Columbine

by Jeff Kass

  Richard and his wife Elaine had three daughters. The oldest, Cynthia Jane, was born on December 27, 1945. A year and a half later came the twins, Karen Ann and Katherine Ann—Eric’s mom—on July 2, 1947. In Denver’s George Washington High School yearbook, the photos of Karen and Katherine are side by side. The plain-looking Katherine smiles, and her brown hair flips up just before it hits her shoulders. More than thirty years later, one can still see the same, slightly broad nose and full cheekbones on display on her face. The yearbook lists her activities as the Mogulmeisters ski club and PTA fashion show hostess. She graduated high school in 1967 in the same manner as her future husband. “She wasn’t in the ‘in’ crowd. She wasn’t a nerd,’’ a classmate told the News.

  Wayne Harris and Katherine Pool married on April 17, 1970 at First Presbyterian Church in Englewood. Wayne was four years out of high school, Katherine three

  On September 5, 1973, three years after marrying, Wayne enlisted in the Air Force. It was the same year Columbine High School opened.

  Their first son, Kevin D. Harris, was born on May 14, 1978. Eric came three years later in Wichita on April 9, 1981. Eric seemed normal to most of those who knew him. But he suffered as his family hopscotched across the country. The Harrises moved to the Dayton, Ohio area when he was two. At six-years-old, a Halloween photo shows him in a skeleton costume. Eric has his hands on his hips and a quizzical look on his face, as if he wonders why he must stop what he is doing to take a picture. A neighbor called the Harrises a “typical American family from the outside.”

  When Eric was eight and in third grade, Wayne was transferred and his family moved to Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda, Michigan. It was 1989.

  Oscoda is located on an arc of land on Michigan’s northeastern side and fronts Lake Huron. The township population back then was about twelve thousand, and Eric remembered it as a “very, very small town.” The family lived in what Eric called “a largely wooded area” and, “of the three close neighbors I had, two of them had children my age. Every day we would play in the woods or at our houses. We would make forts in the woods or make them out of snow, we would ride around on our bikes, or just explore the woods. It was probably the most fun I ever had in my childhood,” he wrote in a class paper.

  After living in the township, the family moved onto the base, according to Eric. He described it as “old” and having homes like “small condos.” He also had lots of neighbors. But he was sad about leaving his friends, “especially my best friend” in Oscoda, he wrote. “Even though we were still only a 10 minute drive away, we only saw each other maybe three times after that. We lived on the Air Force Base for about half a year. I made friends there, some were good, but none were as good as my friends at my old house.”

  The new friends had adventures, too. “We still lived close to a large wooded area so we would travel around in there almost every day,” Eric wrote. “We were all the same age too, so that made it even more fun.”

  At Cedar Lake Elementary School, Eric’s parents attended every school conference, according to the New York Times. Eric’s fifth grade teacher did not foresee him as a troublemaker, and a neighbor told the paper, “We never even heard the kids cry.”

  The Harrises left Oscoda after a couple years. “It was real hard leaving my friends again,” Eric recalled. “And that time I had to say goodbye to my first best friend for good.”

  ∞

  An essay titled “Just a Day,” found on Dylan’s school server files after Columbine, is unsigned and undated. (Randy Brown, who knew Eric and Dylan’s families so well, does not believe it is Dylan’s essay.) The author fondly recalls family fishing trips when he would wake up at five a.m. for something cool, “not school or some other bullshit.” The sky was black, the coffee brewing. He didn’t like the taste, but loved the smell. “I would dine on fancy breakfast cuisine, otherwise known as Cocoa Puffs,” he wrote. “My brother would already be up, trying to impress our father by forcing down the coffee he hadn’t grown to like yet. I always remember my brother trying to impress everyone, and myself thinking what a waste of time that would be.”

  The writer, who does not indicate his age at the time, becomes poetic when describing the drive into the mountains to go fishing in their 1974 Dodge Ram: “A certain halcyon hibernating within the tall peaks and the armies of pine trees.” But he was already a nonconformist. “The lake is almost vacant, except for a few repulsive, suburbanite a$$holes,” he writes. “I never liked those kind of people, they always seemed to ruin the serenity of the lake. I loved the water. I never went swimming, but the water was an escape in itself.”

  “Cast, Reel, etc. countless times, and my mind would wander to wherever it would want to go,” he adds. “Time seemed to stop when I was fishing. The lake, the mountains, the trees, all the wildlife s$*t that people seemed to take for granted, was here. Now. It was if their presence was necessary for me to be content. Time to go! Done. Back to society. No regrets, though. Nature shared the secret serenity with someone who was actually observant enough to notice. Sucks for everyone else.”

  ∞

  At eleven-years-old, Eric was in sixth grade in another remote locale by another lake and living at another Air Force base—Plattsburgh, New York, by Lake Champlain. Again, Eric dwelled in melancholy. “At first I had no friends there, even though there was many kids my age,” he wrote. “Then once school started, and even some help from my older brother, I had some friends. It took a while for our friendships to grow, but soon we were best friends and did everything together.”

