Columbine

by Jeff Kass

  “We’re from Peru,” says one television reporter with an accent.

  “Beirut?” Riddle asks.

  “Peru,” says the reporter, who explains that a twenty-one-year-old Peruvian student is among the Virginia Tech dead.

  The camera rolls for Michael and Sam in Peru.

  Sam is a mixture of casual and athletic that he pulls off as sophisticated. He has short, dark curly hair with touches of gray, jeans, running shoes, and a black zip fleece turtleneck. He tops it off with a herringbone sport coat and Detroit Tigers belt buckle with a tiger’s head.

  “The secrecy of Columbine—withholding the basement tapes—may have directly contributed to the deaths here,” Sam says. He adds, “If the horror is not kept before the public, they’ll never be any problem-solving.”

  “Let’s call for world peace,” Michael says.

  “It’s not the guns. It’s the hate that’s killing,” Sam says. “If you lock up all the guns, they’ll poison someone.”

  Michael walks into a small chapel on a hill alongside Drillfield, takes off his hat, and heads down the center aisle. In front of the altar he bends down on his left knee, bows his head, and prays. “Let these families see that there is a way . . . Let them heal . . . Protect them,” he whispers.

  Outside the chapel a woman is crying. He introduces himself, “I’m Mike Shoels. My kid was killed eight years ago at Columbine.”

  The woman at first seems unsure of Michael, then gives him a fierce bear hug. A man who is with her joins in. “I’m not going to say it gets better,” Michael intones.

  The woman, who appears to be in her 30s or 40s, tells Michael she is a student and has friends who were killed. She then hurries off.

  “I said there wasn’t going to be no tears here today,” Michael says, but adds, “I can’t help it.”

  A girl and boy with a Christian organization walk by with an orange sign: “Free hugs and Hershey Kisses.” Michael introduces himself, shakes hands with the boy, then briefly hugs him.

  Michael walks onto Blacksburg’s main street—literally, Main Street—adjacent the campus and leans against a light pole that looks like an old-fashioned gas lamp. An orange and maroon ribbon—the school colors—is tied to the pole. A newspaper reporter senses a story just looking at Michael, and walks up and begins interviewing him. “Of course we need gun control,” Michael says. “But it’s not the guns that’s killing. It’s what’s behinds the gun.” A television reporter from the Washington ABC affiliate soon joins in.

  If Michael and Sam have the media, they still don’t have the university. No one has called them back to confirm an appointment. The president’s office refers my inquiry about a possible meeting with Michael to the public relations office. The public relations office doesn’t know anything.

  At noon hundreds of students, staff, alumni, and others gather for the moment of silence. Television cameras, arrayed in a circle around the crowd, would film each other if they panned up at the same time. The quiet lasts a couple minutes; one moment is far too short for thirty-three dead.

  Michael is on the front line of mourners, standing next to the semi-circle of memorial stones. To his left a tall thin woman is sobbing. “I know where you coming from,” he says, and gives her a bear hug. Two other women with her join in, making it a group-hug. “I know the pain. I know the sorrow,” Michael adds.

  Michael turns to his right and as if by magic university president Charles W. Steger is there. Michael leans into him and talks softly. “Be real . . . I know for sure it’s going to be alright,” are Michael’s words that can be overheard.

  Michael then gets down on his left knee, head bowed. Steger picks up a flower and places it at a small mourning wall flanked by the memorial stones. Michael does the same. A handful of others in the crowd follow.

  Sam is now ready to declare the trip a success: Michael has told the university president his concerns “in a brief face to face,” and embraced those who are suffering “as only someone similarly situated could do.”

  At a late lunch on the second-floor patio of a Cajun restaurant, Michael orders vegetarian, and Sam starts the meal with a piece of cheesecake. I ask whether they might be accused of playing to the cameras.

  “Did you lose a son in Columbine?” Sam says, bothered but not bruised. “Then fuck you.”

  He adds: “We want to stop the killing. In America, if you’re not techno-literate and you’re not media-aware, you’ll be a victim of those who are. Those haters should get over it and do something themselves.”

  Michael calmly interjects a reference to Isaiah’s prophecy, seventy-two hours before Columbine, when he and Vonda said they would fight violence if he were killed.

  “I’m honoring a promise I made,” Michael says.

  At lunch, Sam gets the call. The university wants Michael to speak to a meeting of counselors who will be working with victims’ families. Within a half hour, an escort picks up Michael and Sam in a mini-van and drives them to the meeting. But inside the modern Cook Counseling Center, they are informed it is the wrong location. The escort himself, a burly man fighting the heat and confusion, has made a mistake. He begins to hyperventilate. It is a bad omen: One wonders if the university employees can handle the waves of grief to come.

  A meeting with another counselor is hastily arranged and Michael and Sam talk for fifteen minutes about what else the university can expect after the shooting: Fights over charity money and the need to keep families from splitting apart.

  “The university did finally reach out,” Sam says. “That was the university deciding where the Shoels’ experience best fit in. And you know what? They may not be too far off the mark.”

  Yet Sam stresses that Virginia Tech will have to move beyond the vigils and candles. Like an X-ray searching for disease, examining school shooters may be the only way to stop them. Tears and teddy bears won’t do it.

