Columbine (60 page)

Eric was gobbling up literature:
Eric kept many of his school assignments, including papers on all the items cited in this chapter. I reviewed them all.

CHAPTER 43. WHO OWNS THE TRAGEDY

There is a house, outside of Laramie:
Linda described their retirement plans, including the house, in an interview with me.

Columbine was set to reopen:
I attended the Media Summit and the Take Back the School rally. Only pool reporters were permitted inside the human shield at the rally, so I relied on their briefings for that passage, as well as my later interviews with numerous people inside. I discussed objectives for the rally and the ideas behind it with several administrators responsible for designing it.

For one morning:
I spent the morning in the Columbine commons, chatting with the kids as they painted their tiles.

CHAPTER 44. BOMBS ARE HARD

just before Halloween:
From this point, Eric recorded the dates for all major milestones, as well as a slew of trivial ones. He also kept dated receipts for many of his purchases.

began assembling his arsenal.
Eric let Nate watch him produce part of one batch. Nate described the process to police; their records served as the basis for my visual depiction.

CHAPTER 45. AFTERSHOCKS

Milestones were hard:
I covered most of the events in this chapter for
Salon
and the bulk of the material was based on that reporting. (An exception was the football championship--I followed the team's progress but did not attend the games.) Years later, I gathered hundreds of pages of news stories on the events and mined them for additional quotes, including those from the Graves and Hochhalter families. All news quotes are cited in the expanded Web version of this Notes section.

another publication broke the news:
It was my story in
Salon
.

The magazine ran an expose
:
Time
sent a team back to reinvestigate the tragedy and reexamined the entire case for that cover story. It did a great job, effectively correcting the major myths. But it did not cop to the correction. This was a grievous example of "rowback"--the term was resurrected in 2004 by
New York Times
public editor Daniel Okrent to critique Iraq War coverage; it's rarely heard even within the industry, because it denotes such an ugly sin. Okrent cites journalism educator Melvin Mencher describing it as "a story that attempts to correct a previous story without indicating that the prior story had been in error or without taking responsibility for the error." Okrent wrote that a more candid definition might be "a way that a newspaper can cover its butt without admitting it was ever exposed."

CHAPTER 46. GUNS

Eric named his shotgun:
Arlene was the heroine from the
Doom
books Eric enjoyed. He scratched the word into her barrel and referred to her by name in writings and on video.

Eric fit both categories:
Millon, Simonsen, Davis, and Birket-Smith created the ten subcategories to sort out very different types of psychopaths, but they are not designed to be mutually exclusive; nor are they necessarily the drivers of behavior. Eric exhibited symptoms consistent with malevolent and tyrannical personalities, and Dr. Fuselier concurred that Eric appeared to be a cross between those two.

"I want to tear a throat out":
I edited this passage down. It went on much longer, and more viciously.

On January 20:
The Diversion program files cite February 3 as the termination date, but that's not an accurate reflection, particularly from the boys' perspective. In both files, Kriegshauser documented meeting with them on January 20 to close their cases.

Eric was also working hard:
Eric wrote about his efforts to "get laid" frequently during the final months.

CHAPTER 47. LAWSUITS

Mr. D told a magazine:
He said it to me. I covered the events of this chapter extensively for
Salon,
and most of it was based on that reporting.

the Rohrboughs:
For simplicity, I used "the Rohrboughs" periodically to denote both sides of Danny's family, the Rohrboughs and Petrones.

gun-control legislation:
In April 2000, a few bills were pending to allow concealed weapons in Colorado. Those were quickly defeated in the wake of the tragedy.

CHAPTER 48. AN EMOTION OF GOD

a big problem:
Eric cited getting the bombs in as a major issue.

If only he had a little more cash:
Eric expressed frustration about his limited funds and drew up budgets for his arsenal.

Dylan wrote a short story:
Jeffco released the story, with Judy Kelly's notes.

Three friends went with them:
The boys videotaped quite a bit of the target practice, and Jeffco released the tape.

They made three target-practice trips:
Manes told lead investigator Kate Battan they made three trips, but she could not determine whether they were before or after the videotaped trip.

Dylan leaked again:
Zack told police his conversation with Dylan occurred in February. His memory might have been off slightly, or Dylan might have begun training earlier--with or without Manes.

Desperado:
Robert Rodriguez directed the film. Tarantino appeared as an actor and is closely associated with Rodriguez.

CHAPTER 49. READY TO BE DONE

Most of the Parents Group attended:
The scenes at the opening of the atrium came from my observations.

Jeffco was forced to cough up:
I followed the slow release of the information over several years and examined most items as they came out, but I did not write about these events at the time.
Westword
and the
Rocky
did an excellent job covering the slow trickle, and I relied on their work. I considered the reports from the Colorado attorney general and the grand jury definitive.

the affidavit to search Eric's house:
After months of silence, the DA responded to a written request from the Browns. His response letter alluded to Guerra's affidavit, which for two years his agency had insisted did not exist. Randy and Judy couldn't believe it. They took it to CBS, and
60 Minutes
cornered Thomas. Judge Jackson demanded to see it--it had been withheld from him as well.

The affidavit was more damning:
Guerra was exceptionally convincing. He demonstrated motive, means, and opportunity. From a threat-assessment perspective, the specificity of Eric's attack raised it to high risk. The details regarding the weaponry increased it further. The capstone, though, came in connecting Eric's plans to physical evidence. The affidavit described the pipe bomb found near Eric's home and stated twice that it matched his descriptions of "Atlanta" and "Pholus."