  It was here that Eric found “the best friend I ever had,” Kris Otten, who lived two blocks away. “Every day we would find something new to do,” Eric wrote. “Some days we would walk along the shore of the lake and just mess around there. Sometimes we would look for old bullet shells from around 50 years ago and we even looked for Revolutionary War and Civil War era items. Kris once found the diary of a slave under some old Civil War barracks.”

  Eric and Kris played home-run derby, rode bikes, and hung out at the gym. “We spent countless hours there, just hanging out and talking,” Eric recalled.

  Eric and Kris also had a friend, Jens, from Norway. “He was the shiest person I had ever known and he wasn’t used to our American customs, but he was always there,” Eric wrote. “Kris and I made it our mission to make Jens into a normal American kid.”

  Eric wrote that the “most noble sacrifice that I can remember” occurred with Kris when they were riding bikes on a dirt trail in a wooded area one day. After entering a drainage pipe, a wave of water knocked them out. Kris got tangled up in some fishing wire and couldn’t move. Eric got a bad cut on his right thigh that would require thirteen stitches. But first Eric rode his bike—with one leg—to a boathouse and found a knife to cut Kris free. “This was my sacrifice,” Eric recalled. “To save my friend in spite of my pain.”

  Eric, at this time in his life, also became overwhelmed with emotion. “I hid in a closet,” he recalled. “I hid from everyone when I wanted to be alone.” Other times he recalled sitting in the back seat on the sixth grade school bus, “talking about guns, sex, and people.” It was, he wrote, “our refuge from everyone else. Where we talked about personal things.”

  Katherine Harris, at this time, continued as a stay-at-home mom. Wayne directed the neighborhood association, was a scout leader and youth coach, and played basketball with his sons in the driveway. Wayne also pressured Eric not to mess up. But the biggest trouble Kris Otten could cite was when he and Eric got caught stealing lighters to set off firecrackers. They were both grounded.

  In 1993 news came that the Plattsburgh base would be closing. But there was still the annual Independence Day celebration, which took place in a large field in the center of base housing. “Kris, Jesse, and I (our other best friend) had the best seats in the house,” Eric wrote. “We were about 100 feet away from the launch site of these fireworks. So they w
ere exploding right over our heads. Then later that night there was a large party with bands playing and singing. A few weeks later, Kris moved to Georgia. This was hard to swallow. We had spent more time together than we did with our own families, and now he was gone. I still had Jesse though. And with what little time I had left in Plattsburgh, we did as much as we could together.”

  If Eric was a wreck after Oscoda, he was crestfallen after Plattsburgh. “It was the hardest moving from Plattsburgh. I have the most memories from there,” he wrote four years later. “When I left Jesse, and when Kris left, I had a lot of feelings. I felt alone, lost, and even agitated that I had spent so much time with them and now I have to go because of something I can’t stop. It doesn’t take long to make a best friend, but it only takes 2 words to lose one. Those are, ‘We’re moving.’”

  Eric, almost sixteen when he wrote those thoughts, added, “Losing a friend is almost the worst thing to happen to a person, especially in the childhood years. I have lived in many places, but the last three places have been the most fun and the greatest experiences of my childhood. Although memories stay with you, the actual friend doesn’t. I have lost many great friends, and each and every time I lost one, I went through the worst days of my life.”

  It was still July 1993 when Wayne and Katherine Harris returned to their Colorado roots and settled in Littleton. For Eric, it was new territory all over again. Otten sensed he was unhappy, and not accepted.

  ∞

  But there was one key person who did accept Eric: Dylan Klebold. Eric, in turn, would accept Dylan. It appeared unconditional, and not till death did they part.

  Eric and Dylan met at Ken Caryl Middle School. It is unclear what brought them together, but both may have been bullied, according to various accounts. Eric’s eighth grade science partner, Alisa Owen, said Eric was described as a “dork.” He was intellectual, funny, and good at math and science. They were not, however, qualities that would lend themselves to popularity.

  Nathan Vanderau, who knew Dylan in junior high via a church group, says Dylan seemed naive, as if you could talk him into anything. Dylan’s father worried about how Dylan would do in middle school but concluded that he did “moderately well.” Tom and Sue did not feel they were absentee parents and were “always there for Dylan.”

  ∞

  In 1995, Eric and Dylan entered a new Columbine High as freshmen. The school had undergone its first major renovation, tagged $13.4 million, and a ceremony welcomed the special students.

  In their first year at Columbine, Eric and Dylan were as nondescript as the building. They were fourteen-years-old, shy, slightly built, and clean-cut.

  Nick Baumgart was friends with them. He was in the same Cub Scout troop with Dylan and had hung out with him, off and on, since third grade. But Baumgart says ninth grade was also the time he started to drift away from Dylan. There was no falling out, but like magnets, Dylan started to form a bond with Eric.

  Dylan, tall and gangly, had not grown into himself. More emotional and less contained, his personality mirrored his awkward body. But he was funnier, more lighthearted, and more likeable than Eric. People wanted to hang out with Dylan.

  Eric seemed like more of a leader because he was quieter and more serious. But a look at his angry and violent diary entries indicated, to put it mildly, that he was sour.

  Personal computers and the Internet were yet to infuse every corner of life, but Columbine High teacher Rich Long was ahead of the curve. He was giving computer classes in a warehouse—the former welding shop—where tables and chairs were hard to come by. Among his students were Eric and Dylan, who he described as, “wide-eyed freshmen anxious to take computer courses.” The start-up conditions didn’t bother Eric and Dylan, and they came in before and after school to get their projects done. They were “enjoyable to teach,” Long said, because they were eager to learn and were “very skilled for that point in time.”

  Eric and Dylan enrolled in Long’s “Computers A to Z,” which covered technology and “Structured Basic” for programming. Their budding mastery over computers provided them with a power they did not have within the general student body. But Long believes both saw the good they could do with technology, as Eric handled the web pages for Columbine’s physics and science departments.

  Eric and Dylan were also attracted to computers, wrote Brooks Brown, because they provided “definite rules” and “logical simplicity.” “For a young man in a world like ours, it was a godsend,” he explained. “In the real world, things and rules change constantly—and you could be in trouble at a moment’s notice.”

  Another explanation for what attracted Eric and Dylan to computers was found in Dylan’s house after Columbine. It is a reprint of a famous 1986 manifesto, “The Conscience of a Hacker,” and it is easy to imagine Eric and Dylan speaking the very same words. Parts of the manifesto include:

  Mine is a world that begins with school . . . I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me . . . Damn underachiever. They’re all alike. I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Mrs. Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head . . . ” Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike. I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me . . . Or feels threatened by me . . . Or thinks I’m a smart ass . . . Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here . . . Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike. And then it happened . . . a door opened to a world . . . rushing through my phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought . . . a board is found. “This is it . . . this is where I belong . . . ” I know everyone here . . . even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again . . . I know you all.

  Eric and Dylan would also embed themselves in violent video games. Eric came to enjoy Postal, named for the act of “going postal.” As the Wall Street Journal wrote in a front page story, the game “comes in a box riddled with fake bullet holes and features a gun toting character who goes berserk. It invites players to ‘spray protesters, mow down marching bands and charbroil whole towns.’ As children writhe on the ground, bleeding and screaming for mercy, the assailant must pick off police and other ‘hostile’ attackers. To quit the game, the lead character must put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger.”

  But Eric and Dylan’s favorite game was Doom. The main player is a “space Marine” who grapples with demons, “cyberorganic mongrels,” and “undead Marines.” “Take down the hell scum with an array of weapons,” is one official description. Eric wrote his own description for a class paper:

  Picture an Earth that has been obliterated by nuclear war and alien attacks leaving cities and military forces in ruins with only a lone marine as humanity’s last fighting force. Picture holographic walls, crushing ceilings, oceans of blood and lava, strange ancient artifacts, and horrible sour lemon and rotten meat stenches in the air. Imagine being trapped on an abandoned cold steel base floating in space for eternity, a leathery skinned monster roaming under a strobe light waiting for a fight, and astonishing weaponry designed to your special needs. All these places and ideas have been created and recreated many times by yours truly.

  Eric said that if he could live anywhere it would be Phobos, one of the Mars moons mentioned in Doom. As to whether he believed in aliens, he wrote on his AOL profile, “you bet your probbed ass I do.”

  “To most people it may be just another silly computer game, but to me it is an outlet for my thoughts and dreams,” Eric wrote in his class paper.

  I have mastered changing anything that is possible to change in that game, such as the speed of weapons, the strength and mass of monsters,
the textures and colors used on the floors and walls, and greatest of all, the actual levels that are used. Several times I have dreamed of a place or area one night, then thought about it for days and days. Then, I would recreate it in Doom using everything from places in outer space with burned-out floor lights and dusty computers to the darkest depths of the infernal regions with minotaurs and demons running at me from every dark and threatening corner. I have also created settings such as eras of ancient abandoned military installations deep in monster-infested forests with blood stained trees and unidentifiable mangled bodies covered with dead vines, and others that portray to futuristic military bases on Mars overrun with zombies that lurk in every corner. These places may seem a bit on the violent side and, I assure you, some of them are. However, many times I have made levels with absolutely no monsters or guns in them. I have created worlds with beautiful, breathtaking scenery that looks like something out of a science fiction movie, a fantasy movie, or even some “eldritch” from H.P. Lovecraft.

  The Browns say they were told that Eric used their own neighborhood as a Doom setting, and their house as the target. And a couple weeks after Columbine, the Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center examined Harris’ games as part of its mission to monitor hate crimes. The center suggested that Harris had made a version of Doom that turned the game from a shooting competition into a massacre because the player was invincible. Wiesenthal researchers said it was called “God mode,” and dying characters would yell out, “Lord, why is this happening to me?” Investigators figure Harris spent one hundred hours to create the configuration, and in one version, he thanked Klebold for his help.

  Eric claimed his interest in the game was intellectual. “Even though one might think it [Doom] is just a game, I believe it is one of the best ways to show my creativity and intelligence,” he wrote.