Columbine

by Jeff Kass

  In his web pages, Eric boasted of his drinking. But here, he said he had drank a total of three times and had never been drunk. He said he did not like the taste, nor the effects, of alcohol. His current attitude toward drinking was, “Don’t want to anymore, don’t need it.” He said he had not had a drink since July, 1997, about eight months before filling out the diversion forms. That time, he had tequila.

  Eric’s AOL profile indicated his favorite class in school was bowling, and his favorite thing to do on the weekend was to bowl and get stoned. But he told Sanchez he had never used illegal drugs. They were “trouble,” and mirroring Dylan’s statement, a “waste of time and of life.” Yet Eric also indicated he had passed out one to three times as a result of using drugs. Like Dylan, he was probably referring to alcohol, but the passing out did not seem to raise any eyebrows. His friends, he said, did not use drugs or alcohol.

  His parents’ attitude toward alcohol and drugs was, “Won’t tolerate it, don’t ever use anything.” Wayne and Katherine Harris agreed that their philosophy was, “Discourage abuse of alcohol, no illegal use of drugs or alcohol.” Brooks Brown had told Katherine Harris about Eric’s alcohol stash after the backpack fight. Yet the parents wrote they were not aware of his using any drugs or alcohol. Eric and his parents agreed there was no drug or alcohol addiction in the family.

  Eric said his parents were supportive, dependable, loving, and “strict, but fair.” They might yell at him, but would also discuss his problems and make him accept responsibility. He got grounded for poor grades, too much time on the computer, and car offenses.

  The Harrises marked “no” for any financial difficulties. Were Eric’s friends a positive, or negative influence? “Was involved in this incident with his best friend,” the parents wrote. “One other friend has had some problems. Other friends seem mostly positive.” No names were specified.

  At the time of diversion, the Harrises said they had not seen any sudden behavioral changes in Eric. He could often be found at home and checked in with them once a day, after school. Yet Eric wrote that he was often away from home, either at school or work. He classified the most traumatic experiences in his life as “moving from Plattsburgh, New York and this incident.”

  Eric’s attitude toward diversion was, “Looking forward to it, hopefully it will set me strait [sic].” The parents said of diversion: “Good alternative to confinement, fines.”

  The parents termed Eric’s grades as B’s and C’s. They mentioned the suspension for breaking into the school computer. Eric and his parents classified his attendance and classroom behavior as “good.”

  Sanchez indicated that he got along well with teachers and administrators, but contradicted Eric’s own words and wrote that he had many friends. She concluded Eric had been cooperative, open, and honest during intake. “He feels Diversion is appropriate for his actions, but feels Dylan is more responsible since it was his idea.” Eric thought about the van owner while taking the equipment, but it did not stop him.

  It appears Sanchez filled out the “Action Plan” for Eric and wrote that his “presenting problems” were “Anger/Stress.” Managing them became the program goals. Dylan’s action plan had no goals.

  ∞

  Six days later, on March 25, Eric and Dylan appeared in court to finalize the plea agreement so they could formally enter diversion. But first, Jefferson County Magistrate John DeVita probed the kids and their fathers. One thing that struck DeVita was that both boys were accompanied by their fathers. Usually, it was the mothers who showed up. The hearing began with the Klebolds.

  “This has been a rather traumatic experience, I think,” Tom Klebold told DeVita. “It’s probably a good, a good thing, a good experience that he did get caught the first time. As far as I can tell, this was the first time.”

  DeVita: “Would he tell you if there were any more?”

  Tom: “Yes, he would, actually.”

  DeVita: “It means you got a good relationship?”

  Tom: “Yes.”

  But Dylan worried DeVita because his grades were C’s and B’s.

  “I bet you’re an A student if you put your brain power to the paper work,” DeVita said.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Dylan said, mumbling the rest of his response.

  “When the hell you going to find out?” DeVita demanded back.

  “You’ve got one year of school left,” DeVita said. “When are you going to get with the program? Look at your dad and make him a promise. You look him right in the eye and you make him a promise about whatever you are going to do to get the kind of grades you are capable of.”

