Columbine

by Jeff Kass

  Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas was at Columbine, and Lozow called Thomas’ assistant.

  “Tom Klebold had heard his son’s name on television,” Lozow said. Word was relayed to Thomas. Thomas turned to a sheriff’s department commander. “Would it be of any assistance if Tom Klebold came on the scene?”

  Don’t bother, came the reply; officers didn’t even have contact with the shooters. It was close to 2:00 p.m. In fact, Eric and Dylan were about two hours dead.

  Byron Klebold told Inskeep he had not been close with his brother since moving out two years earlier. Byron said Dylan was somewhat detached because he was a “pissed off” teenager. Dylan acted tough and had knives, but was also “normal” and gave no indication of carrying out a school shooting.

  Guesthouse tenant Stephanie Juenemann, then twenty-seven, was a friend of the family who had been staying with the Klebolds for a year. “Dylan was always very polite to her and seemed like a ‘nice guy,’” she told police.

  Inskeep then spoke with Judy Brown. He noted that she became “extremely emotional” and indicated she had “gone to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department approximately one year ago and told them that this was going to happen.”

  Tom and Sue repeated that there was no way Dylan could have been involved in something like this. They said police would find no guns and bombs in their home. But investigators who entered the home with a search warrant found homemade brass knuckles, shotgun wadding, shotgun shell casings, a shotgun barrel, four boxes of 9mm bullets, two BB rifles, a BB pistol, and an inert grenade. When police later asked about the pipes in the Klebold garage, no doubt because of the pipe bombs Eric and Dylan built for Columbine, Tom said they were for repairs at the rental homes. Tom had no idea why Dylan would want to participate in the killing of twelve fellow students and a teacher.

  Around 8:00 p.m., a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy arrived and told the Klebolds they had to leave but could get some clothes. Tom went first, accompanied by Inskeep and the deputy. Susan was next, and left with two birds and two cats. Emotion then broke through. Byron started crying and hugged his dad. Tom, Susan, and Byron then left in separate cars. Each parent was accompanied by at least one friend.

  ∞

  Tom and Susan contacted Gary Lozow after being referred to him by a civil attorney. Lozow works at the well-connected, well-respected Denver firm of Isaacson, Rosenbaum. Lozow, who has a long face and thinning gray, slicked-back hair, is known for his criminal defense work. He is not a talking head, although his clients often make headlines. His law firm bio cutely thanks his mom for helping launch his career: “My brother was a criminal defense attorney and if he hadn’t hired me, my mom would have screamed at him.”

  In 1993, Lozow delved into the savings and loan scandals, successfully defending Silverado Banking Chairman Michael Wise. (Wise later plead guilty to financial wrongdoing in another case.)

  In an unusual move, Lozow and another attorney once paid $350,000 to settle claims against themselves. Lozow and Stuart A. Kritzer represented Mitchell and Candace Aronson, who claimed their neighbors tried to drive them from their pricey Jefferson County foothills neighborhood because they were Jewish. The neighbors, William and Dorothy Quigley, filed a countersuit accusing the Anti-Defamation League, which had worked with the Aronsons, of defamation, and illegally tape-recording phone conversations.

  The Quigley’s won $10.5 million in 2000 from the Anti-Defamation League. Lozow and Kritzer made their payout given their representation of the Aronsons. Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas also apologized to the Quigleys in 1995, one year after his office filed criminal hate-crime charges against them. In addition, the county’s insurers paid the Quigleys $75,000.

  Another Klebold criminal defense attorney early on was Rick Kornfeld, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago who was working at Isaacson, Rosenbaum when Columbine struck. Kornfeld, who went on to successfully defend the Denver-based independent bookseller Tattered Cover for refusing to give police a customer’s list of purchases, considered Lozow a mentor.

  The days surrounding Columbine already had some weird overtones for Kornfeld. “April 20th is my wife’s birthday,” he says. “It was also Hitler’s birthday. My father-in-law’s birthday is April 19th, which is the Oklahoma City [bombing], so we sort of have the psycho trifecta of birthdays.”

