Columbine (24 page)

It is an axiom of journalism that disaster stories begin in confusion and grow clearer over time. Facts rush in, the fog lifts, an accurate picture solidifies. The public accepts this. But the final portrait is often furthest from the truth.

One hour into the Columbine horror, news stations were informing the public that two or more gunmen were behind it. Two hours in, the Trench Coat Mafia were to blame. The TCM were portrayed as a cult of homosexual Goths in makeup, orchestrating a bizarre death pact for the year 2000.

Ludicrous or not, the TCM myth was the most defensible of the big media blunders. The killers did wear trench coats. A small group had named themselves after the garment a year earlier. A few kids put the two together, and it's hard to blame them. It seemed like a tidy fit. But the crucial detail unreported Tuesday afternoon was that most kids in Clement Park were
not
citing the TCM. Few were even naming Eric and Dylan. In a school of two thousand, most of the student body didn't even know the boys. Nor had many seen gunfire directly. Initially, most students told reporters they had no idea who attacked them.

That changed fast. Most of the two thousand got themselves to a television or kept a constant cell phone vigil with viewers. It took only a few TV mentions for the trench coat connection to take hold. It sounded so obvious.
Of course! Trench coats, Trench Coat Mafia!

TV journalists were actually careful. They used attribution and disclaimers like "believed to be" or "described as." Some wondered out loud about the killers' identities and then described the TCM, leaving viewers to draw the link. Repetition was the problem. Only a handful of students mentioned the TCM during the first five hours of CNN coverage--virtually all fed from local news stations. But reporters homed in on the idea. They were responsible about
how
they addressed the rumors, but blind to the impact of how often.

Kids "knew" the TCM was involved because witnesses and news anchors had said so on TV. They confirmed it with friends watching similar reports. Word spread fast--conversation was the only teen activity in south Jeffco Tuesday afternoon. Pretty soon, most of the students had multiple independent confirmations. They believed they knew the TCM was behind the attack as a fact. From 1:00 to 8:00
P.M.
, the number of students in Clement Park citing the group went from almost none to nearly all. They weren't making it up, they were repeating it back.

The second problem was a failure to question. In those first five hours, not a single person on the CNN feeds asked a student
how
they knew the killers were part of the Trench Coat Mafia.

Print reporters, talk show hosts, and the rest of the media chain repeated those mistakes. "All over town, the ominous new phrase 'Trench Coat Mafia' was on everyone's lips,"
USA Today
reported Wednesday morning. That was a fact. But who was telling whom? The writers assumed kids were informing the media. It was the other way around.

____

Most of the myths were in place by nightfall. By then, it was a given that the killers had been targeting jocks. The target myth was the most insidious, because it went straight to motive. The public believes Columbine was an act of retribution: a desperate reprisal for unspeakable jock-abuse. Like the other myths, it began with a kernel of truth.

In the first few hours, a shattered junior named Bree Pasquale became the marquee witness of the tragedy. She had escaped unharmed but splattered in blood. Bree described the library horror in convincing detail. Radio and television stations replayed her testimony relentlessly: "They were shooting anyone of color, wearing a white hat, or playing a sport," she said. "And they didn't care who it was and it was all at close range. Everyone around me got shot. And I begged him for ten minutes not to shoot me."

The problem with Bree Pasquale's account is the contradiction between facts and conclusion. That's typical of witnesses under extreme duress. If the killers were shooting "everyone," didn't that include jocks, minorities, and hat wearers? Four times in that brief statement, she described random killing. Yet reporters glommed on to the anomaly in her statement.

Bullying and racism? Those were known threats. Explaining it away was reassuring.

By evening, the target theory was dominating most broadcasts; nearly all the major papers featured it. The
Rocky
and the
Washington Post
refused to embrace the targeting theory all week, but they were lonely dissenters.

Initially, most witnesses refuted the emerging consensus. Nearly all described the killing as random. All the papers and the wire services produced a total of just four witnesses advancing the target theory Wednesday morning--each one contradicting his or her own description. Most of the papers advanced the theory with just one student who had actually seen it--some had zero. Reuters attributed the theory to "many witnesses" and
USA Today
to "students."

