey DePooter
“The hardest part to understand was kids killing kids.”—Student
“A kid my age isn’t supposed to go to that many funerals.”—Student
“I hope people come here to this place to think about how they themselves can be better people rather than come here to reflect on death.”
—Parent
—Among the quotes inscribed on the Columbine Memorial
PART ONE: ’Cause That’s What We Do
Day One
On the day of Columbine, seventeen-year-old Dylan Bennet Klebold is wearing a black T-shirt with Wrath printed in red letters across the chest. Under Klebold’s black trench coat is an Intratec Tec-DC9 semi-automatic pistol attached to his body with a shoulder strap. Tucked away in his black cargo pants is a Stevens 12-gauge side-by-side double-barrel shotgun cut down to about twenty-three inches, which Klebold will have to reload after every two rounds.
Klebold wears his beloved black baseball cap, with the Boston Red Sox logo, backwards. His long, puffy brown hair flares out below the cap and one student thinks he looks like a clown. Klebold has also grown a goatee and mustache. On his left hand is a black, fingerless glove, while his left ring finger has a silver-colored ring with a black stone. The rest of Klebold’s wardrobe consists of white socks, black boots, and blue-green plaid boxer shorts. On his left boot is a red star medallion containing a hammer and sickle.
Eric David Harris, eighteen, is wearing black cargo pants and a white T-shirt that reads Natural Selection. Under his black trench coat is a Hi-Point 9mm carbine rifle on a strap. He also carries a Savage Springfield 12-gauge shotgun with the stock and barrel cut off. It is twenty-six inches long, and Harris can cycle and fire five rounds before having to reload. Harris completes his outfit much like Klebold: fingerless black glove on his right hand, white socks, black combat boots and green plaid underwear.
Harris and Klebold have hand signals, and one imagines them jotting down the gestures before the massacre with a mixture of excitement and exactitude; serious about the carnage, but giddy to kill. The signals include:
Bombing—wave fist
Cops sighted—wave hand
Suicide—point to head with gun
Harris and Klebold fill their cargo pants with CO2 bomblets, but save space in their pockets and utility belts for shotgun shells and 9mm cartridge magazines. A backpack and a duffle bag hold more bombs.
They carry at least four knives. Two are small, including one that resembles a dagger and has an “R” scratched into the black handle, assumedly for Harris’s nickname, Reb. Another hulking knife looks to be about a foot long. A fourth is a contraption like brass knuckles but with spikes jutting out and a wedge-shaped knife attached to one end. The sheriff concludes Harris and Klebold do not use their knives, but they discuss it, saying,“I’ve always wanted to use a knife.”
Their cars match their persons. Harris’s dream car is a Hummer, but he calls his 1986 gray Honda Prelude the best gift he has ever received. He fills it with a pipe bomb, gas cans, and a twenty-pound propane tank. The trunk holds two large, black containers police believe are full of gasoline. One cop suspects a white plastic gallon jug labeled “kitchen degreaser” is homemade napalm. A pint bottle of bleach and a metal can of charcoal lighter round out the collection.
Klebold’s 1982 black BMW holds similar booty, along with a newsletter from the Firearms Coalition of Colorado: “Dear Firearms Activist: The Firearms Coalition of Colorado is working for you!” The newsletter urges people to make a contribution or contact state legislators to lobby for pro-gun legislation: “When you call or write, be polite and respectful, we want to win friends, not make enemies.”
The sheriff figures the car bombs, which never detonate, are set to blow up the officers and paramedics responding to Columbine.
Around 11:15 a.m., investigators believe Harris and Klebold carry two duffle bags into the cafeteria and place them beside lunch tables. Each duffle contains a twenty-pound propane bomb set to explode at 11:17 a.m., when Harris and Klebold figure “500+” will be in the cafeteria. They return to their cars and wait for the bombs to explode so they can mow down surviving students and staff who try to flee.
Peter Horvath, the dean who had once busted Harris and Klebold for stealing locker combinations, had lunch duty that day. It was his job to patrol the cafeteria. But he was late. He wonders: If he had been on time, would he have noticed Harris and Klebold setting down the duffle bags? Would he have said something? Would he have prevented Columbine?
Brooks Brown is the on-again, off-again friend of Harris and Klebold, and says he comes across Harris minutes before the shooting. “Brooks, I like you now,” Harris says. “Get out of here. Go home.” Brooks leaves with the uneasy feeling that Harris is going to pull a prank. He walks down the street contemplating whether to skip fifth period and hears “a loud crack.”
∞
The twenty-pound duffle bag bombs don’t go off. So Harris and Klebold are standing above the school, preparing to fill in the blanks. Their shooting gallery is approximately two thousand students, and 140 teachers and staff. A number of students have taken advantage of the warm, sunny Tuesday—April 20, 1999—to eat lunch outside on the grass. The sheriff’s official timeline reads 11:19 a.m.
“Go, go!” one of them yells.