  The day of Columbine, Kornfeld got back to the office at 1 p.m., after a birthday lunch of Mexican food with his wife, and learned he too was now on the Klebold case. Sometimes, Kornfeld explains, the circumstances of a case may be clear-cut: “You know, sometimes a guy will call and say, ‘The police are at my door with a search warrant, what should I do?’ ‘Well,’ I’ll say, ‘Read the warrant. If the warrant’s legit, like the Grateful Dead say, step aside, they’re coming in.’ Don’t create more problems for yourself. It’s not that fancy.”

  Columbine was the opposite. In those first hours, the case was unfolding as fast as the television images.

  “We were watching the news like everybody else,” Kornfeld says. “The police were not busy informing us what was going on, nor would I expect them to. The media strategy was to sort of try to hold things at bay and not comment until we had something to say.”

  “It wasn’t the typical, I’ve been charged with ‘X’ I’m in trouble. Help me deal with this case,” Kornfeld adds. “This was just a bad, bad, bad situation, and they [the Klebolds] knew that they needed a lot of advice, and I think they wisely perceived that among the types of advice they would need, someday, in some context, was quote unquote legal advice.”

  Another attorney at Isaacson, Rosenbaum, Stephanie O’Malley, was a former Jefferson County deputy District Attorney (and the daughter of then Denver mayor Wellington Webb). She checked with the DA’s office to see what she could find out.

  Still, who the clients would be became clear only at the end of the day. “The [legal] representation clearly became the family because Dylan was . . . was gone,” Kornfeld says.

  The Klebold attorneys concerned themselves not only with the legal, but with the workaday. “There were significant issues about the family’s privacy. Logistics surrounding that. Where would they go? How would they get clothes, etc.?” Kornfeld says. “And then the next, the real obvious legal issues, whether it was the second day, I don’t really remember: Are these parents in any type of criminal, legal peril? And if so, determining that, because that of course tempers your advice about how and to what extent, and under what terms and conditions, to cooperate with authorities.”

  If the Klebolds were not suspects, they might still be witnesses. And a promise or letter from prosecutors absolving the Klebolds would not be ironclad. “You can walk into a meeting as a non-target, and depending on what you say, you can end up as a target,” Kornfeld says. Parents are generally liable for the criminal behavior of their children if they willfully assist them. But for Kornfeld, the flipside was trouble, too.

  “Maybe you stick your head in the sand and you know your kid is experimenting with pipe bombs and then subsequently the kid plants a pipe bomb somewhere,” he says, “I think you’ve got problems, even though basically, you facilitate it by doing nothing as a parent. I think a prosecutor could make a case and certainly a civil lawyer can make a very good case that you were acting negligently.”

  Maybe it’s no surprise that the Klebold attorneys had reached their own conclusion: They didn’t believe the parents had “direct criminal liability.”

  “The parents also wanted to cooperate with the authorities and were willing to do so, and so over the course of several days, that was arranged; the logistics of that, you know, the conditions, the place, who was going to be present,” Kornfeld says. “Were the feds involved? Were the locals involved? Who was running the show? Who was in charge? Who had the authority to make charging decisions, etc.?”

  There was “gamesmanship” in choos
ing a location. “If it’s at our office, it’s our show. If it’s at their [the police] office, it’s their show,” Kornfeld says. Ten days after Columbine, the meeting with police was held at Kornfeld and Lozow’s downtown Denver office.

  The Klebolds have never been charged with a crime, although victims’ families did sue in the civil courts. But that was not Kornfeld’s main concern early on. “I mean, this is America, people are going to get sued, there’s no question about that,” he says.

  Those early days were, for the Klebolds, “I think just absolute shock, disbelief, out-of-body experience,” Kornfeld says. “A bad dream.”

  Since then, a long-standing representation has emerged between Lozow and the Klebolds. But Kornfeld does not believe the Jewish identity shared by Sue Klebold and Lozow was a factor. “He [Lozow] is a great lawyer. Very deep-feeling guy, I think he related to them on a human level, but it was happenstance, I mean they called him,” says Kornfeld, who is also Jewish. “I wasn’t there. I was at lunch with my wife. We’re in court a lot. What would have happened? Would they have called someone else if Gary were not there? If Gary weren’t there and I was there I would have got the call? I mean, you know, who knows? It was somewhat unusual, over the lunch hour on a Tuesday or whatever it was, that Gary would even be around.”

