Columbine
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Gonzales set up a time to meet Eric three days later, on Monday April 5 at 1:00 p.m. “I felt he might be a good lead because he thought about the Marine Corps and he was interested in weapons.”
∞
Eric seemed to be on another track. After speaking with Gonzales, he recorded his thoughts in his diary the next night:
Months have passed. Its the first Friday night in the final month. much shit has happened. Vodka has a Tec-9, we test fired all of our babies, we have 6 time clocks ready, 39 crickets, 24 pipe bombs, and the napalm is under construction. Right now I’m trying to get fucked and trying to finish off these time bombs. NBK came quick. Why the fuck can’t I get any? I mean, I’m nice and considerate and all that shit, but nooooo. I think I try to hard. but I kinda need to considering NBK is closing in. The amount of dramatic irony and foreshadowing is fucking amazing. Everything I see and hear I incorporate into NBK somehow. Either bombs, clocks, guns, napalm, killing people, any and everything finds some tie to it. Feels like a Goddamn movie sometimes. I wanna try to put some mines and trip bombs around this town too maybe. Get a few extra frags on the scoreboard. I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things. And no, don’t fucking say “Well that’s your fault” because it isn’t, you people had my phone#, and I asked and all, but no no no no don’t let the weird looking Eric KID come along, ooh fucking nooo.
∞
On April 5 Eric was on time to meet Gonzales at the Littleton recruiting office near Columbine. He wore a black Rammstein T-shirt, black cargo pants, and tennis shoes. Following procedure, Gonzales re-screened him on the same questions to make sure his answers were consistent and there were no obvious road blocks. Eric then took the Enlistment Screening Test that measures word and math skills. Gonzales scored the twenty-two minute, multiple choice Scantron test on the spot. Gonzales said an average score is forty to sixty. A score over sixty allows someone to qualify for almost any division of the corps. Eric scored seventy-four out of ninety-nine. Gonzales told him he did pretty well. Then he assessed Eric’s values.
The Marines’ reputation is first on the battlefield, bayonets drawn. But like any wise corporation, they actually look for character traits that vault their people above the lemmings. To that end, the corps has a list of eleven traits needed for success and gathered from a survey of former Marines in the Fortune 500. The traits are presented to applicants on eleven small tiles in different colors to make them easier to see. They then pick the tiles that explain their reasons for wanting to join the Marines.
Eric’s top three picks, Gonzales recalls, were physical fitness, leadership, and management skills, and the triple-header called self-reliance, self-direction, and self-discipline, or “self times three.”
Gonzales did not recall why Eric chose the particular traits, but the “self times three” was not any sort of a red flag that a potential recruit was selfish. “I’ve had captains of the football teams pick this,” he said.
On the battlefield, Eric was most interested in Special Forces or infantry. Like most people, Gonzales said, “He was basically looking for the excitement.”
Their meeting lasted one to one and a half hours. Gonzales noted that Eric wasn’t a bookworm, but he wasn’t a jock. He just seemed down the middle, a “normal person.” Eric never mentioned Dylan, nor made any remarks about shooting up his school. He did not say anything about the van break-in, which likely would have been uncovered in a background check and would have raised questions. Gonzales gave him some pamphlets and Eric asked what the Marines provided for college tuition. He seemed genuinely interested in joining up.
Next came the closing. “Are you ready to be a Marine?” Gonzales asked.
But Eric wanted to graduate high school first, which was typical enough. And Gonzales wanted Eric to talk to his parents. He figured they would have questions. Gonzales also knew that people begin to hear negative things about joining up once they tell friends and family, so he arranged a follow-up meeting.
Three days later, on Thursday April 8, at 1:00 p.m., he met with Eric, one day before his eighteenth birthday. The meeting lasted fifteen to twenty minutes, and Gonzales says, “He [Eric] was pretty much sold on the Marine Corps but he wanted to have the parents involved.”
