Columbine

by Jeff Kass

  “Yeah,” is all he can muster.

  Guerra and another officer now collect a pipe bomb and seven CO2 cartridges from Klebold’s cargo pants.

  Then comes Harris. Guerra finds five unexploded CO2 cartridges near his feet. The right cargo pocket on Harris’ pants is buttoned, and Guerra cuts along the top edge. He fishes out four more CO2 cartridges. Five CO2 cartridge bombs are in Harris’ left pants pocket.

  Harris was sitting next to a bookshelf when he put his shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. His body then slumped onto the floor, and his face became instantly unrecognizable. Harris’ blood and pieces of his skull splattered nearby books. As police put him in a body bag, a “mass of blood” tumbled out of his head.

  The Wild West

  Dylan Klebold lived in the Jefferson County foothills, where towering slabs of red rock frame homes fed by winding dirt driveways. His modernist wood home, built in 1978, has peaked roofs and multiple windows, some cut at an angle to match the roofline. When his parents purchased the gray, two-story home and surrounding ten acres for $250,000 in 1989, it had mice in the walls and needed plenty of fixing up, but Dylan’s father, who grew up with carpentry, welcomed the task.

  Tom and Sue Klebold told their real estate agent they felt the location amid deer and frogs would be a good influence on Dylan and his older brother, Byron, because it was “closer to nature and away from the hustle and bustle of the street.” It indeed seems like a quiet, scenic place for finding inspiration. Over the years, the home came to be valued at $900,000.

  Dylan’s bedroom was on the second floor, where he had posters of the bands Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and Chemical Brothers, along with a poster of different liquors and of a woman in a leopard bikini, according to various accounts. There were also street signs, baseball photos, and a “PG-13” sign stolen from a movie theater. Dylan wanted to paint his whole room black but Sue vetoed the idea, so he had to settle for one black area near a window.

  But Dylan did keep a shotgun in his room. He first tried to hide it in the bottom drawer of his dresser, but it was too long. He tried the bathroom, but the hole in the wall behind the wooden toilet paper dispenser was too small. Dylan didn’t think his parents would find the gun if he buried it under the pile of dirty clothes in his closet, but he eventually cut down the barrel and fit it in the dresser’s bottom drawer.

  Dylan was a reflection of that house: rambling, distinctive, emotional, brainy—the more artistic type. He also seemed funny and harmless. He was smart and liked learning, but the formulaic nature of the classroom and oppressive school cliques turned him away from the classroom. He challenged himself and took more advanced courses, although his grades suffered because of it. Over six feet tall, he favored jeans and T-shirts and wore his light brown, wavy hair below the ears. He had a long face, and his John Lennon sunglasses sat atop a goofy grin. With those sunglasses and his hair pulled back in a ponytail, he looked like the blazing gunman in his favorite movie, Natural Born Killers.

  After the shootings, Dylan’s home became the place for reporters and police to look for answers. But few got past the Klebold gate. It guards the driveway, along with an intercom and a dark blue newspaper box. Years after Columbine, no numbers marked the 9351 Cougar Road address, although maybe the digits were never there. The police were among those who got inside, but refuse to release any photos or videos they have of the house.

  When he was alive, Dylan would turn his BMW left out of the driveway. A right on West Deer Creek Canyon Road emptied him out onto the Jefferson County plains. In winter, the few stone buildings seem to float on the snowy whiteness that stretches to the horizon, as if a helicopter had dropped them on the sea. The odds eventually shift as the tract homes become more common than bare land. Although whether it was raw land, or raw housing, the views were equally numbing. The number of humans walking around was about zero.

  ∞

  Jefferson County, shaped like a jagged knife blade, has a split personality. The western half where Dylan lived cuts into the Rocky Mountain foothills and creates a scenic backdrop for an eclectic mix of residents ranging from hillbillies in ramshackle homes to yuppies in multi-million dollar mansions. Denver—contrary to its reputation for blizzards—is essentially a high altitude desert where winters are softened by over three hundred days of sunshine. But the Jefferson County foothills reveal glimmers of the massive snow and deep cold found in the heart of the Rockies.