"Student" equaled "witness." Witness to everything that happened that day, and anything about the killers. It was a curious leap. Reporters would not make that mistake at a car wreck.
Did you see it?
If not, they move on. But journalists felt like foreigners stepping into teen culture. They knew kids can hide anything from adults--but not from each other. That was the mentality:
Something shocking happened here; we're baffled, but kids know
. So all two thousand were deputized as insiders. If students said targeting, that was surely it.

Police detectives rejected the universal-witness concept. And they relied on traumatized witnesses for observations, not conclusions. They never saw targeting as plausible. They were baffled by the media consensus.

____

Journalists were not relying exclusively on "students." The entire industry was depending on the
Denver Post
. The paper sent fifty-four reporters, eight photographers, and five artists into the field. They had the most resources and the best contacts. Day one, they were hours ahead of the national pack; the first week they were a day ahead on most developments. The
Rocky Mountain News
had a presence as well, but they had a smaller staff, and the national press trusted the
Post
. It did not single-handedly create any of the myths, but as the
Post
bought into one after another after another, each mistaken conclusion felt safe. The pack followed.

____

The Jeffco Parks and Recreation District began hauling truckloads of hay bales into Clement Park. It was a mess. Thousands of people gathered at the northeast corner of the park on Wednesday, and tens of thousands appeared on Thursday and Friday. The snow had begun fluttering down Wednesday, and the foot traffic tore the field to shreds. By Thursday it was an enormous mud pit. Nobody seemed to care much, but county workers scattered thick layers of hay in winding paths all along the makeshift memorials.

They didn't know it yet, they had no idea there was a name for it, but many of the survivors had entered the early stages of post-traumatic stress disorder. Many had not. It wasn't a matter of how close they had been to witnessing or experiencing the violence. Length and severity of exposure increased their odds of mental health trouble down the road, but long-term responses were highly varied, depending on each individual. Some kids who had been in the library during the shootings would turn out fine, while others who had been off to Wendy's would be traumatized for years.

Dr. Frank Ochberg, a professor in psychiatry at Michigan State University and a leading expert on PTSD, would be brought in by the FBI a few months later and would spend years advising mental health workers on the case. He and a group of psychiatrists had first developed the term in the 1970s. They had observed a phenomenon that was stress-induced but was qualitatively more severe, and brought on by a really traumatic experience. This was something that produced truly profound effects and lasted for years or, if untreated, even a lifetime.

____

A far milder and more common response was also under way: survivor's guilt. It began playing out almost immediately, in the hallways of the six local hospitals where the injured were recovering. At St. Anthony's, the first week, the waiting rooms were packed with students coming to see Patrick Ireland. Every seat in every room was taken. Dozens of students waited in the hallways.

Patrick spent the first days in ICU. Most visitors were refused, but the kids kept streaming into the hospital room anyway. They just needed to be there.

"You have to realize that this was part of their healing too," Kathy Ireland said.

All day, some of them stayed, and well into the evening. The staff started bringing food in once they realized some of the kids hadn't been eating.

____

Patrick's situation looked grim. His doctors were just hoping to keep him alive. They advised John and Kathy to keep expectations low: whatever condition they observed the first day or two would be the prognosis for the rest of his life. John and Kathy accepted this. And they saw a paralyzed boy, struggling mightily to speak gibberish.

The medical staff chose to not operate on Patrick's broken right foot. They cleaned out the wound and placed a brace around it.
Why
? his parents asked. There were more pressing concerns, they were told. And Patrick was never going to use that foot.

John and Kathy were devastated. But they had to be realists. They turned their attention to raising an invalid, and figuring out how to help him be happy that way.

Patrick was unaware of the prognosis. It never occurred to him that he might not walk. He viewed the injury like a broken bone: you wear a cast, you build the muscle back, you pick your life up where you left off. He knew it would be tougher than the time he broke his thumb. A lot tougher. It might take three or four times as long to recover. He assumed he would recover.

