I never told my parents that I got the address from Dylan until after the shootings. I was worried that if I did, Eric would find out, and then Dylan would be in trouble with him for having warned me. I simply told my parents that a friend had given it to me, and that if Eric ever found out who, he would hurt him.
In truth, I don't know what Dylan's motives were for giving me that Web site. Maybe he was trying to warn me. Maybe he thought the site was funny, and just didn't take it as seriously as I did.
Or maybe Eric did want him to give the address to me. Maybe Dylan was in on it, and both of them wanted to send me a scare. I didn't know.
I have no doubt that Dylan knew exactly what was on that Web site when he gave me the address. He might not have been posting things on it himself, but at the very least, Eric was keeping him up to speed. So I was afraid to go back to him and mention it.
I was afraid to call the police at first, too. In my dealings at Columbine, I had learned that if you report someone, nothing gets done—and then the person finds out who reported him and makes that person's life that much worse. At Columbine, if you got into a fight with someone and you were scared of him, you might mention this to the administration; the administration would then bring both of you into a “counseling session” to try to work things out. That didn't work. So I feared calling the police, but at the same time, I knew something needed to be done.
My parents did their best to explain to the officer about the Web pages, the references to Doom, and other computer terms. The officer admitted that he knew little about computers, but told us that there were others at the station who would understand better.
The officer seemed very sympathetic to me. He could tell that the whole situation had really freaked me out, and he told me a little about his own experiences with bullies in an effort to make me feel better. He also promised us that the situation would be investigated further.
A week or so later, my parents phoned the police station to follow up on their complaint. They made an appointment to see Detective John Hicks on March 31.
“We actually went over there twice,” Judy Brown said. “They couldn't find the Web pages the first time, so we printed out new copies and went a second time. The minute he saw them, he said, ‘I have only seen one or two like this. This is serious.’ His demeanor immediately changed when he started to read it.”
According to the Browns, Detective Hicks brought in two members of the bomb squad to explain to the Browns how to spot a pipe bomb. He also asked the bomb squad to check if there had been any reports of bombs being set off in the area. When they looked into it, the answer was that yes, there was activity.
The Browns say Detective Hicks warned them that there might not be enough in the pages to legally accuse Eric of a threat against Brooks. The wording read, “I want to kill and maim . . . especially a few people . . . LIKE Brooks Brown.”
“He wasn't sure if that wording was going to be good enough to go for everything,” Randy explained. “But he added, ‘I've certainly got him for the pipe bomb building and the detonating.’ So we knew they had him for at least something. There was no point during that meeting that we didn't think they were going to get this kid.
“That's why it was such a shock when the attack on Columbine happened, and we found out that nothing had been done.”
A few days after my parents went to see the police, the word around school was that Eric and Dylan had gotten in big trouble over something. No one knew what it was; Eric and Dylan wouldn't talk about it. But we heard that both of them were in counseling.
I came home and told my parents. My dad had a big look of relief on his face. “That's it,” he said. “They did their job.”
My mom asked me if I could find out what specifically they were in trouble for, and I said there was no way; they were keeping it quiet.
“But Mom, it's big,” I said. “Everybody is talking about it.”
It only made sense to think that the counseling was for the pipe bomb building and the hate, and everything else that was on Eric's Web site.
What the Browns didn't know was that in reality, Eric and Dylan had just experienced their day in court for a van break-in that had happened at the end of January.
On January 30, 1998, Eric and Dylan were hanging out together in a parking lot near Deer Creek Canyon Road. They were parked next to a van loaded with various pieces of electrical equipment.
At first, Eric and Dylan were just killing time, breaking bottles and lighting a few small fireworks. Yet their attention was drawn to the van. When they realized that no one was around, they decided to force their way into it. While Eric kept watch from inside his car, Dylan smashed in the van's window with a rock and began unloading equipment.
Once they had filled up the back seat of Eric's new Honda Prelude—Eric's parents had given him a car now that he finally had his driver's license—the two took off and pulled over a few miles away to check out what they had stolen.
Officer Tim Walsh of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office was on routine patrol in the area. He noticed the two boys and parked his car a short distance away to observe them. After about five minutes, he approached, shone a flashlight into Eric's face, and asked him what they were doing.
At first, Eric and Dylan claimed they had found the equipment stacked up on the side of the road. When Walsh made it clear that he didn't believe that story, they cracked. The boys admitted what they had done, and Walsh took them into custody.
Their parents were furious. Eric and Dylan received significant grounding as punishment. However, both of their fathers backed them up when they appeared before Jefferson County Magistrate John DeVita in early April of 1998.
“This has been a rather traumatic experience, and I think it's probably good... that they got caught the first time,” Tom Klebold told DeVita.
Eric and Dylan were sentenced to one year in a juvenile diversion program, where they would be forced to undergo four days of classes dealing with anger management and drunk driving, 45 hours of community service, multiple fines, and counseling. They received this sentence the same week that the Browns met with Detective Hicks at the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office.