  Eric was next and irked DeVita when he said the van break-in was his first illegal act.

  “Why don’t I believe that?” DeVita said. “First time out of the box and you get caught. I don’t believe it. And if I did believe it, then you got to think real seriously about getting another line of income, because you have no future as a thief. It’s a real rare occurrence when somebody gets caught the first time.”

  “We think this was the first time,” Wayne Harris said. “We are glad he got caught the first time. We haven’t had any indication of any other prior problems.”

  Eric said he got A’s and B’s. His curfew was 10:00 p.m. on the weekends, and 6:00 p.m. on weekdays.

  “Good for you, dad,” DeVita said. “So, dad, I think your curfew is appropriate. It sounds to me like you got the circumstances and situation under control just by ratcheting back his curfew.”

  DeVita was pleased Eric had a job and asked, “Do you have any chores around the home?”

  Eric: “Yes, your honor.”

  DeVita: “What are they?”

  Eric: “Laundry, pick up the trash, vacuum, sweep the floors.”

  DeVita: “Do you do that without being told?”

  Eric: “Yes, your honor.”

  DeVita signed off on Eric and Dylan after five minutes each. The teens were sandwiched between other cases considered more serious, and DeVita, who lives in the Columbine area, says he was fooled by the polite youngsters.

  ∞

  Nate Dykeman met Eric and Dylan in the eighth grade. A lanky 6'4" and 165 pounds, Nate considered Tom and Sue Klebold a second set of parents. After Columbine, he made news for talking about Eric, Eric’s parents, and a bomb. And also for selling a videotape or videotapes he and Dylan made to ABC for $10,000, or $16,000, depending on the story.

  The day after Columbine, Dykeman was already talking with authorities, but a lie detector examiner concluded he was “deceptive” when asked whether he helped plan Columbine. Dykeman then said he “had not told everything he knew . . . because he was afraid he would get arrested and blamed for what happened,” according to a report of his FBI interview. The report goes on to say, “Dykeman advised that he was aware that Harris and Klebold had been experimenting with black powder and pipe bombs for over a year. Dykeman advised that he saw them blow up several things, and he also saw pipe bombs.”

  The FBI report added these details: “Dykeman advised that he saw pipe bombs at Harris’ house on several occasions. Dykeman said that Harris took him into his parents’ bedroom closet and showed him a pipe bomb his parents had confiscated from his room. Harris related to Dykeman that his parents had found the pipe bomb, but didn’t know what to do with it. Harris then showed him two or three other pipe bombs that he had made, which he was keeping in his room. These pipe bombs were made after his parents had confiscated the one that they had in their closet.”

  As the allegations go, Wayne Harris was “furious” over the pipe bomb. Eric was grounded and not allowed to use his car. But the question remained: What to do with the bomb? It was even more pressing because Eric, according to one news account, had already entered diversion.

  “You know, they can’t turn it over to the police,” Dykeman told an A&E documentary. “Eric would get arrested.
They can’t detonate it because it’s homemade explosive. It might damage something or hurt someone. They can’t throw it out, obviously, so they were kind of caught in a weird situation on what to do with it.”

  In a paid interview, Dykeman told the tabloid National Enquirer that Wayne “took [Eric] somewhere safe and made him detonate it.” Dykeman, in another account, said he didn’t know what happened to the pipe bomb. But their buddy Zach Heckler also told police of a time that Eric and his dad set off a pipe bomb Eric had made.

  Eric himself says in a videotape that his parents took away a bomb, and wrote a one-paragraph essay for class dated September 1998, titled “Good to be Bad, Bad to be Good.”

  A time when it was bad to be good was when I had to give away all my weapons to my parents. It was after I got into serious trouble with the law, so my parents wanted to take all forms of weapons that I had away. It was bad not because I might use the weapons, just because I paid good money or spent a lot of time making them. It made me feel that all that time and money was wasted. But since weapons are dangerous and my parents didn’t trust me, I suppose it was for the better.

  After Columbine, a lawsuit against the Harrises alleged that around February 1998, Wayne found one of Eric’s pipe bombs at their home, took it to a vacant field, and exploded it. Wayne Harris denied it in a court filing.