  The foothills also harbor many of Jefferson County’s “Open Space” parks, full of popular hiking and mountain biking trails. Paragliders jump off Lookout Mountain and swoop down to earth on the air currents, while bison graze near Interstate 70 as the highway blazes west into the mountains. Red Rocks, the scenic natural amphitheater, is known the world over for its outdoor concerts. The mountainous terrain also contains dinosaur fossils that include Triceratops footprints and ancient palm imprints on the twelfth green of the Fossil Trace Golf Club in the city of Golden.

  The county flatlands where Eric lived spread east toward Denver and include Columbine. This is typical suburbia, with unremarkable cities like Lakewood, Littleton, and Westminster. This is also the heart of the county economy. Southwest Plaza sprawls on the plain and gets as upscale as Macy’s before dropping down to Sears and J.C. Penney. In a county that is eighty-seven percent white, chain stores represent most of the ethnicity: Heidi’s Brooklyn Deli, Qdoba Mexican Grill, Einstein Bros. Bagels.

  Jefferson County’s most prominent building, the courthouse, is known as the “Taj Mahal” for its approximately $60 million price tag and central, domed building flanked by two rectangular wings. The sheriff and district attorney offices sit nearby as the Taj robustly skirts the edge of the Rocky Mountains, guarding the terrain. Yet the Taj illustrates a suburban quandary as officers must patrol both wilderness and suburban sprawl with no downtown or center of crime to focus their attention. The county’s signature building could not stop its signature crime.

  ∞

  Law enforcement was historically sparse in the Old West. The frontiersman would take the law into his own hands, and there was no better equalizer against nature, Indians, and the common criminal than the gun. Churches were seen as a civilizing influence, but even they could be warlike. In Colorado, most of the early miners were Protestant, yet crusading Presbyterians stood out for moving “against Mormons, Catholics, and others regarded as species of infidels,” according to the book The Coloradans. “These ‘Christian soldiers’ talked in terms of fighting battles, occupying strategic points, posting pickets, establishing outposts, and the like.”

  The strife is said to continue in Jefferson County today, with believers against non-believers and sect vs. sect. “The churches have very little to do with each other,” says Reverend Don Marxhausen, who presided over Dylan Klebold’s funeral. “There’s two separate groups. The evangelicals and the mainliners.”

  The violent individualist who stood up for himself not only survived, but was glorified, and came to symbolize the West.

  William “Buffalo Bill” Cody first came to Colorado territory in 1859 at the young age of thirteen, like many migrants, looking for gold. But after the Iowa native did not find enough nuggets to punch his ticket, he was recruited by the Pony Express, according to some accounts, which was looking for “skinny, expert riders willing to risk death daily.” Cody earned his nickname in 1867 while hunting buffalo to feed railroad workers. He said he killed 4,280 of the animals in seventeen months, but was also known for hyperbole.

  In 1872, at age twenty-six, Cody popped into show business by portraying the Wild West. One of his trademark stories, “Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer,” has him shooting Cheyenne chief Yellow Hair in the midst of battle, stabbing him in the heart, and scalping him “in about five seconds.”

  Buffalo Bill performed in Colorado thirty-five times, and endorsed horse halters from the Gates Tire and Leather Company in De
nver, helping boost the company that still keeps worldwide headquarters in a curved and shiny building full of glass in downtown. Cody’s sister also lived in Denver, and that was where he died in 1917 while visiting her.

  There was some controversy over whether Cody wanted to be buried in Wyoming, where the town of Cody was named after him. But close friends and the priest who administered the last rites said he wanted to be interred on Lookout Mountain in Jefferson County. His state funeral, according to one account, is “still perhaps the largest in Colorado history.” He was buried per his wishes on “a promontory with spectacular views of both the mountains and plains, places where he had spent the happiest times of his life,” according to the Buffalo Bill Museum & Grave, which re-enacts his burial every few years.

