Columbine (43 page)

____

Brian Fuselier didn't want his parents standing in the human shield. "The more you do that, the more you make it unnatural," he told his dad. Brian was doing OK with the trauma; he just wanted his life back, and his school back, the way it had been.

"That's just not going to happen," his father said.

Agent Fuselier took Monday morning off from the investigation to join the chain. Mimi stood beside him. By seven
A.M.
kids were streaming in with their parents. By 7:30, the shield was five hundred strong. It would grow much larger. The parents applauded each student's arrival.

Most of the kids wore matching white T-shirts emblazoned with their rallying cry:
WE ARE
on the front and
COLUMBINE
on the back. Small contingents had opted for their own messages:
YES, I BELIEVE IN GOD OR VICTORS NOT VICTIMS.

Frank DeAngelis took the microphone and a group of kids screamed, "We love you, Mr. D!"

He teared up at the welcome, then delivered a touching speech. "You may be feeling a little anxious," he said. "But you need to know that you are not in this alone."

The school's American flags were raised from half-mast for the first time since April 20, symbolically ending the period of mourning. A ribbon across the entrance was cut, and Patrick Ireland led the student body in.

44. Bombs Are Hard

E
ric was counting on a slow recovery. He was less concerned about killing hundreds of people on April 20 than about tormenting millions for years. His audience was the target. He wanted everyone to agonize: the student body, residents of Jeffco, the American public, the human race.

Eric amused himself with the idea of coming back as a ghost to haunt survivors. He would make noises to trigger flashbacks, and drive them all insane. Anticipation satiated Eric for months. Then it was time to act.

Senior year, just before Halloween, he began assembling his arsenal. Eric sat down in his room with a stack of fireworks, split each one down the side, and tapped the shiny black powder into a coffee can. Once he had a sufficient volume, he tipped the can and guided a fine little trickle into a carbon dioxide cartridge. He measured it out carefully, almost to the rim. Then he applied a wick, sealed it off, and set it aside. One cricket, ready for detonation. He was pleased with his work. He assembled nine more.

The pipe bombs required a lot more gunpowder, as well as a PVC pipe to house each one. Eric assembled four of those that day. The first three he designated the Alpha batch. Not bad, but he could do better. He set them aside and tried a different approach. He built just one bomb for the Beta batch. Better. Still room for improvement. That was enough for one day.

Eric drew up a chart to record his production data. He set up columns to log each batch by name, size, quantity, shrapnel content, and power load. Then he rated his work. Six of his eight batches would earn an "excellent" assessment. His worst performance was "O.K."

The next day, Eric got right back to it, producing six more pipe bombs--the rest of the Beta batch. Later, he would create Charlie, Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot, using military lingo for all of the batches, except that soldiers use
Bravo,
not
Beta
.

Eric penned nearly a dozen new journal entries in the next two months. "I have a goal to destroy as much as possible," he wrote, "so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that."

It was a mark of Eric's ruthlessness that he comprehended the pain and consciously fought the urge to spare it. "I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom," he wrote. "I have to turn off my feelings."

Keep one thing in mind, he said: he wanted to burn the world. That would be hard. He had begun producing the explosives, and it was a lot of work. Ten pipe bombs and ten puny crickets after two days' effort. Those would not destroy much. "God I want to torch and level everything in this whole fucking area," he said, "but bombs of that size are hard to make."

Eric took a few moments to enjoy the dream. He envisioned half of Denver on fire: napalm streams eating the skin off skyscrapers, explosive gas tanks ripping through residential garages. Napalm recipes were available online. The ingredients were readily attainable. But he had to be realistic. "It will be very tricky getting all of our supplies, explosives, weaponry, ammo, and then hiding it all and then actually planting it all," he said. A lot could go wrong in the next six months, and if they did get busted, "we start killing then and there. I aint going out without a fight."

Eric repeated that last line almost verbatim in an English essay. The assignment was to react to a quote from literature, and Eric had chosen this line from Euripides' tragedy
Medea:
"No, like some yellow-eyed beast that has killed its hunters let me lie down on the hounds' bodies and the broken spears." Medea was declaring that she would die fighting, Eric wrote. They would never take her without a struggle. He repeated that sentiment seven times in a page and a quarter. He described Medea as brave and courageous, tough and strong and hard as stone. It is one of the most impassioned public essays Eric left behind.

For years after his death, Eric would be seen as a bundle of contradictions. But the threads come together in "I aint going out without a fight." Eric dreamed big but settled for reality. Unfortunately, that passage remained hidden from the public for years. Scattered quotes from his writings would leak out, and viewed as fragments, they could seem contradictory. Was Eric planning a gun battle or a plane crash or a terrorist attack bigger than Oklahoma City's? If he was so intent on mass murder, why did he kill only thirteen? Trying to understand Eric from the information available was like reading every fifth page of a novel and concluding that none of it made sense.

Dr. Fuselier had the advantage of reading Eric's journal from start to finish. Without the holes, the thrust was obvious: humans meant nothing; Eric was superior and determined to prove it. Watching us suffer would be enjoyable. Every week he devised colorful new scenarios: crashing planes into buildings, igniting blocks of skyscrapers, ejecting people into outer space. But the objective never wavered: kill as many as possible, as dramatically as imaginable.

In a perfect world, Eric would extinguish the species. Eric was a practical kid, though. The planet was beyond him; even a block of Denver high-rises was out of reach. But he could pull off a high school.