  But whatever happened, it did not deter Eric and Dylan. As Dykeman put it, “They just kept creating a larger bang.”

  ∞

  The sheriff’s office still had a shot at Eric and Dylan. Randy and Judy Brown made a follow up call shortly after making their police report and learned that the file was with Deputy John Hicks. The same John Hicks who had ended up with the family’s other web report on Eric and Dylan seven months earlier.

  On March 31, 1998 the Browns met with Hicks at the sheriff’s office. He was taken aback by the ferocity of Eric’s web pages but concluded they did not constitute a computer crime. Eric said he wanted to kill people “like Brooks Brown,” not Brooks Brown himself. But Hicks flagged the bomb-making and brought in bomb squad members Glenn Grove and Mike Guerra. (Guerra maintains he was not part of the meeting, but only popped in to quickly check something with Grove.) The Browns recall that during the meeting, Grove and Guerra found another case where a pipe bomb mirrored one of those described in Eric’s web pages. Hicks also found a record of Eric’s van break-in.

  The day after the meeting, Judy Brown says she saw Eric in line at a supermarket buying Rifle magazine. She quickly went home to call detectives and check on the progress of the case. Randy Brown also called. But in the end, as the Rocky Mountain News put it, “Randy and Judy Brown can’t count the times they called the Jefferson County sheriff about Eric Harris. But they know how many times detectives called back: Zero.”

  More complete accounts from the deputies themselves did not come until five years after Columbine, when the Colorado attorney general took up an investigation.

  In the rounded out accounts, Guerra says he began working on a draft affidavit for a search warrant to enter Eric’s home. He was never formally assigned the case, but a supervisor knew what he was doing. Either way, Guerra plotted the location of the similar pipe bomb found in February 1998 and calculated it was two or three miles from Eric’s house. (Another check by the Rocky Mountain News found it to be about one and a half miles.) We may never know if Guerra made the right connection. But it seems like pretty good detective work.

  Guerra also seems to have found a record of the van break-in about two months earlier but says he thought “it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.” On April 9, 1998 (Eric’s seventeenth birthday), Guerra went to Columbine to discuss Eric and Dylan with the school resource officer, Deputy Gardner. “I remember he said they were just kind of misfit kids; they really weren’t any big deal,” Guerra recalls. “They weren’t a problem to anybody. I think I may have gotten the vehicle descriptions from him; if they drove, or if they didn’t drive.”

  Guerra asked Deputy John Healy, who coincidentally had assisted with the van break-in, to try and find Eric’s website. Healy couldn’t, but he found “a domain name profile of Eric Harris” that said he wanted to join the Marines. It seems like the right Eric Harris.

  Deputy Grove says he was there when Guerra showed the draft affidavit to Sgt. Jim Prichett and Lt. John Kiekbusch. Kiekbusch said Guerra still didn’t have a strong enough case to bring it to the district attorney (and eventually a judge). Guerra needed to get a description of the Harris home and an eyewitness who could link Harris to a pipe bomb.

  There are also three other accounts: Prichett says he did not see the draft; Kiekbusch says he received a “verbal briefing”; Guerra recalls talking to Kiekbusch about it and says he “may have” shown it to him.

  Guerra at one point said he talked to someone—he can’t remember who—in the district attorney’s office. Then he said he hadn’t done that.

  Guerra went by Eric’s home to get a physical description, and it appears he interviewed at least one neighbor. John Voehl estimates that anywhere from six months to one and a half years before the shootings, a police officer, possibly from the Jefferson County sheriff’s office, went around asking about teenagers in the neighborhood. The officer came back later to ask specific questions about the Harris house. Guerra worked on the draft until at least May 1—about a month after the meeting with the Browns.