  ∞

  The Klebolds, at first, seemed to hold more emotion and more willingness to unlock the secrets of Columbine. They quickly spoke with police. They said they wanted to help find answers to the school shootings. They were open to meeting with victims’ families, but the attorneys squashed the plan, according to their pastor. Because many perceived Dylan as the follower, Tom and Susan even seemed to carry less blame: Better to raise a foot soldier than an evil mastermind. “I think [the Klebolds’ image] is partially a reflection of the Klebolds; you are who you are, even in a crisis, and they wanted to try and figure out what had happened and why it had happened,” Kornfeld, says, although he also allows that, “I don’t know if it’s because of the advice they received, whether it was legal, or from friends.”

  But if the Klebolds truly wanted to help the world learn about their son and help figure out what happened at Columbine, they indeed had an odd way of showing it. In fact, aside from their police interviews, condensed and relayed to the public second-hand by police, the sum total of their media interviews over an eight-year span is one, with New York Times columnist David Brooks, who mostly covers national politics and trends with a conservative slant. Brooks concluded in a single, 777-word column that the Klebolds had faced down Columbine “bravely and honorably.”

  The Klebolds otherwise spent their time engaging in hand-to-hand legal combat to stop the release of information on Dylan and the shooting. Should the basement tapes be made public? Or Dylan’s autopsy, which is by default considered a public document? No and no, the Klebolds and their attorneys said to those, and other questions, of public access. The Klebolds even considered suing the sheriff’s department for not warning them about Columbine.

  Those who know the Klebolds, and who knew Dylan, say it was as if Dylan lived a secret life. The Dylan who committed Columbine was not the Dylan they knew, nor the Dylan who Tom and Sue raised. But if Dylan worked to keep his plans a secret from his parents up until Columbine, his parents fought to keep his life a secret after Columbine.

  As to how the Klebolds cope with Dylan’s legacy, the one word answer may be this—suicide. Sue Klebold, shortly after the shootings, relayed to me through an intermediary that she believed a study of suicide would reveal why Dylan went on his rampage. And in their interview with the Times, Tom and Sue emphasized that point. (A donor named Sue Klebold is also listed in the Suicide Prevention Action Network Winter 2006 newsletter.) In one way, Tom and Sue are not far off. But they cannot make the other leap that Columbine was also mass murder.

  ∞

  The day after Columbine, Susan Klebold had her hair done. As thousands of people—cops, reporters, students, families, politicians, well-wishers, hangers-on, looky-loos, loons, locals, and publicity seekers—massed about the school, Susan was one mile away in a strip mall at Dee’s Four Star Images, sliding into a salon chair. It is the same strip mall where Eric and Dylan worked at Blackjack Pizza, although Susan had never mentioned to her hairdresser that her son worked a few doors down. In fact, Susan had never talked about her children in the one year she had been seeing Dee Grant, coming in about once a month.

  Dee doesn’t know how Susan first came to visit her. She remembers that Susan was always on time and always tired. Renting out their converted Victorian in Denver was a lot of work. But Dee wasn’t surprised when Susan called on the worst day of her life—the day of Columbine, Dee recalls—to reschedule her hair appointment for the next day. “I always had the feeling that she was a reasonable person, you know, and I thought she was a good person,” says Dee, who is in her 60s. “And see, for her to call me and change an appointment because something happened, to me just says she’s a creature of habit of responsibility. You don’t break appointments. You don’t have to tell anybody why you’re changing it, but you don’t leave somebody in the lurch. She’s being responsible at all times. Because that’s her mode. She doesn’t know how else to do it.”

  Dee’s small store smells of nail polish, and on a hot spring day, she has on a thin black dress with white and green leaf prints. She has brown hair and black pumps. Another woman’s hair is setting while Dee does the woman’s nails. In the waiting area are the magazines Midwest Living and Essence, an odd choice given the paltry number of African-Americans in the Columbine area.

