When I'd had enough, I followed him and said, “Hey, Jeremy, turn around.” He did, and I punched him in the nose as hard as I could. He fell down, but his friends immediately jumped on me. Needless to say, I took a pretty bad beating—and afterwards, as I was walking to the office, the other kids laughed and pointed at me, calling me a “pussy.”
Teachers would punish any kid who was involved in a fight, no matter who had started it. One time I was in the locker room after gym class when, without any provocation, a kid came up and kicked me square in the crotch. I immediately dropped to the ground, while my friend Matt Cornwell jumped on the offending kid and started throwing punches. All three of us wound up in the office.
Even though all three of us told the same story—the first kid even admitted that he'd kicked me first—all three of us were punished. I received a suspension simply because I'd been involved, even though I'd never thrown a single punch. Matt got an even bigger suspension because he'd defended me. You really begin to resent those in authority when things like that happen.
By eighth grade, I had started hanging out with kids in the “punk” crowd. The punk kids accepted me. They felt like outcasts, just as I did, and they identified with music that attacked the establishment and the majority. I also noticed that when you have friends around you, the bullies don't pick on you as much. They might still call you names as they walk by, but they won't gang up on you and start hitting you. School felt like a prison yard, in a way: you find a “gang” of people to hang out with so that the other “gangs” leave you alone.
My grades dropped further, alarming my parents. We started fighting more and more. I just didn't care anymore—not about grades, not about my future, and definitely not about school. I was involved in a few extracurricular activities, like basketball at the YMCA and working with the disabled kids at school, but more and more, I started to drop out of them. By eighth grade, all I wanted was to hang out with my friends—friends that my parents really didn't approve of.
I did things to escape from my problems. I worked on computers. I played video games. I disappeared into books. Anything seemed better than the real world.
Dylan and I spent little time together during junior high. Not only were we not in the same classes, he wasn't part of my crowd. While I rebelled, frightening my parents, Dylan kept his anger inside and focused on being a good student. He didn't really come over to my house anymore, and for a while we lost track of each other.
However, Dylan was as much a target for the bullies as I was. He was still internalizing his anger and pain, escaping into computers or video games rather than deal with the troubles he faced. But that escape doesn't last for long. Eventually, the player must return to the real world—and when Dylan did that, the treatment he received from his classmates affected him deeply.
It wouldn't be until high school that I would learn just how much.
5
freshmen at columbine
I CAME TO COLUMBINE IN THE FALL OF 1995, BELIEVING IN MY HEART that school was going to get better. All through junior high, all I had heard about were the opportunities at Columbine—the activities, the teachers, and the chance to learn about bigger and more adult things. New kids, new beginnings, and a new school. I had so much hope.
We arrived at a new Columbine, so to speak. During the summer of 1995, construction crews had torn down much of the school and performed a $15 million renovation on it. Our class, the class of 1999, would be the first to enter and graduate from the newly refurbished building.
That fall I met Eric Harris for the first time.
My friend Nick Baumgart had decided to make a haunted house out of his garage for Halloween. I'd known Nick since grade school, and we'd become friends again at Columbine, so when he asked people to come over and help, of course I pitched in.
Dylan came along, and he had Eric with him. I also met Zach Heckler, who like us was really into computers. In fact, a whole lot of people came out. It was just a silly haunted house, but everyone wanted to be a part of it. We were crazy freshmen looking for something cool to do.
I talked to Eric a little that night. The next day, I went to the bus stop and saw him there. He only lived a few blocks away from me; it turned out that we'd been riding the same bus and just hadn't really had much reason to talk until now. Besides, Eric didn't ride every day. He would snag rides from his older brother whenever he could, because no one wants to be “one of the losers riding the bus.” But over the next few weeks, he and I started hanging out regularly.
Unlike Brooks and Dylan, Eric Harris did not grow up in Colorado. In fact, his family moved several times during his childhood. He was born on April 9, 1981, the second child of Wayne and Kathy Harris. Two years later, the family would move to Dayton, Ohio; by the time Eric was in third grade, they had relocated to Oscada, Michigan. When Eric was in sixth grade, the Harrises moved again, this time to Plattsburg, New York; a little over a year later, when Plattsburg Air Force Base closed, Wayne Harris retired from service and moved the family back to his native home of Colorado.
From most accounts, it was hard for Eric to leave his friends behind each time he moved. Ken Caryl Middle School in Littleton would be the seventh school he had attended since kindergarten.
Eric and Brooks never spoke at Ken Caryl, although Eric and Dylan became friends. Both loved computers, video games, and baseball. However, it would not be until their high school years that Eric and Dylan would become inseparable. Both were computer-savvy, both felt like outcasts, and both knew the pain of bullies and rejection.
Also, both were quickly rejected by the establishment at Columbine.
Eric's older brother Kevin was a kicker for the Columbine football team. Kevin had always been friendly toward us. He was technically the “jock” in the family, and he'd give us a hard time about being freshmen, but it was always good-natured. Kevin was on the football team because he loved the game. It wasn't about status.
