Columbine

by Jeff Kass

  I then spoke with Associate Chief Counsel for Disclosure and Forfeiture Richard Isen on July 10, 2001. He himself was bothered about how his agency had handled the FOIA. “Not that this hasn’t happened before,” he said, “but I don’t want it to happen again.”

  He added: “They never really did the search,” and acknowledged, “It just was not their finest hour with that.” He suggested I re-file the FOIA, which I did on July 12.

  I also sent a check for $400 to cover potential costs. (They promptly lost, then found, the check.)

  By now it was no surprise, yet still infuriating and disappointing, that documents were not released for another seven months, in February 2002. After a one-year wait, the 454 pages did contain some new information, such as photos of the bombs used by the killers, and an indication Klebold had harassed someone at Columbine before the shootings. The final charge was $58 in copying costs.

  The list of agencies continues. The FBI was arguably the easiest to deal with, and the most forthcoming. The U.S. Department of Education released hundreds of documents, but was difficult about it.

  It is no leap to expect that thousands of Columbine documents remain locked in government file cabinets.

  Afterword

  The Columbine That Never Was:

  The Story of Preston Junior High

  The Girls

  Katie Prutzman said she was the sassiest. When she was fourteen, she was among the group of four girls who stopped a potential junior high school shooting in 2001, but said she herself “practically lived in detention.” Years later, when she was still a teen, she posed for a photo in a black tank top and white pants with a thick, studded belt and hair falling below her shoulders like a rocker. Her face seemed gentle.

  Prutzman was closest to Samantha Henry, who was also fourteen in 2001. Henry would host sleepovers that included movies and hanging out in the hot tub. Henry agrees that the girls made waves in school even before their earth shattering report to police. Lots of classmates thought the girls were obnoxious. But Henry had no regrets about informing on the suspected shooters—three boys whom she considered friends. “I thought for a little while, ‘OK, they might have been bluffing,’ but it’s not our choice to play God. I’d rather live with the fact, knowing I possibly stopped something from happening, than knowing that people could have died or been hurt.”

  Kristin Maher, fourteen at the time, was a cheerleader but said she had no hobbies and did not play sports. Her father was a real estate developer and her mother a substitute teacher and church secretary. In a photo taken four years later, Maher showed off the tattoos that dotted her waist.

  The other Katy, fifteen-year-old Katy Tynan, hung out with the girls but didn’t classify herself as much of a partier. Her father co-owned a prominent car dealership where she worked as a cashier. After junior high, she attended Christian schools and said of the backlash she and the other girls received for going to police: “Everyone was being mean because they were the popular boys.”

  In 2001, the girls attended Preston Junior High in Fort Collins, about sixty-five miles and an hour’s drive north of Denver, straight up Interstate 25. Fort Collins doesn’t begin to approach the left-leaning axis of the city of Boulder. But the city of approximately 150,000 is home to a state university and known for its craft breweries like New Belgium Brewing Company. The Congressional representative is openly gay Democrat Jared Polis. Fort Collins has been called downright idyllic: In 2006, Money magazine named it number one on its “Best Places to Live” list.

  But many mass shootings occur in such idyllic, suburban-type settings. The Preston Junior High school shooting was alleged to go off on April 24 or 25, 2001—just days after the two-year anniversary of the April 20, 1999 Columbine High School shootings a little over an hour away.

  But the four girls stepped forward, perhaps changing the course of their lives more than the lives of the three boys.

  The averted Columbine reveals a fundamental truth about stopping mass shootings: shooters almost universally “leak” their intentions and telegraph what they are going to do, whether it is through drawings, writings, or the spoken word. The leaks may not always unveil the exact plan, but they provide warning signs that something is underfoot. It is impossible to prove any “averted” shooting would have actually occurred. But looking at the mass shootings that did happen, warning signs are almost always there. The key is catching them in the moment. And it is not always an easy task.

  But that is exactly what the teen girls in Fort Collins may have done. Although their story turned out to be only one part triumph and many parts unintended consequences as the would-be heroes became vilified, and the accused came to thank their accusers.

  What We Know Now

  Fifteen years after Columbine, mass shootings continue to increase, according to an analysis of statistics originally gathered by Mother Jones magazine for its work titled, “A Guide to Mass Shootings in America.” The Mother Jones statistics go back approximately thirty years to 1982. A mass shooting is officially defined (by Mother Jones and law enforcement) as at least four people killed, not including the shooter.

  Smartly, Mother Jones only included mass shootings that occurred in public places and excluded mass shootings connected to armed robberies and gang violence. Those crimes are no less horrific, but the Mother Jones methodology allows us to focus on the mass shooting we have come to know and fear, where a person enters a public place like a school, theater, or supermarket, and randomly opens fire.

  The official definition of mass murder, however, does not begin to account for all the incidents. Pearl, Mississippi school shooter Luke Woodham killed two and injured seven at his high school in 1998. While Woodham is not technically a mass murderer, that appeared to have been his intent despite the fact he did not kill more people. Bad aim, good luck, and speedy medical care can hide the true intent and the enormity of the problem.

  When Columbine struck, school shootings were the type of mass shootings making headlines. But now, mass shootings have occurred on a military base (Ford Hood, Texas), in a supermarket (Tucson, Arizona), and a movie theater (Aurora, Colorado).

  Of the sixty-two mass shootings Mother Jones counted from 1982 to 2012, twelve involved school shootings. Twenty involved workplace shootings, while the other thirty “took place in locations including shopping malls, restaurants, and religious and government buildings,” the magazine wrote.