If a recruit is seventeen, Gonzales says he is required to meet with the parents, so Eric’s case was a judgment call. But Gonzales usually sees the parents when someone is still in high school, and he wanted to meet the parents the night of the eighth. Eric said he would talk with them and call Gonzales.
The next day, Friday, April 9, Eric celebrated his birthday. His friends gathered at the Draft Bar and Grill in nearby Southwest Plaza shopping mall. Chris Morris was there, along with Nicole Markham. It was the last time Cory Friesen would see Eric and Dylan, and he remembered them saying they wished the jocks were all dead. He didn’t take it seriously. Dylan and Robyn finished off the night with Eric at the Rock N’ Bowl bowling alley, which dimmed the lights and featured a DJ from midnight to 2:00 a.m.
Three days later, on Monday April 12, Gonzales still hadn’t heard back from Eric about meeting the parents. So he went to Blackjack Pizza. It was eight days before Columbine.
“Hey Eric, how come you didn’t call me, what’s up?” Gonzales asked.
Eric may have said he was too busy working, Gonzales recalls. But they set a meeting with the parents for Thursday the 15th at 6:00 p.m. at the Harris house.
Gonzales and Eric’s dad hit it off. They had both been to Okinawa and reminisced about the beaches, jet skis, boats, and golf. They stayed in the living room in the front of the house and made other small talk about work. “Their house was nice,” Gonzales added. “Normal parents.”
Wayne Harris wore a dress shirt and slacks, having just gotten off work. Katherine Harris dressed “casual.” Gonzales believes Eric was wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Gonzales himself was in military dress, ready to conduct business.
He said he understood the parents had questions. Indeed, they were most curious about educational opportunities and the delayed entry program, which allows high school seniors to join the Corps immediately, but go to boot camp after graduation. “Mom wasn’t too keen on combat-related jobs,” Gonzales said. “I explained to her it’d be his choice and there’s a lot of other jobs to choose from.”
There were no other questions. Gonzales was there about a half hour. He was getting ready to leave when Katherine Harris left the room and came back with a prescription drug bottle.
“What about this?” she asked.
“What’s that?” Gonzales asked.
Katherine Harris said it was Luvox. Gonzales had never heard of it before. He asked if it was like Ritalin or Prozac, which he classified as mood-altering drugs and therefore a disqualifying factor for the Marines. She said it was.
“We got a problem,” Gonzales said, and explained to them that recruits cannot be on any prescription drug, even penicillin. For more serious drugs such as Ritalin, recruits had to be off the drug for a year.
“After a year,” Gonzales told Eric, “give us a call if you’re still interested.”
Gonzales isn’t convinced that Katherine Harris tried to sabotage Eric’s recruitment because she didn’t want him in the Marines; she was supportive of the college opportunities the Marines offered.
“I just told them that was it, thanked them for their time,” Gonzales said. Eric looked “disappointed, but not devastated.”
The Harrises said nothing further, but “were disappointed as well.” Gonzales himself was also let down.
If the meeting had gone well, the plan was for Eric to do some more screening then sign up on Saturday the 17th, take a physical exam, and be sworn in at the federal courthouse in downtown Denver (where the Columbine lawsuits would later be heard). Instead, Gonzales went to his car and called his boss on the cell phone. Eric Harris wasn’t going to be a player, he said.
Eric Harris also made a call Thursday night to Mark Manes. Eric was now old enough to buy his own ammo, but asked Manes to get him some 9mm ammunition. Manes said OK, but then forgot to do it.
On Friday, April 16, Eric talked at school about being rejected by the Marines. “He seemed disappointed, even though he talked like he was blowing it off,” according to Brooks Brown.
“Dylan and I were the first ones Eric told about the rejection,” Nate Dykeman told the National Enquirer. “He asked me, ‘Where do I go from there?’ He saw it as a last option.” In a dead end sort of way at least one thing was looking up: Eric received a promotion that day at Blackjack to shift manager. But none of it really mattered.
