No one said anything to my face. But as I sat there, I could hear whispers behind me. My name. Eric and Dylan. Questions. Suggestions that I knew something.
I tried to shut it out.
Standing in front of us on the stage, Principal DeAngelis told the crowd that there was so much love at Columbine, that we would get through this together. At the same time, I heard it behind me:
“Brooks is a murderer.”
The whispers were no longer conversational. They were directed at me. I was supposed to overhear them. And I didn't know what to say or do in response.
By the time superintendent Jane Hammond started her speech, I couldn't take it. I knew I was on the stage, in full view of everyone, but I didn't care. I stood up and left.
Less than two weeks after the shooting, my family got a call from the Columbine school counselor, Mr. Collins. Everyone was gearing up to head for Chatfield High School and finish out the year. The plan was that Columbine students would attend for one half of the day, and Chatfield students would attend for the other half. However, there were some people who wouldn't be welcome at any time.
“We believe it would be in Brooks's best interest not to return to school,” Collins told us on our answering machine.
My mom called back, demanding to know why. When she finally got through to Collins, he wouldn't clarify the school's wishes. He kept repeating, simply, “We just think it would be in Brooks's best interest not to return.”
I wasn't the only one to get that message. There were over a dozen kids, all friends of Eric and Dylan, who were asked not to return. Most of them took the advice.
I was ready to go back. However, to put it bluntly, the school made me an offer I couldn't refuse. They told me that if I agreed not to return, I would still graduate with passing grades in all of my classes.
I was failing a couple of classes at the time. To be guaranteed passing grades and a diploma, simply for staying at home—it just seemed to make more sense to accept the offer.
That's not to say that I never went back. Once classes started, I made a brief visit to Chatfield. I needed to see my friends again. When I walked in, the police, who were standing guard at the time, paid close attention to me.
The police had been interviewing Eric and Dylan's friends at length ever since the shooting. Sheriff John Stone was convinced that two kids could not have brought in by themselves the sheer amount of explosives found at the scene. There must have been accomplices, he kept telling the press, and that's why the police were talking to all of Eric and Dylan's associates.
I'd already been visited by detectives before I went to Chatfield. They kept asking about Eric's last words to me outside the school. They wanted to know what had made me walk away. At the time, I thought it was because they were trying to reconstruct Eric's movements. As I would later learn, their motives were much more complex.
My classmates knew that the police were interviewing guys like Nate and Zach and me. So it was assumed that we must be suspects. After all, if we were friends with Eric and Dylan, then we must have known that the attack was coming, right? Never mind that my little brother was shot at in the cafeteria. Never mind that Eric had threatened to kill me only a year before. As friends of the killers, some people's logic ran, we must have been killers, too.
Maybe I should have thought about that before I went to Chatfield, but at the time I just didn't care. I walked in, ignoring the cops who were watching me. The guard gave me a visitor's badge and a bumper sticker with “We Are Columbine” written on it. Then I was given a two-officer escort to walk around the school.
Not only was the escort incredibly demeaning, but it reinforced the impression that I was guilty in some way in the minds of those who already suspected me. I was just digging my hole deeper. I didn't care at the time; I just wanted to see my friends. In retrospect, though, I shouldn't have gone through with it.
I didn't stay long. People didn't really talk to me. Kids I had called my friends were looking at me funny now. They didn't want me there.
In Littleton, I was making enemies left and right. But in the national media, the reporters just kept coming. I was doing interviews all over the place, from Fox News to the Today Show to Tom Brokaw. I would talk to three, sometimes four reporters a day.
Yet I never once did an interview for money. I never sold videotape footage of Eric or Dylan, like one of my classmates did. I wasn't looking to be famous. I just wanted people to understand what had happened, so I accepted a lot of interview requests.
There were two things that my family wanted people to understand: first, that there had been clear warning signs beforehand, and second, that Columbine High School was a much worse place than everyone was letting on.
We were telling people the truth, and we were resented for it.
The police were already under the microscope as it was. They were being criticized for not responding quickly enough to the shootings, making high estimates of the dead before any numbers were released, leaving the bodies in the school overnight, taking too long to reach the wounded, and leaving parents to learn about their children's murders in the newspaper instead of calling them to tell them. So they were playing the game of damage control right from the start, trying to make people believe that there was no way they could have seen this coming, that no one knew how deal with it, that there had been no warning.
Now from out of the blue comes this Brooks Brown kid, talking about some report he filed a year ago about Eric Harris threatening his life and building pipe bombs and vandalizing his neighborhood.
They knew I wasn't lying. They knew the media was listening to me, and the pressure on them was increasing. If they were to keep my story out of the spotlight, they had to discredit my family, and fast.
Sheriff Stone found a way.
I was with my parents when the call came. NBC reporter Dan Abrams told us he had just conducted an interview with Sheriff Stone and wanted to give us a chance to respond before it aired. Within hours, we were sitting with Abrams in front of a TV monitor.
“I'm convinced there are more people involved,” Stone had told NBC. “Brooks Brown could be a possible suspect. Mr. Brown, as well as several others, are in the investigative mode.”
When Abrams inquired about Eric's Web pages, Stone dismissed them as a “subtle threat,” nothing more. Such things wouldn't have been prosecutable, he said. He also dismissed my parents' claims of having reported them in the first place, asking why my parents would have “allowed” me to be friends with Eric Harris if they thought he was dangerous enough to report to police.
“Why did Eric Harris warn Mr. Brown to leave the school on the day he was starting all the shooting?” he said. “Is this a smoke screen?”
My parents were furious. My dad lashed out at the sheriff, saying if anyone was trying to create a smoke screen, it was him.
“He should be ashamed of himself,” my dad said of Stone. “They're looking for a scapegoat. They're going to get sued and they know it, and they're looking for someone to blame it on.”
As for me, I sat there in complete disbelief, staring at that image of Sheriff Stone on the TV. I didn't know what to say.
Stone's allegations first appeared on NBC, but it didn't take long for them to appear in other media outlets. Shortly after his television appearance, the Jefferson County sheriff repeated his suspicions to USA TODAY.
“I believe Mr. Brown knows a lot more than he has been willing to share with us,” Stone told the newspaper. “He's had a long-term involvement with Harris and Klebold, and he was the only student warned to stay away from the school on the day of the shooting.”
On May 6, the Denver Post reiterated Stone's claim that Brooks was a “possible suspect” and that Brooks's statements had been “inconsistent.”
Stone offered no evidence to back this assertion during his interviews, although Jefferson County Undersheriff John Dunaway offered an explanation to Westword reporter Alan Prendergast nearly a year later. Accor
ding to the article, Dunaway claimed there were “plenty of reasons” to suspect Brooks.
“This Brown person is telling us that he is in direct personal contact with Harris moments before the killings begin,” Dunaway told Westword. “And Harris tells him that he likes him and that he should leave the school. Then he shows up in a class photo with Harris and Klebold, and they're all pointing fingers at the camera, as if they had guns.”
The comment was a reference to the “goofy” class photo that the Columbine High School class of 1999 had posed for. Yet, in Dunaway's eyes, this sort of evidence perfectly justified Stone's remarks to the media.
If Stone's comments were an attempt to discredit the Brown family—as they believe—then it was an extremely effective ploy. It wouldn't take long for Brooks to learn just how much damage the sheriff had caused.
Reporters showed up at my house soon after that first broadcast. They wanted to know my response.
I reiterated my parents' claim that the accusation was just a smoke screen. I reminded reporters that there was no evidence against me. I said that neither the FBI nor the district attorney was calling me a suspect. I said Stone was making himself look bad.
That was my public face. Away from the cameras, Stone's words were destroying my life.
There were already people at school who believed I had something to do with the killing, just because I had been friends with Eric and Dylan. Now people in the community were questioning my innocence, too. People who had been undecided, or who had known nothing about me before, suddenly saw me as “that guy who the police think was in on it.”
Shortly after the NBC report, I was walking through a parking lot with Trevor Dolac when a girl leaned out the window of her car and started shouting at me.
“You fucking murderer!” she yelled. “Get the hell out of here!”
Once I was at a stoplight when a car full of Columbine students pulled up next to me and started screaming “Killer!”
Others didn't call me names, but still kept their distance. One night I was with my cousin at the drive-through window of Dairy Queen. It was fairly late, and there weren't any other customers in line. When I pulled up, the employee at the window took one look at me and his eyes got real wide.
He gave us our order without saying another word to me. As we were pulling away, I saw him go to the doors and lock them. He stood there staring at us until we drove away.
Those sorts of things started happening with more frequency as the days progressed. I'd be walking along and hear “asshole” or “killer” yelled at me from passing cars. After a while, I learned to tune it out.
I was having trouble sleeping. I was having trouble eating. I wondered if at some point Stone would move this witch hunt to the next level and have me arrested.
I felt helpless.
The police were pressuring me to take a lie-detector test about my involvement in Columbine. I would have been willing, except that people around me immediately advised against it. A lie detector is a sensitive piece of equipment. Administrators of the test wrap a sensor around your chest to time your breathing. They put pulse sensors on each finger. They look for places where your heart skips a beat during a response, or your breathing becomes shallow, to determine whether you're lying.
My family still feared that the police were trying to put the blame on me, and didn't trust them to administer the test fairly. If I took the test, and their administrator made any adjustments to the machine to make me fail or even seem evasive, it would ruin me.
My aunt, an attorney in Michigan, was the first person to advise me of this. Friends weighed in on the subject as well. Their consensus, based on what had happened so far, was that the police couldn't be trusted.
Nonetheless, I wanted to clear my name, and by not taking a lie detector test, I looked like I had something to hide. So my family came up with a compromise. We paid to have an independent third party conduct the test.