  The document was never formalized. But it does exist. The undated, one and a half-page draft zeros in on Eric’s alleged bombs: Atlanta, Pholus, Peitro, and Pazzie. Guerra wrote that at about six inches long and one inch wide, the bombs matched the size and explosive contents of the bomb listed in the February 1998 police report. He included a description of the Harris home. If granted the warrant, Guerra wrote that he would look for “materials, components, literature, books, video tapes, and any drafts, or notes pertaining to manufacture of pyrotechnic devises [sic], improvised or commercial explosives. Electronic mail messages which were sent or received from the address to establish ownership; paper work [sic] which show’s [sic] ownership of occupancy of the residence.” He excerpted the website statement that Eric wanted to kill and injure as many people as possible, “like brooks brown.”

  But the draft would die before it became a search warrant. Guerra says he was pulled away to do other assignments and, “Since this wasn’t assigned to me as an open investigation, it kind of went to the bottom of the pile.”

  Diversion

  After three months, Andrea Sanchez moved on, handing off Eric and Dylan’s diversion cases to Robert Kriegshauser. In six years on the job, Kriegshauser had supervised maybe five hundred clients, although only ten to fifteen were “exceptional” and allowed to leave the program early. Eric and Dylan were among that group. “In my opinion, you have to be a perfect client, pretty much,” Kriegshauser said. “You have to be an exemplar example of taking care of your responsibilities through the court system. You have to try real hard, basically.”

  Kriegshauser and Sanchez have never spoken publicly. But in 2002 Kriegshauser was deposed as part of a lawsuit when injured Columbine victim Mark Taylor sued Solvay Pharmaceuticals, the maker of Luvox, the psychiatric drug Eric was on when he carried out the shootings. Taylor alleged that the drug did not calm Eric as hoped, but fed his anger. Taylor dropped his suit in February of 2003 and Solvay agreed to contribute $10,000 to the American Cancer Society.

  Kriegshauser’s deposition has never before been made public, but it provides fodder for any number of Columbine theories. Eric and Dylan’s ability to fool Kriegshauser may show them to be master con artists. That deceit also supports the popular diagnosis that Eric was a psychopath (although Dylan’s deceit was also well done).

  The deposition’s fine grain view into the diversion program may feed the idea that the program itself was flawed, given Eric and Dylan’s ability to slip through.

  Or maybe it was Kriegshauser a
nd Sanchez. Their written notes that have been publicly released are full of misspellings and might show them to be not too bright. Yet, for what it’s worth, the deposition shows Kriegshauser to be dedicated to his job.

  The point of the lawsuit, of course, was to try and prove the true troublemaker was the Luvox.

  ∞

  After the District Attorney’s office recommends a case, the diversion officer contacts the family by phone. They ask questions to see if there is any “obvious initial ineligibility.” A form tells them, “If possible, determine if there is an obvious safety issue. If parents report that the juvenile’s behavior remains out of control or he is an immediate threat to himself or others (continual runaway, recent attempt of suicide, assaultive, etc), his case may be more appropriately handled through court.” The information kids and their parents provide is not checked for accuracy. “It’s all voluntary stuff,” Kriegshauser told the attorneys. “We don’t go out and investigate them.” Although the program, which lasts for a year, uses what leverage it can. “So we tell them up front that if we catch them in a lie, it’s going to be harder going for them, so we hope they are going to be honest.”

  Eric and Dylan tested negative after taking standard urine scans. Dylan, but not Eric, underwent a drug and alcohol evaluation. Kriegshauser cannot pinpoint why. It was Sanchez’s decision, but the drug use by Dylan’s brother may have been a factor.

  Eric and Dylan had to complete forty hours of community service and, like other diversion participants, were not supposed to possess weapons, including BB guns or even pocketknives. “If they say yes to [having] a knife, I say, ‘Well, for the duration of this program, you don’t own it,’” Kriegshauser said. “It goes to your parents, locked away.”

  Kriegshauser’s deposition mentions an item in the diversion file that was not released when the files were made public: A letter from Sanchez to the Columbine High School dean, Peter Horvath, informing him that at least Eric was in diversion. “The intention was, basically, so that the school would know we’re out there, and we would like to marry up our forces to see if we could get the kid on a better track,” Kriegshauser explained. “So it would facilitate the passing of information, both attendance records, progress reports, discipline stuff, whatever that would look like, that would be happening at the school.” But Kriegshauser was unaware of any follow-up with the school.