As the shooting started at Columbine, Gonzales was on his way to the school to pick up transcripts on another student. Then he remembered he had an 11:30 a.m. appointment in the nearby suburb of Lakewood, and flipped a U-turn. He later saw Eric Harris’ house on television. He was shocked. “It was weird,” he adds. After authorities released Eric’s name, Gonzales called his boss and said he had interviewed Eric the week before. He was told not to speak with anyone, but word got out and the Lakewood recruiting office was so mobbed with reporters that Gonzales had to go out the back door. That lasted about a month.
∞
The Klebolds knew Dylan played Doom—lots of it. And Tom Klebold was concerned about the violent films Dylan watched—Matrix, James Bond, Lethal Weapon—but figured that’s what kids do.
Tom Klebold also thought he and Dylan had similar personalities, and Dylan was his best friend. Although Dylan sometimes gave one-word answers, they talked a lot, and he seemed like a typical teen. Tom and Dylan would play chess and work together on Dylan’s BMW, like building speakers for it. (Dylan didn’t like helping repair the rental properties.) The Klebolds split season tickets to the Colorado Rockies baseball team with four families, and Tom usually attended with Byron or Dylan. About three years before Columbine, Tom and Dylan had to stop playing sports together when Tom got rheumatoid arthritis.
The Klebolds were OK with Dylan’s friends, whom they described as quiet, intelligent, nice, polite, and “maybe shy.” They were definitely not the most popular kids in school, the Klebolds thought, but they seemed happy and healthy, like laid-back kids without social pressures. Some were members of a fantasy baseball league Dylan joined, which had its own website. Or the friends would watch movies. Dylan had a sleepover at least once a month at a friend’s house, including Eric’s.
The Klebolds thought Eric was “quieter” and respectful, but didn’t hang out much at their house. Eric would get mad at Dylan if he “screwed something up,” yet the Klebolds did not see a leader amongst the two. While Eric and Brooks had their falling out, Dylan didn’t seem to hold a grudge against Brooks. When Brooks had a band in elementary school, Dylan played drums, and in the year before Columbine, the two discussed writing a play.
In the months before Columbine, Dylan himself would say he was still in love, and still depressed. He filled his diary with huge hearts, wrote that he had stopped masturbating, and still hinted at the shootings: “I hate this non-thinking statis. I’m stuck in humanity. Maybe going ‘NBK’ w. Eric is the way to break free. I hate this.”
Dylan was also applying to college. According to information obtained through the Arizona Public Records law and never before released, the University of Arizona at Tucson received Dylan’s college application on January 15, 1999.
Dylan’s college essay is a classic example of his, and Eric’s, status: still dorks, but able to fool people into thinking they were normal while angry enough to keep fueling their plot. Dylan does not flaunt his goofy sense of humor nor any of his creativity in the essay. He plays it safe and comes across as a boring flat-liner, but alludes to some problems.
Dylan filled out the boilerplate sections of the application by listing his father on the line for parent, and said no other relative had ever attended the school. He intended to enroll in the fall in the College of Engineering and Mines to major in computer engineering. His 2.74 G.P.A. ranked him 229 in a class of 463 in the middle of his senior year. He had taken the SAT in June 1998, scoring 560 in verbal, and 650 in math for a total of 1210.
The application included a single, brief recommendation from his high school counselor, Brad Butts, written in December 1998: “Dylan has great potential in the computer science and technology field. He is very bright and I believe is beginning to mature in his attitude toward school and his future. His grades show an inconsistent pattern of performance, but he has continued to take challenging courses. His current grades are Video Production—A, Government—B, AP Calculus—C, Composition for College Bound—C, PE—D. Please feel free to call if you have questions.”