____

Patrick's friend Makai was released from St. Anthony's Friday. He had been shot in the knee alongside Patrick. Reporters were invited into the hospital library for a press conference, broadcast on CNN. Makai was in a wheelchair. It turned out that he'd known Dylan.

"I thought he was an all right guy," Makai said. "Decent, real smart."

They'd taken the same French class and worked together on school projects.

"He was a nice guy, never treated me bad," Makai said. "He wasn't the kind of person he's being portrayed as."

____

Patrick made improvement with his speech the first week, and his vitals began returning to normal. On Friday, he was moved out of the ICU and into a regular room. Once he had settled in, his parents decided it was time to ask him the burning question. Had he gone out the library window?

They knew. They just had to know if he did. Did he know why he was there? Was the trauma of the truth still ahead?

"Well, yeah!" he stammered. Were they just figuring that out?

He was incredulous, Kathy said later. "He looked at us like, 'How could you be so ignorant?'" She was OK with that. All she felt was relief.

____

That same week, Dr. Alan Weintraub, a neurologist from Craig Hospital, came to see Patrick. Craig is one of the leading rehab centers in the world, specializing in brain and spinal cord injuries. It's located in Jeffco, not far from the Irelands' home. Dr. Weintraub examined Patrick, reviewed his charts, and gave John and Kathy his assessment: "The first thing I can say to you is there's hope."

They were astounded, relieved, and perplexed. Later, the discrepancy made sense to them. The staffs had different expertise and different perspectives. St. Anthony's specialized in trauma. "Their goal is to save lives," Kathy said. "At Craig the goal is to rebuild them."

They began making arrangements to transfer Patrick to Craig.

____

By Thursday, students in Clement Park were angry. The killers were dead, so much of the anger was deflected: onto Goths, Marilyn Manson, the TCM, or anyone who looked, dressed, or acted like the killers--or the media's portrayal of them.

The killers were quickly cast as outcasts and "fags."

"They're freaks," said an angry sophomore from the soccer team. "Nobody really liked them, just'cause they--" He paused, then plunged ahead. "The majority of them were gay. So everyone would make fun of them."

Several jocks reported having seen the killers and friends "touching" in the hallways, groping each other or holding hands. A football player captivated reporters with tales of group showering.

The gay rumor was almost invisible in the media, but rampant in Clement Park. The stories were vague. Everything was thirdhand. None of the storytellers even knew the killers. Everyone in Clement Park heard the rumors; most of the students saw through them. They were disgusted at the jocks for defaming the killers the same way in death as they had in life. Clearly, "gay" was one of the worst epithets one kid could hurl against another in Jeffco.

Eric and Dylan's friends generally shrugged off the stories. One of them was outraged. "The media's taken my friends and made them to be gay and neo-Nazis and all these hater stuff," he said. "They're portraying my friends as idiots." The angry boy was a brawny six-foot senior dressed in camouflage pants. He ranted for several hours, and he was soon all over the national press--sometimes looking a bit ridiculous. He stopped talking. His father began screening media calls.

A few papers mentioned the gay rumors in passing. Reverend Jerry Falwell described the killers as gay on
Rivera Live
. A notorious picketer of gay funerals issued a media alert saying, "Two filthy fags slaughtered 13 people at Columbine High." Most significantly, the Drudge Report quoted Internet postings claiming that the Trench Coat Mafia was a gay conspiracy to kill jocks. But most major media carefully sidestepped the gay rumor.

The press failed to show similar deference to Goths. Some of the most withering attacks were reserved for that group: a morose-acting subculture best known for powder-white face paint and black clothes, black lips, and black fingernails, accented by heavy, dripping mascara. They were mistakenly associated with the killers on Tuesday by students unfamiliar with the Goth concept. Equally clueless reporters amplified the rumor. One of the most egregious reports was an extended
20/20
segment ABC aired, just one night after the attack. Diane Sawyer introduced it by noting that unnamed police said "the boys may have been part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement and that some of these Goths may have killed before." It was true, Goths had killed before--as had members of every conceivable background and subculture.