I've always enjoyed sports, but not the mentality that seems to go with them. I played basketball in junior high and enjoyed going to professional sports games with friends. Sometimes Dylan would talk to me about the fantasy football leagues he played in. The games themselves are great—I can relate to the excitement and the competition. But what I don't relate to are the people who equate sports with status. “I am a football player, and therefore I'm better than you.” “I am a basketball player, and therefore I deserve to make out with all the cheerleaders. Pathetic geeks like you are not on my level.” I couldn't understand that. I didn't see any reason to play a sport other than pure love of the game. Too many people at Columbine seemed to be playing for other reasons.
I don't mean to imply that all jocks in the world are jerks. I've known athletes who are good people. The thing is, Columbine's culture worshipped the athlete—and that unconditional adulation had a pretty bad effect on many of the jocks at our school.
Eric shared my opinion on that. That's why he didn't play for the Columbine soccer team, even though he loved soccer.
Yet Eric loved his brother, and he loved going to games during our freshman year to watch Kevin play. Some have suggested that there was some sibling rivalry there, since Kevin was a football player and Eric hated football players, but I never noticed any problems. There we were, cheering in the stands—and Eric was cheering as loud as the rest of us.
During freshman year, we formed a circle of friends that included Zach Heckler, Nick Baumgart, Eric, and Dylan. Our favorite place to hang out was the Columbine library.
The library was a great place to trade jokes, or sit and talk about how much we hated the school. Conversations like those were nothing unusual. But we'd have fun, too.
Nick earned himself a reputation early on as the clown of Columbine's Class of 1999. We quickly discovered that he would do virtually anything for money, no matter how stupid or humiliating it was. Once we paid him to make an ass of himself in the library by hitting on a girl he liked.
Usually this
money would be no more than the couple of quarters that we could scrape together at the time, but for Nick, it was the principle of the thing. He didn't really care about the money; he just knew that he could make people laugh, and that it was his “designated role” at Columbine to be the clown. So he filled that role with a flourish.
Sometimes we would get so rowdy with our jokes that we'd get kicked out of the library for the rest of the day. Most of the time, though, we did our best to avoid causing trouble. After all, our favorite thing was using school computers to surf the Internet, and we didn't want to lose that privilege.
Freshman year was the best, because there were relatively few restrictions. In 1995 the Internet was still a relatively new trend, and school officials didn't know that much about what was on it. So the monitors didn't pay any attention when we went to sites like InsaneClownPosse.com, Monty Python Online, or News Askew, filmmaker Kevin Smith's Web site. We'd get online and screw around all through study hall.
Sophomore year, though, they changed the policy on us. Now we had to have permission to be on certain sites, and we'd get in trouble if we were caught surfing one that wasn't “education-related.” Our Columbine school ID cards had three “lights” on them: red, yellow, and green. The first time the teachers caught you going to a non-educational site, they punched out the green light on your ID and called you a “yellow-lighter.” That meant you were “in trouble” and had a warning against you. If they caught you a second time, they punched the yellow light. That meant you weren't allowed to use the Internet for the rest of the year.
To enforce this policy, anyone using a computer in the school library had to put his or her ID card up on top of the computer monitor, so that the teachers on duty could see. That's not to say that you couldn't still go to “inappropriate” sites, though. I got away with it. You just had to be careful.
Computers were huge for us. Everyone is on the Internet now, but we were the kind of kids who were using it back when it was a “geek thing.” All of us loved to sit on a computer and do nothing else.
I'd been into computers since I was a little kid, when my dad bought a Commodore. Most people don't even remember it, but it was a small, simple computer that you could learn programming on. So as a kid, I would sit and learn syntax code. I read books on computer programming, then tried to do it myself. As newer computers came out, like the Apple IIE, I got experience on them, and then in fourth grade my parents bought our first IBM.
Computers were one of the things that bonded us in our freshman year of high school. Nick was really into graphic design and working on Macintoshes. Eric was a video game nut who talked sometimes about designing games for a living. All of us lived for playing Sega Genesis or Nintendo, and we loved computer games like Duke Nukem and Doom.
Most people looked at computers then as a “nerd” thing. We were proud to be nerds. We could relate to the logical simplicity of a computer. It made sense.
What we saw happening at Columbine didn't make sense.
It seems like once you get to high school, all of the social groups are decided within the first few weeks. Once they've solidified, the cruelty begins.
Sometimes kids would just ignore us. But often, we were targets. We were freshmen, and computer-geek freshmen at that. At lunchtime the jocks would kick our chairs, or push us down onto the table from behind. They would knock our food trays onto the floor, trip us, or throw food as we were walking by. When we sat down, they would pelt us with candy from another table. In the hallways, they would push kids into lockers and call them names while their friends stood by and laughed at the show. In gym class, they would beat kids up in the locker room because the teachers weren't around.
Seniors at Columbine would do things like pour baby oil on the floor, then literally “go bowling” with freshmen; they would throw the kid across the floor, and since he couldn't stop, he'd crash right into other kids while the jocks pointed and giggled. The administration finally put a stop to it after a freshman girl slipped and broke her arm.
