“I remembered how Eric had held a grudge toward Aaron before,” Judy said. “I knew he wasn't going to let this one go either.”
Shortly after Eric and I had our falling-out, Eric figured out a way to get two of his enemies with one shot. He and Dylan plotted a new “Rebel Mission” against Nick Baumgart.
Eric had decided he didn't like the way Nick laughed. It was ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than choosing to hate my brother for telling him to get off the computer, or hating me because I didn't want to drive him to school anymore. The same “clownish” traits that had made us laugh so hard at Nick's antics in the library during freshman year now had Eric hating him with a passion. Go figure.
Dylan and Nick had never been great friends, not even in grade school, and I imagine it wasn't hard for Eric to convince him to help with the plan.
Dressed in their usual black “mission clothes,” Eric and Dylan crept over to Nick's house late one night. They put superglue in all of his door locks, then tried to set fire to all of the plants and bushes outside.
Then, the next day, Eric went up to Nick and said, “Man, I'm sorry about your house. I was talking to some people and I heard that Brooks did it.”
Nick went home and told his mom, and she went off the wall about it. So my mom called her to explain that I couldn't have been involved.
For the first time, my parents' strict demands on me regarding school were about to pay off. Because I hadn't been doing a lot of my school-work, my teachers had begun sending a card home with me every week that indicated whether or not I had done my assignments.
That week, I'd missed some assignments, so I didn't have the card. My parents and I had a big fight, and I wound up grounded. I lost car privileges and had to stay at home every night. As it turned out, one of those nights was the night that Nick's house was hit.
“I can guarantee you that Brooks didn't do it,” my mom told Mrs. Baumgart.
“Why?”
“Because he was here at home, grounded.” Based on that, it was pretty easy to figure out who the true culprit was. If Eric had been angry with me before, now he was furious.
A few weeks after Eric and I stopped talking to each other, Trevor and I happened to be driving home from school in separate cars. Trevor was driving his car ahead of me when we pulled up to the stop sign near my house.
The spot was right next to the bus stop. Eric, who was riding the bus again, was throwing snowballs with other kids from school.
When Eric saw Trevor, he picked up a chunk of ice from where it forms over the gutter. He threw it as hard as he could at Trevor's car, denting the trunk. Then, without missing a beat, he picked up another chunk of ice and threw it at my car.
The ice smashed into my windshield; I heard it crack. It wasn't a large chip, but enough to make one of those little spider webs around it.
I was livid. I slammed on the brakes and leaned out of the car, yelling, “Fuck you! Fuck you, Eric! You're gonna pay to fix this!”
Eric laughed at me. “Kiss my ass, Brooks! I ain't paying for shit!”
I floored the gas down the remaining few blocks to my parents' house, went in and told my mom exactly what had happened. Then—seeing red—I went straight to Eric's place to talk to his parents.
I hammered on their front door, still furious. All I could think of was getting back at Eric. Mrs. Harris answered, and I glared at her. “I've got something to tell you about your son,” I said.
She looked back at me, a little confused. “Okay . . .” She asked me to come in.
We sat down in her living room, and I told her everything Eric had been doing in the past few months. “Your son's been sneaking out at night,” I said. “He's going around vandalizing things. He's threatened people. And just now he broke my windshield.”
She didn't seem to believe me. She kept asking me to calm down. That only made me angrier.
“He's got liquor in his room,” I said. “Search it. He's got spray paint cans in his room. Search it. Eric's fucked up, and you need to know about it. I'm getting out of here before he gets back, because I'm not gonna deal with him right now.”
Mrs. Harris wanted me to stay, to sit down and talk with Eric about this, as if we were in the school counselor's office or something. I shook my head. “I'm gone,” I said as I got back in the car to go home.
As it turned out, Trevor had gone on his own mission of sorts. When I went to the Harrises' house, he drove back to the bus stop, where Eric and his friends had all left their backpacks while they continued their snowball fight. Trevor pulled up, grabbed Eric's bag, threw it in his car, and took off back to my house.