  The day after Columbine, Dee’s grandchildren were in the shop. Susan commented how nice and innocent they were, and reminisced about her own children. Dee had already made the connection between Susan and Dylan. That’s why she called police before Susan came in.

  “I thought, with everything that has gone on, which is so horrendous, that I needed to let them [the police] know she was here for either her protection, my protection, or just their knowledge,” Dee says. “Because maybe they’re looking for her and I didn’t want to be a part of anything that isn’t supposed to be going on. I didn’t want anything to fall on me down the road. So it was just kind of, but it was really in everyone’s best interest. Because who knows who’s following her? Who knows if violence was going to follow her as well?”

  Dee told the police she didn’t want them coming into the shop but, “I just want them to be aware of it, and if they feel like they want to patrol the shop while she’s here, that’s fine, but not to come in. They said it wouldn’t be necessary.”

  Dee also went to confession to talk to a priest about Susan coming in the next day. “Maybe because I’m Catholic and you think you have to tell everything to the priest,” Dee explains. “But I guess I wanted to feel like I was doing the right thing by having her come over. I was kind of, you know, because I wanted to treat her like I always treated her because she’s always been right with me and I know her family has a crisis now, and I didn’t want; I knew the whole world was against her and I just kind of identified with her situation. Kind of put yourself in someone else’s shoes, you know? And I had no reason to believe she was in any way, shape or form the cause, or evil herself, through my relationship with her. So I wasn’t judging her. I was just trying to treat her as a mom who was in crisis now.”

  Susan came in for a color and a cut. That’s about $55. Dee says plenty of women end up sitting in her stylist’s chair after a tragic incident. Now Susan Klebold examined her own life: What happened here? We thought we were doing everything right. Did we do anything wrong?

  Susan thought Dylan had all the right boxes checked off: He was “going forward” after his run-in with the law. He went to prom. He was going to graduate. He had picked out a college. “You know how you kinda see the light at the end of the tunnel, and she kinda saw that as, you know, I think we’re going to have a chance now,” Dee recou
nts. “Dylan’s a smart boy, you know, we’re going to put him in with some others, once he goes off to school. You know how parents always hope. How they always hope. Especially if they have a problem child.”

  Susan wasn’t a big fan of Eric Harris. “I think there was just probably; you know how you have a little gut feeling like, ‘Well, I wish he [Dylan] would kinda pick another friend, you know, this one is a little complicated,’” Dee says. Yet while Susan felt she couldn’t keep two kids apart at that age, she figured Dylan’s going off to college would break that bond.

  After the killings, Dee said Susan flagged Dylan’s computer marathons as a warning sign. But she had hesitated to cut him off. “Computers is where it’s at, you know, he’s learning a lot about it, and that’s a good thing, it’ll give him an edge,’” Susan thought, according to Dee.

  Susan was flummoxed by testimony that Eric and Dylan were prejudiced. “Dee, we’re not prejudiced,” Susan said. “I’m Jewish. You know? We don’t teach prejudice.’”

  Of reports that the two brandished Nazi slogans, Susan said, “Dee, that’s ridiculous.”

  Susan seemed “sad and numb” when they spoke the day after Columbine, tears sometimes welling up in her eyes. “She really didn’t know what to make of it. Then of course she says, ‘Well, Dee, I really don’t know if I’ll see you anymore because I don’t know where our lives are going to lead now. I don’t know if we’ll have to change our names, move, I don’t know.’ So you know, she thanked me, and I wished her good luck and like that.”

  Dee has not spoken to Susan since then, although her daughter sent Susan a card for Mother’s Day.

  The same day Susan got her hair done, she and Tom issued a statement on Columbine. “We cannot begin to convey our overwhelming sense of sorrow for everyone affected by this tragedy. Our thoughts, prayer and heartfelt apologies go out to the victims, their families, friends, and the entire community. Like the rest of the country, we are struggling to understand why this happened, and ask that you please respect our privacy during this painful grieving process.”