The essay:
Dear University of Arizona:
I would like to take this time to introduce myself to you. I have been at Columbine High School (Littleton, CO) for three and one-half years (originating from Ken Caryl Middle School). During this time, I have become acquainted with most of the staff, as well as the student body. I have participated in many extra-curricular activities, and have worked in and out of classes towards preparing myself for my future. During my freshman year, I performed above average, receiving grades that reflected my perseverance. However, during my sophomore and junior years, I had trouble keeping a high G.P.A. This was partially a result of my hanging out with the wrong crowd; not caring about my future. It took me a long time to finally realize that the decisions I was making would affect me for the rest of my life. Also, I have difficulty communicating with people, and my time management was not optimal. These are things that I am diligently working to rectify, so my grades and my people skills reflect the positive change. Through the four years, my classes have shown and will show that I have chosen relatively difficult classes, in hope [sic] to better myself and my education. For example, I had gone through French 402 by the end of my junior year, and I am also in my fourth year of math. That current class is AP Calculus. By taking difficult classes, my grades might not have been as high as possible, but I feel that I benefitted more by this, than receiving perfect grades in courses less challenging. Now, during my senior year, I am endeavoring to work harder than before, and to maintain good time-management skills, so I can achieve a better G.P.A. than in the past.
At Columbine High School, as well as during my own time, I have been a computer enthusiast. My computer experience started in Junior High, mostly by my tinkering on my home machine. Since then, I have taken three computer-related classes at Columbine. These include a structured Q-Basic class, which taught beginning knowledge of the programming language Q-Basic, Computers A-Z, which taught the hardware and its maintenance, and also an HTML/Web Page design class, which organized students to fabricate and maintain the Columbine Web Page. I also did various technical tasks for staff around the school during that time. During some of my personal time, I taught myself beginning Visual Basic and HTML. A friend and I also got interested in server maintenance and network administration, which led us to help maintain the Columbine network and server. As a result of these classes, as well as personal time spent, I have grown a passion for using, operating, and learning about computer systems. I feel that choosing Computer Sciences and Engineering as a major will help further my education, and my future.
Some of the major extra-curricular activities that I participated in during my time at Columbine High School were the school plays and musicals. However, I did not act in these, but ran the sound system for the performances. Since my sophomore year when I started participating in these plays, I have run sound for four plays, and have also accepted requests to run sound for various private groups and talent shows in our school. I have also participated in stage design, and helped co-direct one play. During the spring of this year, I and a few other students with similar theatrical interests will attempt to produce an entirely student-run produc
tion, done outside of the school. I have a strong interest in sound engineering and broadcasting, and might pursue that as an alternative to a computer-related major.
I have chosen to apply at the University of Arizona for various reasons. The first, being that U. of A. is a highly competitive school, with a highly renounced computer program. This is what I believe will help me further my education and my career. I also believe I would enjoy the hot, dry climate, a drastic change from the weather here. I feel that a large student body will add to diversify my learning experience of college.
I truly believe that I would be a positive member of and an active leader in the U. of A. community, and I hope that you feel the same way. Thank you for the consideration of this application, and this letter. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Dylan Bennet Klebold
Dylan also applied to the University of Colorado at Boulder. Again, those records have never been made public. Dylan’s personal essay was the same as for Arizona, although he changed the second to last paragraph with weak, almost odd reasons for wanting to attend the more local college:
I have chosen to apply at the University of Colorado at Boulder for various reasons. The first being that I live in a suburb of Denver and the commute to my home is feasible. I was very impressed when I went to visit the campus. The Engineering/Science program not only sounded like what I was looking for to further my career in computers, but also has been ranked very high among colleges in the country. I was also impressed with the tour guides. They were informative, and told me a great amount about the college’s history, its specialties, and the life style within. The accommodations for students at C.U. were inviting, as were the wide variety of activities and courses.
After his contrite college application, Dylan wrote an essay for creative writing class in February 1999 that was so violent the teacher flagged it with comments. It is one of Dylan’s most public signs of violence.