  Col. John Milton Chivington was among those who came to Colorado to save souls. A beefy man—over six feet tall and 250 pounds—with a burly, dark beard and jutting chest, he was balding on top but two sturdy tufts of hair jutted out over each ear. In his military uniform with gold buttons up the front, he looked the part of a no-nonsense, nineteenth century soldier.

  Chivington was also an ordained Methodist minister, and in 1860 he brought his family to Colorado as the presiding elder of the Rocky Mountain District of the Methodist Church. But he would die as one of the West’s most controversial figures for his gruesomely superb job of killing. At dawn on November 29, 1864, Chivington seems to have nearly taken it upon himself to lead a charge on the Sand Creek Indian Reservation. Historian Joe Frantz gives a compelling account of the incident and implies 450 dead, but the National Park Service, which oversees the National Historic Site of the massacre, says 160 died. Frantz wrote:

  At dawn Chivington’s militia charged through the camp of 500 peaceful Indians, despite Black Kettle’s raising an American and then a white flag. Not just warriors were killed. Women and children were dragged out, shot, knifed, scalped, clubbed, mutilated, their brains knocked out, bosoms ripped open. Four hundred and fifty Indians in varying stages of insensate slaughter lay about the campground. There is no defense whatsoever for the action. It was bloodier than Chicago or Detroit or Harlem ever thought of being. Chivington and his cohorts were widely hailed as heroes by many of their fellow Americans. Indeed, two weeks later Chivington was honored in a Denver parade. But questions soon arose about what exactly occurred at Sand Creek, and Chivington arrested six of his own men for cowardice. Those men, however, said that they had held back and refused to participate in a massacre. The U.S. Secretary of War had the six men released, although one of them, a longtime friend and colleague of Chivington, Capt. Silas Soule, was shot and killed from behind days later in the streets of Denver.

  Chivington faced court martial charges for Sand Creek, but was no longer in the U.S. Army and escaped that punishment. A Congressional investigation still condemned him for having “deliberately planned and executed a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty.”

  Chivington left Colorado and lived in other states but later returned to Denver and worked as a deputy sheriff. He died in 1892 and was buried after what the Rocky Mountain News called “still the biggest, best attended funeral in the city’s history.”

  The Sand Creek Massacre, confirming the fears of the Eastern establishment, most likely delayed Colorado’s bid to become a state and enter the union. “Do not allow Colorado in, with its roving, unsettled horde of adventurers with no settled home, here or elsewhere,” one Eastern newspaper wrote. “They are in Colorado solely because a state of semi-barbarism prevalent in that wild country suits their vagrant habits.”

  A dozen years after the Sand Creek Massacre, Colorado did enter the Union and took the name of the Centennial State for being founded one hundred years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The next year, the state’s premiere institution of higher learning, the University of Colorado at Boulder, admitted its first forty-four students. Nearly 125 years later, Dylan Klebold would apply there. He was neither accepted nor rejected. His application was not complete, and he put a bullet in his head before the shortcoming could be reconciled.

  Dylan was not alone. Colorado, and the West, has some of the nation’s highest suicide rates. Population booms here overrun mental health resources on the new suburban frontier, and people feel compelled to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Wide expanses wall people off from one another, and a lack of close family for new settlers keeps people isolated. What is left is the gun. So valued for self-protection, it becomes a weapon for healing thyself: Guns are the most common method of youth and adult suicide.

  ∞

  While Columbine united Eric and Dylan, it does not exist. It is an unincorporated swath of suburban homes anchored in south Jefferson County, fifteen miles southwest of Denver. It is full of middle-class families. But there is no town or city, mayor or municipality. It is a tiny dot of sprawl.

  “There’s no parade. Where would you have it?” explains Rev. Marxhausen, who once worked in Chicago. “There’s no community center. You come from the Midwest, every area has its own downtown. There’s no downtown here. The first thing clergy people who move here say is, ‘Where is the community?’ There is no community.”