____

A high school was pragmatic, but the choice was not arbitrary. If jocks had been his target, he would not just have hit the gym. He could have killed the few thousand packing the bleachers at a Columbine football game. If he'd been after the social elites, he could have taken out prom just three days before. Eric attacked the symbol of his oppression: the robot factory and the hub of adolescent existence.

For Eric, Columbine was a performance. Homicidal art. He actually referred to his audience in his journal: "the majority of the audience wont even understand my motives," he complained. He scripted Columbine as made-for-TV murder, and his chief concern was that we would be too stupid to see the point. Fear was Eric's ultimate weapon. He wanted to maximize the terror. He didn't want kids to fear isolated events like a sporting event or a dance; he wanted them to fear their daily lives. It worked. Parents across the country were afraid to send their kids to school.

Eric didn't have the political agenda of a terrorist, but he had adopted terrorist tactics. Sociology professor Mark Juergensmeyer identified the central characteristic of terrorism as "performance violence." Terrorists design events "to be spectacular in their viciousness and awesome in their destructive power. Such instances of exaggerated violence are constructed events: they are mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater."

The audience--for Timothy McVeigh, Eric Harris, or the Palestine Liberation Organization--was always miles away, watching on TV. Terrorists rarely settle for just shooting; that limits the damage to individuals. They prefer to blow up things--buildings, usually, and the smart ones choose carefully.

"During that brief dramatic moment when a terrorist act levels a building or damages some entity that a society regards as central to its existence, the perpetrators of the act assert that they--and not the secular government--have ultimate control over that entity and its centrality," Juergensmeyer wrote. He pointed out that during the same day as the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, a deadlier attack was leveled against a coffee shop in Cairo. The attacks were presumably coordinated by the same group. The body count was worse in Egypt, yet the explosion was barely reported outside that country. "A coffeehouse is not the World Trade Center," he explained.

Most terrorists target symbols of the system they abhor--generally, iconic government buildings. Eric followed the same logic. He understood that the cornerstone of his plan was the explosives. When all his bombs fizzled, everything about his attack was misread. He didn't just fail to top Timothy McVeigh's record--he wasn't even recognized for trying. He was never categorized with his peer group. We lumped him in with the pathetic loners who shot people.

____

Eric miscalculated again. It was about drinking this time. He and Dylan talked a friend's mom into buying lots of liquor. She took requests. Eric ordered tequila and Baileys Irish Cream. Dylan asked for vodka, of course. There was also beer, whiskey, schnapps, and Scotch. The group had a little boozefest that weekend. Eric made off with the leftovers and stashed them in the spare-tire compartment of his car. He was pretty proud of himself. He had all the booze he needed for a long time. He bought himself a flask and loaded it up with smooth, potent Scotch. Eric didn't actually like alcohol, but he loved the idea. He took only three sips in the month he owned the flask, but he could sip Scotch whenever he wanted--how cool was that? He got a little cocky and bragged to a friend. The jerk ratted him out to Eric's dad.

There was one hell of a fight at the Harris house that night. Wayne was livid.
When are you going to get on track? What are you going to do with your life?

Eric spun a fresh batch of lies. He had been keeping up his grades just to maintain his cover story, setting the stage for a fresh round of bullshit. Man, he was good that night. He even quoted lines out of his favorite movies and delivered them like he was totally in the moment. "I should have won a freaking Oscar," he wrote in his journal.

Despite the fighting, Eric convinced his Diversion officer that everything was great with his parents. Kriegshauser noted the happy home life in his notes for every session from that period. Eric had an instinct for when the truth would placate an adult, how much to reveal, and to whom. When he attended anger management class for Diversion, he wrote the required response paper, dutifully sucking up about how helpful it was. In person, he sensed Bob Kriegshauser would respond to a different tack. Eric admitted that the class was a waste of time. Bob was proud of him for coming clean. In his session notes, he praised Eric's honesty.

Dr. Fuselier found Eric's paper interesting for another reason. Eric really had learned something from the session. He'd listed the four stages of anger and several triggers: quick breathing, tunnel vision, tightened muscles, and clenched teeth. The triggers served as warning signs or symptoms of anger, Eric wrote. Just the kind of information he could use. Eric was a prodigy at masking his true emotions and simulating the desired effect, but prodigy was a long way from pro. Clarifying tiny giveaways where an expert might see through his act--that kind of data was invaluable. Eric described himself as a sponge, and mimicry of agreeable behavior was his number one skill.

____

Eric's grades were up, and his teachers were happy. He would end the fall semester with glowing comments on his report card about a positive attitude and cooperation. Dylan was still tanking. On November 3, he brought Kriegshauser another progress report. Calculus was no better, and now he had a D in gym, too. It was just tardiness, he explained.

You will get there on time, meaning not one minute late, Kriegshauser demanded. That better be a passing grade by next session.

By their next session, the grade had dropped to an F. Kriegshauser confronted Dylan on the situation, and Dylan tried to weasel out. There was a pattern, Kriegshauser said. Dylan wasn't even trying. The comments from his calculus teacher showed a bad attitude. He wasn't making use of his class time effectively. What was going on there? Dylan said he'd been reading a book in class. Kriegshauser was incredulous. Dylan wasn't much of a smooth talker. Listen to yourself, Kriegshauser told him. Think about what you're saying. You are minimizing everything. You're full of excuses. You sound like you think you're the victim.

Kriegshauser said there would be consequences if Dylan's efforts didn't change. That could include termination. Termination would translate to multiple felony convictions. Dylan could find himself in prison.