Columbine

by Jeff Kass

  There is also the issue of the Browns’ report. It would not show up on a records check because deputies did not make an arrest or take other formal action. Kriegshauser says he was unaware of the report, but if he did find out about an added criminal complaint once someone was in diversion, he said he would want to talk with the police, the kid, and the parents, and see if they were found guilty. The kid might stay in diversion depending on how far along they were and if they were making progress. Or Kriegshauser might terminate them. But as far as he knew, participants were not checked once they entered the program anyway.

  “We know our communication with the police and the other agencies is poor,” Kriegshauser said. “It’s a system-wide issue. So we put it on the juvenile and we hope that the parents—and that’s where we get a lot of our information—will tell us if they have had contact with the police. Even if it’s not an arrest, even if they get stopped in a car because they had a tail light out and they got their name taken, we tell them to report that to us.”

  Kriegshauser added that he never caught Eric in a lie, and Eric even told him about a speeding ticket he received while in the program. “I never doubted Eric’s honesty,” Kriegshauser said, and noted, “He never gave me cause to.”

  ∞

  On April 16, 1998, Sanchez wrote of her first meeting with Eric once he had formally entered diversion. “Eric has been having difficulty with his medication [Zoloft] for depression,” she wrote. “A few nights ago he was unable to concentrate and felt restless.” But the doctor was going to switch the medication. School and work were going well. Prom, maybe a reference to junior prom, was coming up. Eric wasn’t going to the dance, but would attend the after-party. He also took a urinalysis on the 16th, and told Sanchez it would be clean.

  Two weeks later, on April 30, Sanchez wrote, “After-prom party was fun,” and, “Grades on report card were A’s, B’s, and a C. Eric is feeling okay now that he isn’t on medication, but knows he will feel better when he begins his new medication.”

  ∞

  Every diversion “client” writes an apology letter to the victim, according to Kriegshauser, even if they are busted for drugs. (In that case, the letter goes to the parents.) Eric and Dylan’s letters went to Ricky Lynn Becker of Westover Mechanical Services. He was apparently assigned the van the night Eric and Dylan broke in. Kriegshauser said the diversion counselor decides whether to make a copy for the file before the letter is sent to the victim. Dylan’s letter has never surfaced. Eric’s did not appear when his file was made public, but was first leaked to the media. A copy of the letter apparently resided in his computer and was not formally released until 2006.

  Dear Mr. Ricky Becker,

  Hello, my name is Eric Harris. On a Friday night in late-January my friend and I broke into your utility van and stole several items while it was parked at Deer Creek Canyon Road and Wadsworth. I am writing this letter partly because I have been ordered to from my diversion officer, but mostly because I strongly feel I owe you an apology and explanation.

  I believe that you felt a great deal of anger and disappointment when you learned of our act. Anger because someone you did not know was in your car and rummaging through your personal belongings. Disappointment because you thought your car would have been safe at the parking lot where it was and it wasn’t. If it was my car that was broken into, I would have felt extreme anger, frustration, and a sense of invasion. I would have felt uneasy driving in my car again knowing that someone else was in it without my permission. I am truly sorry for that.

  The reason why I chose to do such a stupid thing is that I did not think. I did not realize the consequences of such a crime, and I let the stupid side of me take over. Maybe I thought I wouldn’t be caught, or that I could get away. I realized very soon afterwards what I had done and how utterly stupid it was. At home, my parents and everyone else that knew me was shocked that I did something like that. My parents lost almost all their trust in me and I was grounded for two months. Besides that I have lost many of my privileges and freedom that I enjoyed before this happened. I am now enrolled in the diversion program for one full year. I have 45 hours of community service to complete and several courses and classes to attend over the course of my enrollment.

  Once again I would like to say that I am truly sorry for what I have done and for any inconvenience I have caused you, your family, or your company.

  Respectfully,

  Eric Harris

  Sanchez thought that Eric did a good job on the letter, which is undated. But in his personal diary on April 12, 1998 Eric wrote:

  Isnt america supposed to be the land of the free? how come, If im free I cant 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 fucking nowhere on a Fri-fucking-day night. NATURAL SELECTION. fucker should be shot. same thing with all those rich snotty toadies at my school. fuckers think they are higher than me and everyone else with all their $ just because they were born into it? Ich denk NEIN. BTW, “sorry” is just a word, it doesnt mean SHIT to me. everyone should be put to a test. an ULTIMATE DOOM test, see who can survive in an environment using only smarts and military skills. put them in a doom world, no authority, no refuge, no BS copout excuses. If you cant figure out the area of a triangle or what “cation” means, you die! if you cant take down a demon w/ a chainsaw or kill a hell prince w/ a shotgun, you die! fucking snotty rich fuckheads. [Censored by Jefferson County Sheriff] who rely on others or on sympathy or $ to get them through life should be put to this challenge. plus it would get rid of all the fat, retarded, crippled, stupid, dumb, ignorant, worthless people of this world, no one is worthy of this planet, only me and whoever I choose. there is just no respect for anything higher than your fucking boss or parent. everyone should be shot out into space and only the people I say should be left behind.