According to the Browns, when Detective Hicks ran a search for prior offenses on Eric Harris, the report of the break-in came up. However, the Browns did not learn that Dylan had been involved in the break-in as well. So when Brooks came home and said that both Eric and Dylan were in trouble, they had no reason to suspect anything other than the Web pages.
As for Eric, he offered two completely different perspectives on the incident. In a school essay he wrote on November 18, 1998, he described the incident to his teacher:
After a very unique experience in a real live police station being a real live criminal, I had lots of time to think about what I did. . . . As I waited, I cried, I hurt, and I felt like hell . . . My parents lost all respect and trust in me and I am still slowly regaining it. That experience showed me that no matter what crime you think of committing, you will get caught, that you must, absolutely must, think things through before you act, and that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. To this day I still do not have a hard realistic reason why we broke into that car, but since we did, we have been set on a track that makes it mandatory for me to be a literal angel until March of ‘99.
However, in his own personal journal, which was obtained by members of the media in late 2001, Eric described the incident much, much differently:
Isn't America supposed to be the land of the free? How come if I'm free, I can't deprive a stupid fucking dumbshit from his possessions if he leaves them sitting in the front seat of his fucking van out in plain sight and in the middle of fucking nowhere on a Fri-fucking-day night? NATURAL SELECTION. Fucker should be shot.
Just as he had done with Judy Brown several months earlier, Eric Harris was saying one thing and thinking another. The diversion program would not stop Eric's hatred—nor would it stop him from secretly
beginning a plot with Dylan Klebold to attack Columbine High School.
Our whole family was on edge for some time after we discovered Eric's Web pages. We kept a baseball bat by the door, in case Eric tried to break into our house. If we saw a car drive by slowly or heard people making noise outside, my brother and I would sneak out with my dad and hide behind the bushes, watching. My dad installed brighter lights for the front and rear doors, as well as a motion-detector light.
We lived like that for a long time.
Things would still happen. On April 11, 1998, I received a short email from an unknown sender. It said something like, “I know you're an enemy of Eric's. I know where you live and what car you drive.” We reported it to the police, but unfortunately the e-mail was accidentally erased before we could give them a copy.
One time my dad opened the front door in time to see a chain of firecrackers going off on our porch. Obviously, there was no way to prove who had done this, either, but when you read Eric's descriptions of his “Rebel Missions,” it seems pretty obvious.
On another night, we were sitting in the living room at about 11:30 when Aaron suddenly looked up and said, “Did you hear that? I heard some glass breaking or something.” We went outside and looked around, but we didn't see anything.
The next morning, my dad went out to the garage and noticed that his car had tiny red dots all over it. So did half the garage. Then we looked at the windows on the garage door, and there was a little hole in one of them, barely an inch in diameter. Someone had shot a paintball through the window.
The police came and looked at the car, but obviously there was no way to prove who was responsible. However, my parents and I got into the car and drove up and down the neighborhood. We saw that a lot of houses had been shot with paintballs. The path traced right back up to Eric's street.
During this time, I stopped talking to Dylan altogether. I didn't know what to trust him with anymore. I was freaked out about the Web pages, and he was good friends with Eric, so I avoided him.
One thing that concerned me was that after a few months went by, Eric's Web site hadn't been taken down. There were things on the pages that had been changed, but nonetheless, Eric was still posting angry rants. My parents tried to get in touch with Detective Hicks, to see how the investigation had progressed. They were never able to reach him.
In a CBS 60 Minutes II investigation two years after the assault on Columbine, it was learned that a search warrant had been drafted for Eric Harris's home. However, the warrant was never presented to a judge. Had it been served, the police would have found pipe bombs, gunpowder, Eric's angry journal rants—and perhaps early evidence of a plot he and Dylan were already beginning to hatch.
Even before they were arrested for breaking into the van in January, Eric and Dylan felt like the whole world was against them. Some have theorized that the trauma of this incident reinforced their feelings of persecution, cementing their bond and making them hungry for revenge.
Eric's journal indicates that sometime in theirjunior year they devised their plan to attack Columbine High School. Police reports show that in the spring of 1998, Dylan wrote in Eric's yearbook about “killing enemies, blowing stuff up, killing cops! My wrath for January's incident will be godlike. Not to mention our revenge in the commons” (the Columbine High School cafeteria, where Eric and Dylan had suffered at the hands of bullies since freshman year).
Eric wrote in Dylan's yearbook, “God I can't wait until they die. I can taste the blood now. . . You know what I hate? MANKIND! Kill everything . . . kill everything . . .”
In a journal entry that was not released until nearly three years after the massacre, the Browns discovered just how seriously Eric had plotted against them—and, twelve months before the shootings, against the school. The entry was dated April 26, 1998:
Sometime in April me and V will get revenge and kick natural selection up a few notches . . . We will be in all black. Dusters, black Army pants, and we will get custom shirts that say R or V in the background in one big letter and NBK [Eric's nickname for the planned attack, named for the film Natural Born Killers/in the front in a smaller font . . .