My mom decided that we were going to confront Eric. Once I got home, the three of us got in her car; my mom was driving, I was in the passenger seat, and Trevor sat in the back.
We drove back down the street to the bus stop. As we pulled up, my mom rolled down her window and called for Eric to come over.
“I said to the kids, ‘Lock the doors. I'm just going to unroll the window a crack,’ Judy Brown recalled. “And they did, and I said, ‘Eric, I've got your backpack and I'm taking it over to your mom's. Meet us over there.”
Eric's response shocked all three of them. His face turned bright red, and suddenly he began shrieking and pounding on the car, pulling as hard as he could on the door handle. He screamed at them to let him in.
No one, not even Brooks, had seen Eric act like this before.
“He just went crazy,” Judy Brown said. “I started to pull away slowly, and he wouldn't let go. I said, ‘Back away from the car. We'll meet you at your mom's.’ He didn't listen. He just kept screaming, ‘Give me my backpack!’ Trevor moved over to the other side of the car, away from him. We were all scared.”
Judy drove to Eric's house; Kathy Harris was standing in the driveway. Judy got out of the car and gave the backpack to her, explaining what had happened to Brooks's windshield.
“Normally a kid throwing a snowball at a car wouldn't upset me that much,” Judy said. “I understand that kids can get carried away. But because we had heard he was going to do something to vandalize Brooks's car, it made me think this was on purpose.”
Kathy Harris's eyes began to well up with tears. Judy immediately became sympathetic. She remembers Kathy Harris as being “very sweet, a very nice lady.”
At the time, Judy didn't think much of Eric's bag; she had no idea that Eric was already building pipe bombs at that time, or that his journal contained entries about how much he hated school.
“To this day, I wonder what might have been in that bag,” she says.
Later that evening, Kathy Harris called Judy at home to discuss the matter further. According to Judy, Kathy wanted to listen, but her husband, Wayne, kept saying that Eric didn't mean it.
“He said, ‘This is just kids’ stuff. The truth is, Eric's afraid of you.’ I said, ‘Look, your son isn't afraid of me—he came after me at my car.’ And he said, ‘My son said that he is afraid of you.’ He didn't want to hear that his son had done anything wrong.”
My mom told us about her phone call with the Harrises, and we sat around talking about it in our living room. By now my dad was home from work, so we brought him up to speed on the situation. I told my parents about the other things Eric had been doing, and Aaron backed me up, because he knew about it as well.
I was still seething. It helped a little to know that my parents were on my side, and that Eric's parents were dealing with him at the same moment. Nonetheless, I felt so much anger that night. I was used to getting shit from the bullies. I didn't expect it from people I used to call my friends.
The next day at school, I heard through my friends that Eric was still angry. My friends didn't tell me specifics, but they said Eric was threatening me. I went home and told my mom, who called the police. An officer came to our house, and we talked to him at length about what was going on.
My mom described the windshield incident. “He thinks he got away with it,” she told the offi
cer. “Please, just go over there and let him know that he didn't.” The officer was sympathetic to the situation. He told us he understood how upsetting a bully could be. He said he would pay a visit to the Harris home, only a few blocks away, and have a chat with them in an effort to rattle Eric a little.
I'm guessing that he must have done just that, because later that night, we got another phone call from the Harrises. This time, it was Mr. Harris, letting us know that he was bringing Eric over to our house to apologize.
My mom took Aaron and me aside. “I want both of you in the back bedroom, and don't come out,” she said. We went, and we listened at the door as Eric came in.
“Eric came over and stood in our doorway, and he just had this fake tone to his voice,” Judy said.” ‘Mrs. Brown, I didn't mean any harm, and you know I would never do anything to hurt Brooks I let him finish, but I could see right through the act. And then I said, ‘You know, Eric, you can pull the wool over your dad's eyes, but you can't pull the wool over my eyes.’
“That seemed to surprise him. He said, ‘Are you calling me a liar?’ I remember that specifically. And I said, ‘Yes, I am. And if you ever come up our street, or if you ever do anything to Brooks again—if I ever even see you on our street again—I'm calling the police.’”