Harris and Klebold take their shotguns out from a bag, but probably just to put them in their large cargo pants pockets for later.
Columbine students Rachel Scott and Richard Castaldo are sitting on the grass eating lunch outside the cafeteria, near the west side of the school that faces the Rocky Mountains. Rachel Scott is a cute seventeen-year-old with brown hair and a cheeky smile. She is known for her love of drama, Christianity, and an occasional cigarette. She is killed with shots to the head, chest, arm, and thigh. Castaldo, a seventeen-year-old budding musician, is shot and paralyzed. From then on, he will use a wheelchair.
Harris takes off his trench coat and puts it on the ground. Maybe it is too restrictive. Or maybe he is too hot. He rests one of his guns on a chain link fence at the top of a stairway and fires at the students below.
Daniel Rohrbough is a freshman who enjoys street hockey, Nintendo, and visits his grandparents on their Kansas farm every summer. Harris quickly ends that. Using his carbine, he shoots Rohrbough in the left leg, chest, and abdomen—probably in that order. But it
will take police three years to figure that out.
Around the time of Rohrbough’s shooting, Lance Kirklin is laying on the grass outside the school, already bleeding. Klebold stands above him.
“Help me,” Kirklin moans. “Help me.”
“You want help?” Klebold says. “I’ll help you.”
He then fires a shotgun at the left side of Kirklin’s face. Kirklin will live, but require multiple reconstructive surgeries.
Students in the cafeteria begin to stand up and look around, wondering what is happening. Some think it’s a senior prank, others a movie, because they know Harris and Klebold are in video class. But teacher Dave Sanders and school custodians Jon Curtis and Jay Gallatine sense the danger. They tell students to get down. Some hide under lunchroom tables, while others flee up the cafeteria stairway or head to the kitchen.
Klebold briefly charges into the cafeteria and holds his weapon in a “ready-to-fire” sweeping motion. He doesn’t shoot but looks around and walks back outside. Klebold then steps over injured student, Sean Graves, playing dead, and rejoins Harris at the top of the stairs.
The two shoot toward the ball fields at students fleeing the school. Harris hits Anne Marie Hochhalter with the bullets that will paralyze her, and a friend drags her away. Harris and Klebold toss bombs into the nearby senior parking lot and onto the school roof. One explodes where Hochhalter had been.
The gunmen banter: “This is what we always wanted to do.” “This is awesome!”
At 11:22 a.m. Jefferson County Sheriff’s Deputy Neil Gardner, the school’s community resource officer, has finished lunch in his patrol car while monitoring the “Smoker’s Pit” in Clement Park adjacent the school. A panicked custodian radios him saying, “Neil, I need you in the back lot!” Gardner figures he means the south student parking lot, which is on the opposite end of the school. As Gardner heads over, his dispatch radio relays that a female is down in the south lot. Gardner flips on his lights and siren.
Meanwhile, art teacher Patricia Nielson is heading outside to tell Harris to cut it out. He is the only gunman in her line of sight. She thinks it is just a video production with a cap gun, but still not a good idea. She is at a set of glass doors facing the mountains when Harris smiles at her, levels one of his guns, and fires. The first shot snaps through the glass and hits a student who is alongside her, Brian Anderson. The shot seems to slap his necklace chain, bounce off his sternum, and does nothing more than leave scrape and burn marks on his chest.
“Dear God. Dear God. Dear God,” Nielson says. She turns to run and a bullet grazes her shoulder. She drops to the ground and skins her knee as she crawls back inside the hall. Nielson and Anderson flee, but end up where the greatest carnage will occur: the library.
Gardner, wearing a yellow polo shirt, arrives in the south parking lot in about two minutes, at 11:24 a.m., and gets out of his car. Harris greets him with about ten rifle shots before his gun jams. Gardner gets off four shots while Harris fiddles with the weapon. Harris spins to the right and returns fire. Jefferson County motorcycle officer Paul Smoker, who minutes earlier was writing a speeding ticket, has driven across Clement Park through the grass and is now on scene. He pops off three shots at Harris once the teen goes into the school. Klebold fires his Tec-9, and shots ping off the lockers. Harris and Klebold will now have free reign inside. It is 11:26 a.m. Seven minutes into Columbine.
At 11:27 a.m. two pipe bombs are thrown from the second story hallway into the cafeteria. Dave Sanders, forty-seven, is dressed in a T-shirt, blue and white dress shirt, gray slacks and brown shoes. He is herding students into classrooms when a bullet tears into his neck and out his upper lip, damaging an artery. Another shot enters his upper back, right side, and exits his chest, right side. It damages a vein.
The question of who shot Sanders remains unanswered. But two students will keep him alive for hours. Sanders is the third person mortally wounded at Columbine. Shot in the first minutes, he dies in the last.
Harris and Klebold continue to pace the hallway outside the library, “randomly shooting and detonating explosives,” according to the sheriff’s official report. A 911 call indicates they continue like this for three minutes.