  ∞

  Three months into the diversion program, Dylan was failing to complete his first ten hours of community service. He started off doing work at Eldorado Canyon State Park near Boulder, known for its rock climbing routes. He claimed to have worked seven hours, from 7:40 a.m. to 2:40 p.m. on Tuesday June 2, but it was inexplicably his first, and last, time there. Sanchez was miffed over his lack of hours and assigned him a two-page paper on time management.

  Dylan then launched into another odd stint of community service: Just one and a half hours at St. Philip Lutheran Church. Again, according to his diversion file, he never showed up there again and there is no explanation why. The only St. Philip listed in the metro area, at the time, was headed by Rev. Don Marxhausen, the same pastor who would preside at Dylan’s funeral and where Dylan’s family had briefly worshipped a few years earlier. But various church workers, including Marxhausen, do not remember Dylan doing community service there.

  On June 11 Dylan ended up at the Link Recreation Center in Lakewood for his community service, the same place Eric was going. Link, a former junior high school now run by the City of Lakewood in Jefferson County, has a little bit of everything: weight room, video games, and pool tables. The former cafeteria rents out for events. Eric and Dylan only worked together once, on June 23. Still, Dylan completed thirty-six and a half hours there to finish out his service requirements.

  Dave Kirchoff, the Link Center coordinator, remembered watching Columbine unfold on television “like everybody else in the world.” The next day, a staffer thought the names Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold sounded familiar and they checked the paperwork.

  “It’s a little creepy,” Kirchoff says. “The creepiest part is to realize they’d been involved in something like that and realize you had no idea, no inkling it was a possibility.”

  Link doesn’t usually take people like Eric and Dylan with theft charges because if anything goes missing, the diversion workers are among the first suspects, Kirchoff said. (The same goes for Eldorado.) But Kirchoff does
not remember anything on Eric and Dylan’s paperwork indicating a theft charge, or them saying anything about it. “But we do ask,” Kirchoff says. “They may not have been one hundred percent up front with us.”

  Community service at Link generally means custodial work like wiping down equipment. Workers make the rounds with glass cleaner, towels, and brooms. Friends often want to work together, although the center usually needs only one person at a time. Kirchoff figures Eric and Dylan ended up in just about every nook and cranny in the rec center.

  Eric’s final review for Link reads, “Great worker,” and such words are not handed out lightly to the two hundred who do community service there each year. “For me to put something like this, they were pretty dependable, somewhat competent,” Kirchoff says.

  Dylan may have been as good, but Kirchoff didn’t sign him out. He had a vague recollection of Dylan because of his “unique face.” Kirchoff did not recall any trouble from the two. Indeed, Eric and Dylan were focusing their energies elsewhere.

  “My recollection of them is almost non-existent,” Kirchoff said. “That was kind of the interesting thing; they came in, did their work, did it reasonably well, but there wasn’t anything striking about them.”

  Kriegshauser did not know details of Eric and Dylan’s community service, according to his deposition. The clients “never tell us what they do or what they are required to do,” he said.

  Kriegshauser will call a program if he thinks a kid is not really doing the community service, and he did check with Link, but doesn’t think they called back. “Which is a typical thing,” he says. “We leave a message, but nobody calls back.” Yet, at least in the case of Eric, Kriegshauser had no reason to believe he “was anything but a great worker.”

  ∞

  Dylan turned in his time management essay (for blowing his community service hours) to Sanchez using a font so thick and bold it almost looks like Arabic. The essay contains no capital letters and two large paragraphs. It was, arguably, Dylan’s way of being difficult and giving the finger to authority. The undated paper, simply titled “time management,” also showed some intellectual flair. Dylan wrote on the Seven Years War, a series of worldwide conflicts between two coalitions that included the French on one side and the English on the other; his one obvious mistake was that it occurred in the 17th rather than the 18th century.

  “Time management is an essential aspect of society,” he began. “Since the invention of clocks in the middle ages, people have become more productive, efficient, and have had better life styles [sic]. knowing how and when to do certain things is one key to a happy lifestyle.”

  The British vanquished the French in a pivotal North American battle, which is what Dylan seems to refer to when he wrote that the French general “did not know time management, as he hesitated when he should have acted. an experienced time management connoisseur would have rotated the cannons sooner, ending the british threat. in conclusion, this and other examples show the importance of time management.”

  Sanchez termed the paper “very creative and well-written.” It was also her last day overseeing Eric and Dylan before she turned the cases over to Kriegshauser. She concluded in her final analysis that Dylan was a “nice young man, kind of goofy, and a bizarre sense of humor, he makes me laugh.” She added: “I sometimes see him and Eric together, I like to meet apart too so I can discuss Eric’s meds and his shrink meetings. That is all I have to say, Bye Bye!!!!”

  Sanchez ended her June 24 entry on Eric with an expression in Spanish, “Muy facile hombre,” which might be interpreted as “An easygoing guy.” A separate, final summary sheet from Sanchez had a couple more conclusions about Eric. “Really nice young man. Seems responsible and remorseful,” she wrote, later adding, “I am not at all worried about drug use from Eric, pretty good head on shoulders (now watch he will get a hot UA [urinalysis] for Acid or something).”