Alverson & Associates, a polygraph company based in Denver, agreed to our request. On May 11, administrator David Henigsman hooked me up to the sensors and began asking questions. He started with simple things, like “Is your name Brooks Brown?” and “Are you a student at Columbine High School?” Then he began asking me about the attack.
He asked if I had ever seen Eric and Dylan's pipe bombs, or if I had ever helped to make one. He asked if I had any prior knowledge of what was going to happen. He asked whether I had any reason to lie.
I passed.
We gave the police the results, including a signed statement from Alverson that I had been truthful. The police weren't satisfied. They wanted the video of the test, the complete transcript, and all computer data. We refused. My dad told them, “Look, Alverson is a trusted name that has been used all over the country. If this isn't going to convince you, then nothing will. We don't owe you anything else at this point.”
Even though Stone had named me as a possible suspect, my room was never searched. Neither was my car. My computer wasn't seized. These steps were taken with other acquaintances of Eric and Dylan, even though their names were never given to the press as possible suspects. They weren't with me.
Around the middle of May, my parents got a phone call from the producers of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah had already done one show about Columbine, where she had spoken with parents of the victims. Now she wanted to hear from me about what had happened with Eric's Web pages.
My mom turned down the invitation at first; she didn't want people to think we were using the tragedy to meet Oprah Winfrey or to get famous.
The problem was, several media outlets had stopped listening to us about Eric's Web pages. Since the police were denying that we had talked with them, and Stone was suggesting that I'd been in on the attack, they weren't believing my family anymore. We realized that this show was a chance to get our story out there. So, after further consideration, we agreed.
We didn't care about being on TV. We just wanted to get the truth out. We wanted people to know that if something like this could happen at Columbine, it could happen anywhere. All around, we were hearing that music had caused Columbine, or video games had caused Columbine. We had to counter that.
People needed to know that bullying and injustice had caused this. Parents and administrators not being attentive to the needs of their kids had caused this. We didn't want anyone else to go through what our community had suffered. We wanted to help stop Columbine from happening again.
I also had the opportunity to speak up in my defense, to answer the accusations before a national audience.
We appeared on the show May 21. Oprah's producers provided the tickets to Chicago, where the show is taped. I was actually nervous about getting on a plane; I've always hated flying. Nonetheless, after the events of the past month, leaving Littleton behind for a little while was a relief.
It was hard to make it through the taping. Only a few days before, I had finally come to grips with the idea that Eric and Dylan really were dead, that I would never be able to confront them with what they had done, would never have that outlet for my pain and confusion. It had only been a month since the shootings; my emotions were still raw.
I thought I was prepared to talk, but then the taping began. Immediately the producers played a “montage” tape that showed our community in mourning, video footage of Dylan, and a general review of the events of April 20. At the end, Oprah projected the drawing I'd made when Dylan and I were in grade school. It showed two friends holding hands, with a caption underneath that said, “What scares me most is if Dylan does boast that he isn't my friend.”
Seeing it all projected up there, I felt all the pain coming back. It was all I could do not to start crying all over again. And it was right at that moment that the video ended and the lights came up on me.
“Brooks still cannot believe his boyhood friend has done this,” Oprah said, turning to me.
I nodded, and took a breath.
“And I know that the Klebolds, if they had k
nown about Eric's Web page, if they had known anything about any of this—they would have been all over it,” I said.
My mom went on to explain how we had turned over the Web pages, and the police hadn't followed up on them. My dad told Oprah about the different options the police could have pursued. I talked about my last conversation with Eric, the atmosphere of the school, and how I was still trying to understand what had happened.
We were joined during the show by Gavin DeBecker, an expert on predicting violence and author of the book Protecting the Gift: Keeping Children and Teenagers Safe. DeBecker was quick to criticize Sheriff Stone for his comments.
“I think what the sheriff's comments about Brooks seemed to indicate, when he said he may be a suspect, is that typical example of institutional BS that says ‘those people know something about our department, and I want to now reduce their credibility,’” DeBecker said.
Instead of finding the easiest ways to point fingers and avoid blame, DeBecker said, people need to look deeper for the answers. He suggested that kids in my generation had “grown up with death in a way that you and I never did.”
“This is their world,” he said. “These boys give us all the opportunity to look at ourselves.... The shooting gives us the opportunity to say, ‘Hey, what's this about?’ Something's clearly different here when boys are going into high schools and doing this. We have an opportunity now.”
Oprah encouraged people to learn from what had happened at Columbine.
“I'm thinking if we don't learn from this, we'll see it again,” she said.
Those words echoed my own feelings. Since we had been denied the chance to ask Eric and Dylan why they had done what they'd done, we would have to learn on our own.
My family's appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show helped get the word out. Other shows invited us to appear as well. However, one particular appearance wound up falling through.
No Easy Answers Page 15