First we will go to the house of . . . Brooks in the morning before school starts and before anyone is even awake. We go in, we silently kill each inhabitant and then pin down Brooks . . . Then take our sweet time pissing on them, spitting on them and just torturing the hell out of them. Once we are done we set time bombs to burn the houses down and take any weaponry we find, who knows me [sic] may get lucky. Then get totally prepared and during A lunch we go and park in our spots. With sunglasses on we start carrying in all our bags of terrorism and anarchism shit into our table. Being very casual and silent about it, it's all for a science/band/English project or something . . .
Once the first wave starts to go off and the chaos begins, V opens fire and I start lobbin' the firebombs. Then I open fire, V starts lobbin' more crickets. Then if we can go upstairs and go to each classroom we can pick off fuckers at our will. If we still can we will hijack some awesome car, and drive off to the neighborhood of our choice and start torching houses with Molotov cocktails. By that time cops will be all over us and we start to kill them too! We use bombs, fire bombs and anything we fucking can to kill and damage as much as we fucking can . . . I want to leave a lasting impression on the world.
The plan was in place, and no one knew. Not me, not my parents, not the school. The police could have stopped it, had they acted on my family's report. But they didn't.
The warning signs were there. The threats, Eric's Web pages, the “Rebel Missions” in the neighborhood. Today, they're all painfully obvious. But back then, no one was putting them together. Not even me. In the back of my mind, I couldn't imagine why a person would murder anyone else, not even a person who wrote the kinds of things that Eric did.
The following summer, I moved on with my life. I believed the danger had passed.
9
suburban life
BY THE END OF MY JUNIOR YEAR, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS WERE MAKING their way into the news.
The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Mississippi. Two months later, in West Paducah, Kentucky, Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. In March of 1998, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Arkansas—one aged thirteen, the other eleven—set off a fire alarm to make their fellow students run outside, then opened fire from the trees. They killed four students and a teacher. Finally, Kip Kinkel went on a rampage in Springfield, Oregon in May of 1998. He murdered both of his parents at home, then went to school, killed two students, and wounded twenty-two others.
Each of these stories made national headlines; the attacks on Paducah and Jonesboro happened right in the middle of my junior year. In fact, I read a great deal about them during debate class. We would hold “extemporaneous meetings” where we went through media clippings from the past week and discussed them, and the shootings came up several times.
Violence had plagued inner-city schools for some time, but these shootings marked its first real appearance in primarily white, middle- to upper-middle-class suburbs. And to me, it seemed the location wasn't the only unusual thing about these shootings. In the past, when a kid shot somebody at school, it was because he had it in for the victim and had come looking for him or her. Now the motives seemed different. Now we were seeing people go into schools and whip out a gun for no other reason than to randomly wipe out as many people as possible.
When we talked in class about the shootings, kids would make jokes about how “it was going to happen at Columbine next.” They would say that Columbine was absolutely primed for it, because of the bullying and the hate that were so prevalent at our school.
Columbine had already seen its own tragedy that year. In 1998, a student named Robert Craig had killed his father and then himself with a gun at their home.
The students' response varied. Some k
ids didn't give a shit. Their basic attitude was, “Aw, great, another death-metal guy died. Whoop-whoop.” However, friends of mine who had been close to Robert became very upset. The people who weren't in the popular crowd went through a hell of a time when Robert died; seeing the jocks laughing about it made things even worse.
I had talked to Robert Craig a couple of times. I wasn't close to him or anything, but we had a few of the same friends. He seemed like a good kid, and it upset me a lot when I heard the news; I wrote a poem about it in one of my notebooks, trying to make sense of the whole thing. The violence had seemed to come out of nowhere; Robert had acted depressed sometimes, but plenty of people at Columbine acted depressed. It wasn't something that we thought would end with murdering your dad and then killing yourself.
Still, I didn't dwell on Robert's death for long. Nor did I dwell on my problems with Eric. I spent the summer between junior and senior year playing in a band with a few friends and my little brother. I played drums, Aaron was on keyboards, and my friends Doug and Kevin handled vocals, guitar, and trumpet. We called ourselves “Second Sedition.” The way we saw it, the first sedition had been in 1776. We were the second one. I wrote a good deal of our lyrics, and Aaron was an absolute master when it came to music.
We recorded a demo CD and sent it out in the hopes of landing a few live gigs around the Denver area. We couldn't make it happen. We did play with a few other bands in Clement Park at the end of our junior year, but we couldn't land any bar gigs. We were told that our sound was “too dark.” To us, that was a compliment, but it didn't exactly help us build up an audience. The band pretty much fell apart by the beginning of senior year, but such is life. It had been fun.
No Easy Answers Page 9