"Based on the aforementioned information your affiant respectfully requests the court issue a search warrant for the residence," Guerra's affidavit concluded. The police would have found a great deal. Eric had made quite a few bombs by that time. The former chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, who had chaired a commission set up by the governor to investigate Columbine, eventually weighed in. He chided Jeffco for missing a "massive" number of clues. The massacre could have been prevented, he concluded. He lamented the perimeter response; if the SWAT team had stormed the building, he said, several lives could have been saved.

The affidavit also revealed that Division Chief Kiekbusch had told at least three whopping lies at the press conference ten days after Columbine: that the Browns had not met with Investigator Hicks, that the department couldn't find bombs like those in Eric's Web descriptions, and that it had been unable to locate his Web postings. The affidavit contradicted all three, and Kiekbusch had to have been familiar with it, since he had just attended the Open Space meeting with one topic: how to suppress it.

Jeffco responded with new lies. It issued a press release claiming it had disclosed the affidavit's existence a few days after Columbine--at the very time commanders were meeting to plot how to hide it. All the local media called Jeffco on the lie.

"It's amazing how long":
Sue Klebold recalled this exchange to David Brooks in 2004. He reported it in his
New York Times
column.

The FBI and Secret Service:
The FBI released its report,
The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective,
in 2000. Two years later, the Secret Service and the Department of Education teamed up for a broader analysis:
The Final Report and Findings of the Safe School Initiative.
Both reports were excellent, and I relied on them extensively. I also used news accounts to document foiled copycats in other cities. I interviewed school administrators, students, and mental health experts about zero tolerance policies.

two biggest myths:
The Secret Service studied every targeted attack at schools from December 1974 to May 2000. There had been forty-one attackers in thirty-seven incidents. Disciplinary history and academic performance also varied widely. The loner myth was perhaps the single biggest misconception. Some of the attackers were loners; two-thirds were not.

they "snapped":
"Nonviolent people do not 'snap' or decide on the spur of the moment to meet a problem by using violence," the FBI report said. Planning ranged from a day or two in advance to over a year.

in video games:
Only an eighth were fond of violent video games. A larger group--about a third--exhibited violence in their own written assignments or journals.

Most perps shared:
In many cases, bullying may have played a role: 71 percent of attackers had experienced persecution, bullying, threats, or injury. Initially that sounds dramatic, but the study did not address how many nonattackers suffer that sort of experience; it's pretty commonplace for a high school kid. Several of the shooters experienced severe or long-term bullying, though, and in some cases, it seemed to be a factor in the decision to attack.

suffered a loss or failure:
Loss came in different forms: 66 percent had suffered a drop in status; 51 percent had experienced an external loss, which included the death of a loved one but was more commonly being dumped by a girlfriend. The key was that the attacker perceived it as significant and felt his status drop.

More than half told:
There were at least two outsiders in the know 59 percent of the time. Someone had suspected the attack 93 percent of the time.

The danger skyrockets:
The FBI offered this example of a high-risk threat: "At eight o'clock tomorrow morning, I intend to shoot the principal. That's when he is in the office by himself. I have a 9mm. Believe me, I know what I am doing. I am sick and tired of the way he runs this school."

Melodramatic outbursts:
Melodrama and wild flourishes of punctuation are common--for example: "I hate you!!!!... You have ruined my life!!!!" Most laymen assume that such drama signals greater danger. That's a common fallacy, the report said. Perpetrators are just as likely to remain calm. No correlation has been established between emotional intensity and the actual danger it foretells.

A subtler form of leakage:
The FBI said a kid had reached the point of leakage when the same ugly ideas grabbed hold of him "no matter what the subject matter, the conversation, the assignment, or the joke."

list of warning signs:
The FBI listed criteria in four different areas: behavior, family situation, school dynamics, and social pressures. The behavioral list alone included twenty-eight characteristics. It cautioned that lots of innocent kids exhibited one or two or even several of its warning signs; the key was evidence of a majority of the items from all four areas. The risk factors were also highly correlated with substance abuse.

A national task force:
It included officers involved in Columbine, and leaders in the field, from the Los Angeles Police Department's SWAT team to the National Tactical Officers Association.

CHAPTER 50. THE BASEMENT TAPES

The first installment:
Jeffco showed the Basement Tapes to
Time,
then the
Rocky,
and then to a small group of reporters at a single screening. I was not included and have not seen them. My depictions came from three sources: a detailed account in the police files, news stories from the reporters who viewed them, and descriptions by Agent Fuselier and Kate Battan, who each studied them for six months. The police report ran ten pages and documented each scene in detail, with extensive quotations.

After the initial press showing, Jeffco promised more but never held another. The Klebolds then filed a motion asserting that the tapes belonged to the killers' estates. Other suits followed. Most victims' families eventually fought for release of the tapes. Jeffco worked with the killers' families to suppress them, a legal alliance that infuriated the victims. In December 2002, U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch threw out the copyright claim with an angry rebuke. He called it "a transparent attempt to hide something of public interest." But Stone's department insisted that the killers' words were too dangerous to expose to the public.

A
Denver Post
motion worked its way up to the Colorado Supreme Court. The court ruled against Jeffco. It unanimously declared the material to be public records. Colorado law includes a loophole, though, stating that records may be withheld in cases of "public interest." It was then up to the new sheriff to rule whether the tapes and writings were a risk to the community. He decided that the killers' journals were safe but the Basement Tapes were not. The
Post
chose not to appeal. Any future sheriff has the power to release the tapes at any time.