Harris and Klebold’s targets eventually disappear. Students and teachers have either fled the school or barricaded themselves in classrooms, locking doors and blocking them with upended tables.
By the time Harris and Klebold enter the library, fifty-six people will be inside. Fifty-two are students and four are female faculty or staff. Twelve of the fifteen who die at Columbine, including Harris and Klebold, will expire in this place dedicated to quiet contemplation. The library also sees twelve injured—half the total number.
∞
The names of the Columbine killers and the dead are as clear as their gravestone etchings. The murdered include four girls, an African-American boy, and a Hispanic boy. They are football, volleyball, and soccer players. One wants to be a Marine, just like Eric Harris. Another yearns for a career as a wildlife biologist. Every future equation of work, school, family, and success beckons.
The shooting is mostly random. Harris and Klebold single out Isaiah Shoels, who is black, but only after they happen upon him by chance. Harris and Klebold have “shit lists,” and Harris has a “girls’ list,” yet it does not appear that anyone on the lists is specifically targeted the day of Columbine.
So we think we know what happened at Columbine, or at least the tick-tock of actual events. At least thirty thousand pages of police and other official documents have been released. Add to that videos, 911 tapes, lawsuits, and extensive media coverage.
But one of Colorado’s largest criminal investigations comes with a disclaimer. Information has been hidden, held back, and proved plain wrong. As quickly as Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone would report a detail, questions and contradictions arose.
Who shot student Daniel Rohrbough? Depending on eyewitness statements, which are often problematic, Sheriff Stone wrongly reported that Klebold was the killer. An outside investigation found it was Harris.
When did teacher Dave Sanders die? Police interviews of the two students who tended to Sanders—whose death remains among the most controversial—are among the briefest.
What did police know in the years before the shooting? The draft affidavit for a search warrant to enter Harris’s home a year before Columbine was not fully acknowledged and released until 2001, after CBS News and victim families sued.
Could more lives have been saved?
Basic investigative details, such as witness names, are constantly misspelled. English grammar and spelling are a foreign language to some police reports. The shortcomings are matched only by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s frequent inability to concede, or repair, the errors. Yet it is impossible to reinvestigate the shooting. So the public is forced to accept many official conclusions based on little more than intuition. What seems right or logical is taken at face value. But only after the sheriff’s words are mixed with news accounts, outside investigations, and other documents does a more accurate truth begin to emerge.
Where the sheriff’s investigation does appear honest and thorough, there are still gaps common to all crime investigations. In the library, for example, witnesses often give different accounts of Harris and Klebold’s exact words and movements. Stress is probably one factor, along with the crouching position students took under library tables that hindered their view. Some were too distant from the atrocities to fully capture words or movements. Smoke made it difficult to see. The fire alarm made it difficult to hear.
∞
Six minutes into Columbine, around 11:25 a.m., Patti Nielson runs into the library. “Help,” she yells, “there’s a kid with a gun. We’ve been shot.”
She repeats the warning, and asks if librarian Liz Keating is in the room. Keating has, in fact, gone home for lunch.
Computer teach
er Rich Long, who is in the second-floor library to repair a computer, sees his former students: Klebold looks back at Harris, the same way he always looked to others before taking something on. But now Klebold is narrow-eyed and concentrating. Long recognizes him only in his physical form. “I saw and felt evil,” he says.
To stay or go from the library is a life or death decision. Long pushes students into the hall and he himself leaves.
Nielson, who is at the service counter, tells students to get under the tables. Library Assistant Lois Kean and library tech Carole Weld leave the main reading area where students are crouching under tables, and flee to a side television studio and sound booth. Teacher Peggy Dodd tells kids to get out, as if it is a fire drill. Then she sees teacher Dave Sanders running down the hallway, motioning for people to get back, as if they should stay in the library. Dodd goes into the magazine room with three students, including the injured Brian Anderson, and locks the door.
Bree Pasquale makes eye contact with Isaiah Shoels.
“What’s goin’ on?” he asks.
“Someone’s outside with a pipe bomb,” she replies.
There has been no training, Nielson says, on what to do during a school shooting. She goes on instinct and tells the kids to get under the tables. A dispatcher will later repeat the advice to keep the kids down as Nielson gets on the phone with 911.
“I am a teacher at Columbine High School, there is a student here with a gun,” Nielson first explains. “He has shot out a window.”
Dispatch: “Has anyone been injured ma’am?”
Nielson: “I am, yes. . . . And the school is in a panic, and I’m in the library. I’ve got . . . Students down! Under the tables, kids, heads under the table! Kids are screaming, and the teachers are trying to take control of things. We need police here.”
Dispatch: “OK, we’re getting them there.”
The dispatcher asks if Nielson can lock the library doors, but she doesn’t want to move closer to the gunmen in the hallway. The pop pop pop of gunshots, like banging on metal, taps through the 911 tape. Near the end of the four minutes that have been released to the public, the dispatcher asks Nielson her name. “Patti,” she says quietly. Then suddenly, “He’s in the library, he’s shooting at everybody.”