  Eric and Dylan’s educational level probably did vaunt them well above the other diversion clients, and they did not come across as common criminals—indeed, their crimes were not done for material gain so much as revenge. But Sanchez may not have had the time, nor ability, to divine that. And Eric and Dylan were expertly deceitful.

  ∞

  In his first full meeting with Eric, Kriegshauser showcased his “strict, or kind of black and white” philosophy. They discussed Eric’s medication and mood. The meeting would have lasted fifteen minutes to a half-hour and Eric was, “Very receptive. He was always extremely respectful,” Kriegshauser says.

  Kriegshauser met that same day with Dylan for the same bureaucratic matters. But Dylan did not appear for the next appointment, on July 27. He called Kriegshauser on the 28th to say he had messed up the time. Kriegshauser was as angry as Sanchez had been when Dylan didn’t meet his community service hours. Kriegshauser now demanded that Dylan use a Day-Timer. “And, typically speaking, that’s how I respond when somebody says they missed an appointment,” Kriegshauser said in his deposition. “They forgot the time. They had something else scheduled. Well, guess what, you’re not scheduling your time appropriately. You need to be able to manage all of these obligations. So start bringing one [a Day-Timer] every time you come and see me.” (Time management was never an issue with Eric, Kriegshauser said.)

  If clients like Eric and Dylan were doing “really well,” Kriegshauser explained, he liked to talk more intimately with them and go beyond the standard checklist stuff. So on August 24, “I brought up how do you feel about diversion, or however it came out. So the conversation basically went about or went around government, rules in society, authority versus not authority, chaos versus not chaos, that kind of stuff.” Dylan sounded like the same Dylan who was critical of society with Horvath. And Eric and Dylan both railed against blind faith in law and authority. “He [Eric] was anti-government, like just about every other client I have,” Kriegshauser said. “He didn’t like the fact that he was in trouble. He didn’t like having the man tell him what to do. But he wasn’t belligerent about it. He listened to what I was trying to express to him.”

  Eric and Dylan asked something to the effect of, “What if we smoke pot? What if we don’t agree with the rule that it’s illegal?”

  Kriegshauser replied, “Well, it’s illegal; and I told you [you] can’t do it, period.”

  Eric said, “Well, it figures, because you’re the authority, which is real typical.”

  Kriegshauser has since gone over that conversation in his head “a billion times.” But the details may not have mattered.

  In fact, the diversion program itself, meant to soothe and rectify Eric and Dylan, probably prodded them towards Columbine as they chafed against the strict guidelines and boiled inside for being caught.

  ∞

  Dylan’s grades were all over the map, from an A in video to two D's, which, notably, were not in slacker classes: French and honors chemistry. The common denominator was that Dylan rejected school because of the classroom strictures and because he didn’t like the people. Like Magistrate DeVita, Kriegshauser understood Dylan was smarter than his grades showed.

  “I got the distinct impression it was lack of effort,” he said. “He seemed far more capable than that in my discussions with him. He seemed articulate and intelligent, and it just—just didn’t add up for him. Now, they were AP classes, advanced placement classes, but they still seemed low compared to what he should be doing.”

  Kriegshauser told Dylan to improve his grades and if not, he would have to come into the diversion office daily to do homework and compile a weekly homework log. At first, Dylan’s grades went up, but then dropped to an F in gym. The math teacher noted that Dylan could use his class time more appropriately, and Dylan admitted reading a book during class.

  “I told him that his effort needs to improve or he will face consequences here including possible termination,” Kriegshauser wrote in the log. “I also confronted him on his mini
mizing and excuse giving. I told him to listen to himself and think about what he is saying. It all sounds like he feels like the victim although he denies this.”

  By contrast, Kriegshauser felt Eric’s grades, A’s and B’s, were good throughout the program. “He’s a darned good student,” Kriegshauser said of Eric in his deposition. “No concerns about school.”

  Eric, but not Dylan, was ordered to a Mothers Against Drunk Driving panel. On the panel, victims or perpetrators talk about their experiences, although it is not just about alcohol use, but giving people “victim empathy.” The panel had no impact on Eric, Kriegshauser recalled.

  But by September, Kriegshauser felt Eric was doing well in the program. “Eric asked if he would be allowed to go on a trip to Germany in March,” Kriegshauser wrote in his notes. “I told him that I would bases [sic] my decision on his progress at that time. I told him that if he works hard I will try to ST [successfully terminate] him a little early so he can enjoy his trip with out [sic] stress about Diversion. I reminded him that his effort and progress must remain excellent for this to happen.” (Kriegshauser, in his deposition, did not recall any other details about the trip to Germany.)

  The next month, Kriegshauser learned Eric had received a speeding ticket. His parents grounded him for three weeks and yanked his computer privileges for about two weeks. Kriegshauser felt that was appropriate and didn’t give Eric any additional tasks.

  Eric was sent to a one-day program called Violence is Preventable. (Kriegshauser said such emotions never seemed to be a problem with Dylan.) On December 1, 1998 Eric turned in his essay on what he had learned. It was exactly what Kriegshauser would want to hear: