Columbine (23 page)

Some of the men turned and pointed to the huge block letters on their backs:
SWAT
.

"Be quiet!" an officer yelled. "Put your hands on your heads and follow us out."

"Someone's got to stay with Mr. Sanders," someone said.

"I will," Aaron volunteered.

"No!" an officer said. "Everyone out."

Then how about hauling Dave out with them, Kevin suggested. There were folded tables--they could improvise one as a stretcher.

No.

It seemed heartless, but the SWAT team was trained to make practical choices. Hundreds of students were trapped. The gunmen could reappear any moment. The team had to assume a battlefield mentality and evacuate the maximum number in the minimum time. They could send a medic back for the injured later.

The SWAT team led students single file down the stairs to the commons. They waded through three inches of water that had rained down from the sprinklers. Backpacks and pizza slices floated by. Don't touch them, the officers warned.
Don't touch anything
. A SWAT member held the door. He stopped each student, held them for two seconds, then tapped them on the shoulder and told them to run. That was a standard infantry maneuver. A single pipe bomb could take out an entire pack of children; a well-aimed machine-gun burst could do the same. Safer to space them.

Outside, the kids ran past two dead bodies: Danny Rohrbough and Rachel Scott. Marjorie Lindholm remembered "a weird look on their faces, and a weird color to their skin." The girl just ahead of her stopped suddenly when she saw the bodies, and Marjorie caught up. A SWAT officer screamed at them to keep moving. Marjorie saw their guns trained right on her. She gave the girl a push, and they both took off.

Two SWAT officers stayed with Dave, and another called for help. It fell to a Denver SWAT member outside the building to recruit a paramedic. He spotted Troy Laman, an EMT who had driven out from the city and was manning a triage station. "Troy, I need you to go in," the SWAT officer said. "Let's go."

Laman followed the officer through the flooded commons, up the stairway, past the rubble, and into Science Room 3. By that time, Dave had stopped breathing. According to emergency triage protocol, that qualified him as dead. "I knew there was nothing I could do for this guy," said Laman, who had no equipment. "But because I was stuck in a room with him by myself for fifteen minutes, I wanted to help him."

The SWAT officer eventually cleared Laman to keep moving. "There's nothing you can do," he said.

So Laman went on to the library. He was one of the first medics to go in.

____

Dave Sanders's story got out fast. Both local papers, the
Rocky Mountain News
and the
Denver Post,
described his ordeal on Wednesday. On Thursday the
Rocky,
as it's often called, ran a piece called
POLICE DISPUTE CHARGES THEY WERE TOO SLOW.
"A lot of people are angry," one student said. But the bulk of the story focused on the police response.

"We had 1,800 kids rushing from the school," said Jeffco sheriff's spokesman Steve Davis. "The officers had no idea which were victims and which were potential suspects."

The
Rocky
offered this summary of the SWAT response based on the department's claims: "Within twenty minutes of the first panicked call for help, a makeshift six-man SWAT team rushed into the sprawling school, and within an hour, dozens of heavily armed officers in body armor launched a methodical, room-by-room search of the building."

The department would eventually admit that it took more than twice that long, 47 minutes, for the first five-man team to enter. The other half of that team attended to wounded students on the lawn, but never proceeded in. A second team entered after nearly two hours. Until the killers' bodies were found, that was it.

____

The situation grew hotter on Friday when a veteran suburban cop laid down thirteen roses in Clement Park and then described the SWAT response as "pathetic."

"It pissed me off," he told reporters. "I'd have someone in there. We are trained to do that. We are trained to go in there."

The officer's statement was widely reported. He became an instant symbol. And his department foolishly extended the story by placing him on nondisciplinary leave and ordering a "fitness for duty" evaluation. They backpedaled a few days later.

Members of the SWAT teams began responding in the press. "It was just a nightmare," said a sergeant. "What parents need to understand is we wanted teams in there as quickly as we could. We were going into the situation blind. We had multiple explosions going off. We thought there could have been a band of terrorists in there."

Officers were nearly as confused as TV viewers. Outside, they could hear the blasts. But once they entered, they couldn't even hear one another. The fire alarm drowned out everything. Communication was limited to hand signals. "Had we heard gunfire and screaming, we would have gone right to that," a SWAT officer explained.

The barrage of noise and strobe lights beat down their psyches like psychological warfare. Officers could not locate anyone with the alarm code to shut it down. They found an assistant principal, but she was so frazzled she couldn't remember the digits. In desperation, officers tried to beat the alarm speakers off the walls. One tried to disable the control panel by smashing the glass cover with his rifle butt. The alarms and sprinklers continued until 4:04
P.M.
The strobe light that flashed with the alarm continued for weeks.

Those were legitimate obstacles, the Sanders family acknowledged. But more than three hours after he was shot? Linda's sister Melody was designated family spokesperson. "Some of his daughters are angry," she told the
New York Times
a few days later. "They feel like, had they gone in and gotten Dave out sooner, he would have lived."

Melody said the Sanders family didn't hold the SWAT members responsible. But the system was a disaster. "It was utter chaos," Melody said.

The family expressed gratitude for the efforts that had been made. As a gesture of goodwill, they invited the full SWAT teams to Dave's funeral. All the officers attended.