Eric was shocked by Judy's words. He didn't say anything further; he just turned and stormed out to his father, who was waiting in the car.
“I don't think anyone had ever confronted him like that before,” Judy said. “I think he was amazed that I didn't just go, ‘It's okay, Eric. Yes.’ Maybe he had gotten away with it for so long, manipulating people that way, that he was stunned when it didn't work.”
Eric hadn't counted on my mother's attitude. He couldn't believe what she'd said to him.
At least, that's what I heard from people around school, since Eric and I weren't speaking anymore.
Dylan tried to make peace between us, but he always failed. Eric wanted nothing to do with me, and after what had happened to my windshield, I felt the same way toward him. Dylan and I would still go out to have cigarettes together, and Eric would refuse to go along because I was there. Sometimes I would go visit Dylan while he was working at Blackjack Pizza, and then Eric would show up and I would have to leave. I wished I could do something to improve the situation. But if that meant talking to Eric again, I refused. I was too angry.
However, I had no idea that, in the privacy of his study, Eric was quietly plotting his revenge.
8
the web pages
IN MARCH OF 1998, I WAS WALKING TO CLASS WHEN DYLAN approached me with a small piece of paper. On it was written the address for a Web site.
“I think you should take a look at this tonight,” Dylan said.
I shrugged. “Okay. Anything special?” I figured at the time that it was the address for some new program Dylan had uncovered.
“It's Eric's Web site,” he said. “You need to see it. And you can't tell Eric I gave it to you.”
I nodded. “All right.”
That night I logged on for the first time. Sure enough, it was Eric's page; I recognized the more familiar features, like the “Jo Momma” joke section; all of us would sit around and tell those. “Jo Momma” jokes are a takeoff of the traditional momma joke, only they're made to be deliberately bad. The humor came from seeing just how lame you could make them. We'd say things like, “Jo Momma is so poor she lives in a two-story Dorito bag.” “Jo Momma is so fat she uses a Greyhound bus for roller blades.” “Jo Momma is so dumb that she has seven extra fingers and two extra toes and she still can't count to 29.”
However, Eric had several pages that clearly were not meant as a joke. They were brutal, savage attacks on everything he hated about the world. One of them had to do with me. Eric had written:
My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law, if you don't like it, you die. If I don't like you or I don't like what you want me to do, you die. If I do something incorrect, oh fucking well, you die. Dead people can't do many things like argue, whine, bitch, complain, narc, rat out, criticize, or even fucking talk. So that's the only way to solve arguments with all you fuck-heads out there, I just kill! God I can't wait till I can kill you people. I'll just go to some downtown area in some big-ass city and blow up and shoot everything I can. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame. Ich sage FICT TU! I will rig up explosives all over a town and detonate each one of them at will after I mow down a whole fucking area full of you snotty ass rich mother fucking high strung godlike attitude having worthless piece of shit whores. I don't care if I live or die in the shootout, all I want to do is to kill and injure as many of you pricks as I can, especially a few people. Like Brooks Brown.
I sat there staring at the screen for a moment. It was unexpected, to say the least.
On another page, Eric had posted my phone number, along with a specific list of everything he hated about me. On yet another, he encouraged would-be killers to seek me out, and promised a reward for my head.
Eric had an entire three-page document dedicated to the building of pipe bombs. He gave specific instructions on what ingredients to use, along with updates on his own progress. He described the bombs he'd already built, and the successful detonation of one of them. The entry read:
Mother fucker blew BIG. Pazzie was a complete success and it blew dee fuck outa a little creek bed. Flipping thing was heartpounding gut-wrenching brain-twitching ground-moving insanely cool! His brothers haven't found a target yet though.