  But first a Japanese television crew is in the lobby. They have been waiting for Michael and Sam to finish the counseling meeting, and now film a segment with them on the sidewalk. (Columbine is big in Japan, a Japanese reporter explains.) After the interview, Michael and Sam walk back towards Drillfield. A cameraman walks behind them, still filming.

  EPILOGUE

  Police Report

  On the day of Columbine, then Sheriff John Stone stood on the grass in Clement Park adjacent the school and held forth at one of the many makeshift press conferences. Silver-haired spokesman Steve Davis would also give updates to the media corps that was still relatively small, albeit growing by the minute. About every half hour sheriff officials would leave the briefing area to gather more information directly from investigators, although there was never enough time to answer all the questions from reporters. Among the many key questions: How many dead? Up to twenty-five, Stone said. Yet the number would settle at fifteen. Did Harris and Klebold have any contact with law enforcement before Columbine? Maybe none, officials said. The answers began to symbolize the character of the Columbine investigation—nothing could be further from the truth.

  Columbine was not meant to be a story about an otherwise obscure suburban Colorado sheriff’s office. It was, and is, a story about what motivated two teenage suburban killers and what we might learn to stop school shootings. But we needed the photos, videos, and documents amassed by the sheriff to plumb the killers’ motivations. The problem was that the sheriff simply wouldn’t give them up. Or said certain items didn’t exist. Or twisted the story about what had really happened. And almost as soon as they responded to the shootings, police were criticized for not entering the school quickly enough. That too would now have to be taken up.

  But various sheriffs wanted to keep the truth a secret. So beginning on day one, an information war began. The media, other government agencies, and even victim families were forced to sue, prod, and poke for answers. The fight sparked often successful lawsuits, p
ublicly shamed the sheriff’s office, and triggered five outside investigations: The 2000-2001 Governor’s Review Commission; the 2002 joint Colorado Attorney General and Jefferson County District Attorney task force; the 2002 review by the El Paso County Sheriff; the 2003-2004 Colorado Attorney General’s investigation; and a 2004 Colorado grand jury investigation. (Sheriff Stone issued his own report in 2000, which has plenty of facts. It also has plenty of shortcomings.)

  The tally, after eight years, was over twenty-six thousand pages of documents reluctantly or belatedly made public by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office alone. The department, meantime, kept its grip on a few select items, while others appear to have been destroyed or lost forever.

  “It’s amazing,” Brian Rohrbough, whose son Dan died at Columbine, told the alternative Denver weekly Westword. “While we were planning a funeral, these guys were already planning a cover-up.”

  ∞

  According to the official Columbine report, Jefferson County SWAT commander Lt. Terry Manwaring arrived at the school at 11:36 a.m., approximately seventeen minutes after the shooting started. Manwaring and other select officers saddled up more quickly than many realize. Around noon, an ad hoc SWAT team of Denver, Littleton, and Jefferson County officers had been lashed together. They commandeered a Littleton fire truck for cover, and as they approached the school, Manwaring split the officers up. Jefferson County Deputy Allen Simmons took a team of five others into the school around 12:06 p.m., about forty-five minutes after the shooting began. “They were immediately met by the deafening sound of Klaxon horns and the flashing lights of the fire alarm system,” the official report says. But Harris and Klebold would kill themselves in about two minutes. Wounded teacher Dave Sanders would be reached only upon his dying breath.

  In a rare view of the police response, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Division Chief John Kiekbusch discussed the law enforcement tactics at Columbine in a video from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

  Kiekbusch starts his approximately forty-five minute talk by saying he is not there to speak about Columbine. Yet he ends up discussing the police response and is frank about some of the problems. Kiekbusch recounts his thoughts as the calls started coming in.

  “Oddly enough, we had a new sheriff, a new undersheriff,” he told the small, classroom-sized conference room. “We knew that the office was going to go through a reorganization. And the odd thought that went through was maybe this is some kind of a really bizarre, super-complicated exercise that they’re putting the organization through just to see if we’re suitable to hang around, get promoted, or what have you. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case either.”

  Kiekbusch touched on what was apparently the ad hoc SWAT team. “At the time, our people were willing to do something completely contrary to the policies in which they were trained,” he said. “We didn’t have time to assemble a full SWAT team. We didn’t have time to plan our tactics to make sure that we knew where everything was inside that building.”

  He adds that “the only information that they [the ad hoc SWAT team] would have would be to go to the sound of the gunfire.”

  Yet dispatchers had information from Patti Nielson’s 911 call. Those with Dave Sanders would also call. Information from fleeing students was conflicting and confusing, but coming in. And the parents who lost children in the library—who were told to stay down and that help was on the way—might find themselves angrily agreeing with what else Kiekbusch said at the FEMA conference: “I can tell you any number of police officers that I’ve spoken with who were involved in one way or another with Columbine went home and told their children, ‘If you hear gunshots, you run. You run as fast as you can, you run in the direction away from those, and you keep running until you don’t hear gunshots anymore.’” He added, “And there’s a very strong element of truth in that.”