27. Black

E
ric was evolving inside. Sophomore year, the changes began to show. For his first fifteen years, Eric had concentrated on assimilation. Dylan had sought the same goal, with less success. Despite the upheavals of moving, Eric always made friends. Social status was important. "They were just like everybody else," a classmate said later. Eric's neighbor described him as nice, polite, preppy, and a dork. High school was full of dorks. Eric could live with that--for a while.

Sophomore year, he tried an edgier look: combat boots, all-black outfits, and grunge. He started shopping at a trendy shop called Hot Topic and the army surplus store. He liked the look. He liked the feeling. Their buddy Chris Morris began sporting a beret. That was a little much, Eric thought. He wanted to look different, not retarded. Eric was breaking out of his shell. He grew boisterous, moody, and aggressive. Sometimes he was playful, speaking in funny voices and flirting with girls. He had a lot of ideas and he began expressing them with confidence. Dylan never did.

Most of the girls who knew Eric described him as cute. He was aware of the consensus but didn't quite accept it. He responded candidly to one of those chain e-mail questionnaires asking for likes, dislikes, and personal attributes. Under "Looks," he wrote, "5' 10'' 140. skinny but handsome, some say." The one thing he would like to change about himself was his weight. Such a freaking runt. He'd always hated his appearance--now at least he had a look.

Eric took some flack for the new getup--older kids and bigger guys razzed him sometimes, but nothing exceptional. And he was talking back now and provoking confrontations. He'd shaken off his silence along with the preppy uniform.

Dylan remained quiet right up until the end. He wasn't much for mouthing off, except in rare sudden bursts that freaked everyone out a little. He followed Eric's fashion lead but a less intense version, so he took a lot less ribbing. Eric could have silenced the taunts anytime by conforming again, but by this point, he got a kick out of standing out.

"The impression I always got from them was they kind of wanted to be outcasts," another classmate said. "It wasn't that they were labeled that way. It's what they chose to be."

"Outcast" was a matter of perception. Kids who slapped that label on Eric and Dylan meant the boys rejected the preppy model, but so did hundreds of other kids at the school. Eric and Dylan had very active social calendars, and far more friends than the average adolescent. They fit in with a whole thriving subculture. Their friends respected one another and ridiculed the conformity of the vanilla wafers looking down on them. They had no desire to emulate the jocks. Could there be a faster route to boredom?

For Dylan, different was difficult. For Eric, different was good.

____

For Halloween that year, Eric Dutro, a junior, wanted to go as Dracula. He needed a cool coat, something dramatic--he had a flair for theatrics--so his parents picked up a long black duster at Sam's Club. The kids referred to this as a trench coat.

The costume didn't work out, but the trench coat was cool. Eric Dutro hung on to it; he started wearing it to school. It made quite an impression. The trench coat turned a whole lot of heads, and Dutro loved turning heads.

He had a hard time at school. Kids at Columbine picked on him. Kids would ridicule him relentlessly, calling him a freak and a faggot. Eventually he fought back the only way he knew how: by upping the ante. If they were going to call him freak, he was going to give them one hell of a freak show. The trench coat made a nice little addition to his freakdrobe.

Not surprisingly, Dutro hung with a bunch of kids who liked turning heads, too. After a while, several of them were sporting trench coats. They would dress all in black and wear the long coats even in the summer. Somewhere along the line, someone referred to them as the Trench Coat Mafia, TCM for short. It stuck.

Eric Dutro, Chris Morris, and a handful of other boys were pretty much the core of the TCM, but a dozen more were often associated with the TCM as well, whether they sported trench coats or not.

Eric and Dylan were not among them. Each of them knew some of the TCM kids, and Eric, especially, would become buddies with Chris. That was as close as they came.

Eventually, after the TCM heyday was over, Eric got himself a trench coat. Dylan followed. They wore them to the massacre, for both fashion and functional considerations. The choice would cause tremendous confusion.

28. Media Crime

T
he Trench Coat Mafia was mythologized because it was colorful, memorable, and fit the existing myth of the school shooter as outcast loner. All the Columbine myths worked that way. And they all sprang to life incredibly fast--most of the notorious myths took root before the killers' bodies were found.

We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened. No Goths, no outcasts, nobody snapping. No targets, no feud, and no Trench Coat Mafia. Most of those elements existed at Columbine--which is what gave them such currency. They just had nothing to do with the murders. The lesser myths are equally unsupported: no connection to Marilyn Manson, Hitler's birthday, minorities, or Christians.

Few people knowledgeable about the case believe those myths anymore. Not reporters, investigators, families of the victims, or their legal teams. And yet most of the public takes them for granted. Why?

Media defenders blame the chaos: two thousand witnesses, wildly conflicting reports--who could get all those facts straight? But facts were not the problem. Nor did time sort them out. The first print story arrived in an extra edition of the
Rocky Mountain News
. It went to press at three o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, before the bodies in the library were found. The
Rocky's
nine-hundred-word summary of the massacre was an extraordinary piece of journalism: gripping, empathetic, and astonishingly accurate. It nailed the details and the big picture: two ruthless killers picking off students indiscriminately. It was the first story published that spring to get the essence of the attack right--and one of the last.