One guy, a wrestler who everyone knew to avoid, liked to make kids get down on the ground and push pennies along the floor with their noses. This would happen during school hours, as kids were passing from one class to another. Teachers would see it and look the other way. “Boys will be boys,” they'd say, and laugh.
The problem was that the bullies were popular with the administration. Meanwhile, we were the “trouble kids,” because we didn't seem to fit in with the grand order of things. Kids who played football were doing what you're supposed to do in high school. Kids like us, who dressed a little differently and were into different things, made teachers nervous. They weren't interested in reaching out to us. They wanted to keep us at arm's length, and if they had the chance to take us down, they would.
The bullies liked to propel paper clips at us with a rubber band. If a teacher saw you get hit, he or she did nothing. But as soon as you threw it back, or did something to defend yourself, you were done. The teacher would grab you and you would be in the office. We were the “undesirables,” and the teachers were just waiting for an excuse to nail us. The bullies knew it.
Usually we didn't fight back. One thing we learned early on was that if we responded at all to what the bullies did, they'd do it more. Bullies want power. They want boosts to their self-esteem, and they think that if they can make you fear them, they've won something. That's the mentality that bullied kids have to deal with on an everyday basis. We knew that there was nothing we could do to stop them, but at least they wouldn't get anything out of it if we just ignored them.
Even so, the pain of bullying was taking its toll on us. Eric, especially, was a target. He had two strikes against him; the first was that he had a slight chest deformity. It wasn't that noticeable—it was just sunken in a bit—but when Eric would take his shirt off in P.E. class, the bullies were ready and waiting to mock him. Mocking a guy for a physical problem he can't control is one of the most humiliating ways to bring him down.
On top of that, Eric was the shortest of our group. The rest of us, as we got older, became well over six feet in height; Eric never did. He was small, he was a “computer geek,” and he wasn't even from Colorado to begin with. He was as prime a target as the bullies at Columbine could have asked for.
Brooks's experiences were not unique. A year after the Columbine tragedy, research into the school's atmosphere was conducted by Regina Huerter, Director of Juvenile Diversion for the Denver District Attorney's Office. Huerter's findings paint a disturbing picture of cruelty and indifference in Columbine's halls.
From October 14 to November 29, 2000, Huerter conducted interviews with twenty-eight adults and fifteen current or past students regarding their experiences with bullying at Columbine and how administrators responded to it.
Huerter's nine-page report was presented to the Governor's Columbine Review Commission on December 1, 2000. It contained numerous examples of assaults, racism, and other forms of bullying that witnesses say went on in the years before the Columbine murders.
“All students with whom I spoke, independent of their status at school, acknowledged there was bullying,” Huerter wrote. “One identified the unwritten rules of survival in the school as: ‘Don't screw with anyone who can beat you up, don't look at jocks in the eye, bump them, or hit on their girlfriend, and don't walk in the wrong area . . .’”
At the same time, Huerter noted “a strong perception from nearly everyone I spoke with that there was ‘no reason to say anything about the bullying—no one was going to do anything.’ Some students were just ‘untouchable.’”
Huerter described an “overwhelming” sense that teachers responded only to bullying they had personally witnessed—and that when “certain parties” were involved, even these incidents were overlooked.
Students and parents who did report bullying often met with an unsatisfactory response. Among the examples Huerter mentioned in her report:
Two students repeatedly bullied a fi
fteen-year-old classmate in Physical Education class two years before the shooting. “The victim was repeatedly subjected to ‘twisters,’ a form of pinching and twisting the skin,” Huerter wrote. “Although the class was in session, the teacher didn't acknowledge knowing what was taking place. Another form of bullying against this student, a practicing Jew, involved racial slurs and ethnic intimidation, including threatening by the bullies to ‘build an oven and set him on fire.’ Each time a basket was made during P.E. basketball, the bullies would state, ‘that's another Jew in the oven.’ They also wrote a song to torment the victim.” The boy reported the bullying, and initially administrators confronted the bullies over their actions. However, the report states, the victim continued to be harassed for the next year and a half—and each time the new incidents were reported, “The counselor would bring the bully in to question him, the bully would deny the behavior, and they would let it go, telling the family, ‘we're doing everything we can,’” Huerter wrote. “The victim states that ‘they (the administration) did everything but call me a liar.”
One student told his parents he wouldn't go back to Columbine after an incident with “four or five football players shoving and pushing him, harassing him verbally and following him to his car.” The boy's father called school officials, who did not return the call for six weeks. When an administrator did finally call back, he was very short and rude, the father recalled. The family pulled the student from Columbine and enrolled him in Heritage High School nearby. The student told Huerter that he still refuses to enter Columbine property to this day.
“I was told by adults working in the district that they were afraid to speak up about school issues, including school culture and bullying behavior, because they feared losing their jobs,” Huerter wrote. “All said bullying behavior was going on, that they did tell APs (associate principals), and nothing was done.”
No Easy Answers Page 5