  He did not give details, but Kiekbusch made a generalized statement of contrition to his audience: “No one would ever say that everything we did was absolutely correct at Columbine. That would be foolish.”

  He talked of preserving the scene, and how important it was to solve the crime. “If it gets messed up from the get go, you’re going to be out of luck,” Kiekbusch said. “It’s very, very difficult, if not impossible, to go back and put that sort of thing together.” The same could be said of the Columbine investigation itself.

  ∞

  Within three days after the shootings, the information war was kicking up. On April 23, Randy Brown was quoted anonymously in the Rocky Mountain News as a “Columbine father,” and he talked of how he gave police printouts of Eric’s website in 1998. (The Brown family does not have a memory of Aaron Brown’s 1997 report.)

  “Sheriff’s Sgt. Jim Parr said he knew nothing about the complaint,” the News story added. “District Attorney Dave Thomas said he never received it.”

  All the while, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office was using the Browns’ report to bolster search warrants for the homes of Eric and Dylan. On the day of Columbine, investigator Cheryl Zimmerman wrote to a judge: “Your affiant discovered a report made to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office on March 18, 1998, [case number] 98-5504, by Randy Brown. Randy Brown stated that Eric Harris was making death threats towards his son, Brooks Brown.”

  The search warrants were granted. But sealed.

  The Denver Post argued they were public and filed a motion with the court the day after Columbine. At an April 23 hearing, the Post was met by two Jefferson County deputy district attorneys, whose office opposed unsealing the warrants. They said it would compromise public safety and jeopardize the investigation. Jefferson County District Judge Henry Nieto, who had signed the warrants, agreed to keep them sealed.

  But the scramble was on. Numerous Open Records Act requests were made seeking “any and all” types of information related to the Browns’ report, and to previous police contact with Eric and Dylan.

  Deputy Guerra, who had done his own investigation into the Browns’ report a year earlier, had been busy at the school gathering the bombs he had meant to uncover before Columbine. A few days into the investigation—no one can pinpoint the exact date—Guerra was still at the school when he was summoned to the internal affairs office. Detective Dennis Gerlach told Guerra he was wanted at a meeting regarding his draft affidavit. Some dubbed it the “Open Space” meeting because it took place at the government building dedicated to Jefferson County’s trademark park lands. When the meeting’s existence was finally revealed five years later, as the police themselves were being investigated, a grand jury raised a critical eye and called it a “private meeting.” The media and others were less diplomatic, although arguably no less accurate. They called it a “secret meeting.”

  In the early stages, Guerra seems to have innocently grabbed his file. Gerlach looked it over, and off they went. Recollections vary as to who was at the meeting. But those named include Sheriff John Stone, Undersheriff John Dunaway, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Division Chief John Kiekbusch, District Attorney Dave Thomas, Assistant District Attorney Kathy Sasak, County Attorney Frank Huftless, and Assistant County Attorney Lily Oeffler. Stone has said he did not attend. If that is true, it may not have been because he had high ethical standards, but because no one invited him. “The meeting was called to discuss the Guerra draft affidavit; the potential liabilities of the document, and how to handle press inquiries that may arise concerning the document,” according to the grand jury report, which added, “Based on discussions at the open space meeting the JCSO proceeded with the approach to not disclose the existence of the affidavit at a press conference.”

  The grand jury noted that “as a result of the meeting,” Sheriff’s Lt. Jeff Shrader drew up a press release but did not mention the draft affidavit. A smokescreen was placed around events before, during, and after Columbine.

  Spokesman Steve Davis read the press rele
ase to the world’s media, which was now in full force at Columbine, ten days after the shootings on April 30, 1999. The two-page statement also was handed out on plain paper—no official logo, letterhead, or other identifying characteristic. Kiekbusch handled the questions.

  The release now confirmed that Randy Brown made a report concerning Eric’s threats and webpages. A background check, according to the press release, was done on Eric on April 2, 1998 (when he would have been entering the diversion program). It doesn’t state the outcome. While the department did investigate, with the crown jewel being Guerra’s draft affidavit, the press release focused on why sheriff’s deputies allegedly didn’t investigate. The department argued it could not fully pursue the case or confirm that the violent words came from Eric because Investigator John Healy could not access Eric’s website. But no mention is made of Healy accessing the web profile of Eric Harris wanting to join the Marines.

  The department said it could not conduct a full-fledged investigation because Randy Brown wanted anonymity. The actual report says Randy was “interested in remaining anonymous.” Anonymous tips are standard in police work—not an excuse to let an alleged crime slip by. The Browns indeed wanted investigators to pursue the case—why else would they report it—just leave their name out of it.

  There was no mention of Aaron Brown’s 1997 report, and zilch on the secret meeting. Maybe the biggest whopper was not mentioning Guerra’s investigation and draft affidavit. The sheriff’s office even added that no other pipe bombs could be linked to the Browns’ 1998 report, although Guerra pursued a possible match from a previous case.

  The press release says the Browns’ report “was forwarded to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office Investigations Division for follow-up” and maintained “as a [sic] ‘open lead’ since it was originally reported.” Yet police records show the Browns’ case was closed out the same month it was reported.