  The closest anyone comes to officially recognizing Columbine is the U.S. Census, which calls it a “Census designated place”—nothing more than a group of people who live in an area with a recognized name. Just over twenty-four thousand people live in this area, which is rectangular in shape except for a triangular appendage at the southern end. More than ninety percent of residents are white. But the population is, by many measures, above average. More than forty percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher (when the national average is around twenty-eight percent). The median household income is over $80,000, compared to about $52,000 for the rest of the country.

  The heart, and horror, of Columbine is the high school. It is named for the state flower, the white and lavender Columbine, but visitors often expect an evil fortress with black clouds.

  Columbine High looks perfectly normal, if outdated. Heavy on the concrete and composed of a series of nondescript wings, the large school’s most prominent feature—and the only nod to any architectural flair—is the cafeteria wing and its windows that bulge out in a semi-circle.

  The public library sits on the same block, connected to the school by sprawling Clement Park, which features a lake, picnic tables, and athletic fields.

  The park also holds a memorial to the thirteen killed at the school. Visitors descend into an outdoor oval and are enveloped by a wall of red stone. Oversized, smooth, smoky stone plaques are embedded in the wall and engraved with quotes from Columbine students, parents, teachers, and former President Bill Clinton. An inner circle contains tributes to those who have been dubbed the thirteen innocent victims. Matthew Kechter’s parents remember his broad grin after catching his first trout. Kyle Albert Velasquez’s parents say he was—and is—very much loved. Daniel Lee Rohrbough’s parents note that the killings happened in a country where the authorities could lie and cover up what they did. There are references to God throughout. On the ground of the inner circle is a ribbon, also made of smooth, smoky stone. It reads: Never Forgotten.

  ∞

  To arrive at his best friend Eric’s house, Dylan might have turned left onto South Wadsworth Boulevard, the type of major thoroughfare Eric wanted to set aflame. Then right on West Chatfield Avenue. A few more turns and onto South Reed Street. Follow the road past a few houses to the cul-de-sac. 8276. Eric’s house. Five miles, ten minutes. A white Ford Explorer would have been parked in the driveway.

  Eric’s house is picture-perfect suburbia, the flatlands Antichrist to Dylan’s mountain retreat. Eric’s cul-de-sac of middle-class homes might be Ohio, or Southern California. Unremarkably, the neighborhood held a block party about five months after Columbine. Remarkably, the Harrises at
tended.

  It is a solid neighborhood, although hardly elegant. The Harrises bought their tidy, stone two-story home for $180,000 in 1996. Inside are four modest bedrooms and four baths. The house is framed by gray trim, wood shingles, a two-car garage, and plenty of windows, although the blinds were drawn after Columbine.

  Eric was like that home. He could look normal in his jeans, flannel shirts, and short brown preppy hair—Dylan’s opposite. Yet neither had he been accepted by the rest of the teenagers. He had some outlets—soccer, video games, and vandalism—but nothing satisfied. He frothed with anger.

  The Harrises put their home up for sale in 2004, five years after Columbine. They asked for $269,900 and exaggerated by calling it a “sharp contemporary,” but added this “advisory to buyer”: “The Sellers of this Property are the parents of Eric David Harris who was involved in the Columbine High School shooting. Sellers are not aware of any physical consequences to the property, but encourage Buyers to evaluate the Columbine incident so that they feel comfortable purchasing the Property.”

  The real estate agent was Jay Holliday, whose daughter Jessica was at Columbine the day of the shootings. But two other real estate agents with Columbine connections were barred from showing the house. One was Randy Brown, whose son Brooks was a sometimes friend of the killers. The Brown whose family first reported Eric to the Jefferson County Sheriff more than two years before the shootings. After the shootings, Randy Brown became a vocal critic of police. “I’d love to get inside and see it and see Eric’s room,” Randy said of the house. “It is where this entire plot and tragedy began.”

  Rich Petrone, the stepfather of slain student Dan Rohrbough, was the other agent who was blackballed. “You know how you want to go to the scene of the crime?” Petrone said. “That’s how it is for me.”