Atlanta, Phobus, Peltro, and Pazzie are complete, for those of who [sic] that don't know what they are, they are the first 4 true pipe bombs created entirely from scratch by the rebels REB and VoDkA. Atlanta and Phobus are each 1 1/4″ by 6″ pipes, Peltro is 1″ by 6″, and Pazzie is 3/4″ by 5″. Each is packed with powder that we got from fountains, mortar shells, and cracker-ing balls. Each also has a 14″ mortar shell type fuse. Now our only problem is to find the place that will be “ground zero.”
Eric had posted detailed descriptions of the “Rebel Missions” he and Dylan had carried out in the neighborhood. In this example, they set off firecrackers outside the house of the person they had targeted for the evening:
Awwwwyeya. This mission was so fuckin fun man. OK, first of all, my dad was the only parent home, so it was much easier getting out. . . but still hard since all those rocks in my backyard make so much noise . . .
We watched as some lights in the Target's house went on, then off. Maybe the bastard heard something. But when the (firecracker) strip started, he turned his bedroom lights off. The strip lasted for about 30 seconds . . . we think . . . It was very fucking long. Almost all of it went off, loud and bright. Everything worked exactly how we wanted it to. After about 15 minutes we started down the bike trail to the next target. The first target's lights were on again in the bedroom, but we think we got away undetected. While we were walking to the next target, we shot some stuff. Heh, VoDkA brought his sawed off BB gun and a few BB's, too. So we loaded it, pumped it, and fired it off a few shots at some houses and trees and stuff. We probably didn't do any damage to any houses, but we aren't sure . . .
. . . Ok people, I'm gonna let you in on the big secret of our clan. We ain't no god damn stupid ass quake clan! We are more of a gang. We plan out and execute missions. Anyone pisses us off, we do a little deed to their house. Eggs, [TP], superglue, busyboxes, large amounts of fireworks, you name it and we will probably or already have done it. We have many enemies in our school, therefore we make many missions. It is sort of a nighttime tradition for us.
Based on the Web site, however, it seemed clear that these “Rebel Missions” weren't going to satisfy Eric for much longer. Writing, “I live in Denver and would love to kill all its residents,” Eric offered one final warning to his readers:
Well all you people out there can just kiss my ass and die. From now on, I don't give a fuck what almost any of you mutha fuckas have to say, unless I respect you which is highly unlikely, but
for those of you who happen to know me and know that I respect you, may peace be with you and don't be in my line of fire. For the rest of you, you all better fucking hide in your house because im comin [sic] for EVERYONE soon, and I WILL be armed to the fuckin teeth and I WILL shoot to kill and I WILL fucking KILL EVERYTHING! No I am not crazy, crazy is just a word, to me it has no meaning, everyone is different, but most of you fuckheads out there in society, going to your everyday fucking jobs and doing your everyday routine shitty things, I say fuck you and die. If you got a problem with my thoughts, come tell me and I'll kill you, because . . . god damnit, DEAD PEOPLE DON'T ARGUE!
I'd seen enough. I told my parents.
“This was not a little kid's joke,” said Randy Brown of Eric Harris's Web pages. “Threats against everybody, wanting to kill everybody, the violence of it all. And then there was his specific threat against Brooks. I didn't know anything about threat assessment at the time—we'd never even heard the words before—but those are certainly signs that we know now of serious threats.”
Brooks and his parents got into a heated argument over what to do next. Randy wanted to go to the Harrises and tell them. He suggested faxing the pages to Mr. Harris anonymously. But Judy Brown objected. She said Mr. Harris had done nothing about the windshield incident; he hadn't even offered to pay for the damage.
The family eventually agreed to call the police. That night, Deputy Miller of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department came to the Brown home to look at the pages for himself. It was March 18, 1998.
Randy Brown handed over printed copies of the Web pages to Miller, and explained his family's past troubles with Eric. They discussed the pipe bombs and Eric's desire to kill more people. Most of all, Randy expressed his concern for Brooks's safety.
Judy and Randy gave Dylan Klebold's name to Miller as well, because he and Eric were such close friends—and Dylan had been mentioned on the site as being part of the “Rebel Missions.” However, Brooks had not told his parents that Dylan was the one who gave him the Web site address in the first place.
No Easy Answers Page 8