  Mass shootings remain rare relative to other violent crimes. But the Mother Jones numbers, broken down roughly by decade, show an increase in mass murders where victims are randomly targeted.

  The eleven years from 1982 to 1992 had fourteen mass shootings resulting in 133 dead and 128 injured. As with school shootings, most mass shootings in those years occurred in the South and West of the United States—eleven of the fourteen.

  The decade from 1993 to 2002 shows nineteen mass shootings with 119 dead and 150 injured. Fifteen of nineteen shootings were in the South and West.

  A massive rise in disturbing numbers arrived from 2003 to 2012. By then, twenty-nine mass shootings spread across the U.S. map—more than double the first eleven years counted. The number of dead reached 261—again, almost double the span from 1982 to 1992. The number of injured jumped to 216—moving solidly towards doubling the number of the first eleven years. Sixteen of the twenty-nine incidents were in the South and West.

  A copycat effect, no doubt, echoes throughout the shootings, but the nature of it may have changed. The rise in shootings may indicate that the copycats do not directly build upon a single incident. Rather, mass shootings now copy the idea of a mass shooting. And that idea is more powerful than any one mass shooting because it carries the collective weight of all mass shootings. This idea seems to have become infused in our DNA. Anyone can now view a mass shooting as a solution to his or her problem. Mass shootings outside the South and West—the states traditionally most f
ertile for such incidents—have increased.

  The lightning rod solution that emerges after mass shootings is guns. More armed people—guards, teachers, and citizens—is one axis of debate. The other is more gun control, more background checks, and in general fewer guns. The battle is bitterly fought, and re-fought, after every mass shooting.

  A generally agreed upon figure is that three hundred million guns are privately owned in the United States. In 1995, approximately two hundred million guns were in private hands, according to Mother Jones. (Gun ownership is not evenly spread; the guns are concentrated in the hands of about thirty-six percent of the population.) Mother Jones hints that more guns may be the cause of more mass shootings (the magazine is known for its liberal bent, although its reporting on mass shootings is very evenhanded). Mother Jones also found that not one of the mass shootings it examined was stopped by an armed civilian (in a handful of cases, once it appears the shooter stopped, he was subdued by someone who happened to have a gun).

  At least anecdotally, it is interesting to note that Columbine had an armed Jefferson County Sheriff’s Deputy working as the school resource officer, Neil Gardner. He fired at Columbine shooter Eric Harris—who also fired back—but missed. In 2012, New York City Police shot at, and killed, a gunman outside the Empire State Building. In the process, police bullets and fragments wounded nine innocent bystanders. Those who believe more guns are the answer must also be prepared for the fight that will surely occur if an armed civilian mistakenly kills another civilian in the midst of a firefight.

  Yet stricter gun-control is not clearly the answer either. Mass shooters have stolen guns and purchased them both legally and illegally, operating inside and outside the realm of law to get what they want.

  In the wake of mass shootings, other battles surface over violent video games and a violent culture. Four teenage girls from Fort Collins, however, showcased the best strategy: paying attention to hints and speaking of them before any extreme action has been taken.

  The Boys

  Alex Vukodinovich, smiling with spiky blond hair, was considered the leader among the three boys, and girls paid him plenty of attention. But he still felt lonely on the inside. The attention he got from other teens wasn’t enough and he wanted the rest of the world to take notice. He liked to draw, but his drawings would seal the criminal downfall for him and his friends.

  Chad Meininger was the oldest of the three boys, and might have been on the opposite end of the spectrum from Vukodinovich. The fifteen-year-old with rounded features liked riding snowboards and BMX bikes, but saw himself as “maybe the least happy-go-lucky” of the three. The girls in the group liked him the least. At school, he was teased for being a little chubby, but tried to brush it off. “We were just stupid junior high kids,” he said, years later. “We made a stupid mistake.”

  Scott Parent, with straight brown hair hanging over his forehead, was also fourteen at the time. He liked computers, math, and snowboarding. He tried to find humor in things. He was the quietest of the three and was subject to “a little bullying.” Like Vukodinovich, he fought his own demons to the point of having suicidal thoughts.

  But the boys did not direct all their anger inward. Building upon Columbine, police believe that by late 2000 they had developed a plan for shooting up their junior high. Many of the details ended up in an affidavit: Vukodinovich recalled several conversations with Parent about “re-doing” Columbine. They had a plan to bring guns to school, and Vukodinovich tried to “recruit” at least two other boys into the plot within the first two weeks of January 2001—about three months before the alleged target date.

  The plan was to enter the school with guns, take ten seventh-graders hostage in the counseling office, and execute them. They would shoot and explode propane bottles (as attempted at Columbine) for maximum death. In the finale, also borrowing from Columbine, the shooters would kill themselves.

  Evidence included ammunition, a shotgun, a pair of rifles, a TEC-9 semiautomatic handgun, a .38-caliber handgun, and a propane bottle later seized from Vukodinovich’s parents’ horse ranch. Many of the drawings found in Vukodinovich’s Preston locker and notebook involve bare-bones stick figures and aren’t overtly violent. But the most intricate one, titled “Alex and Scott’s Big Finish,” is in black and red ink and shows three bodies hanging, as if from railings, over a pile of corpses. Someone is swinging a hatchet toward the bodies on the ground. In the background, a building appears with broken windows.

  The boys had targeted a group of students they derided as “preppies,” and some of the girls recall the boys mentioning the names of their potential targets. Whether there was an actual “hit list” is a point of contention. “There were names and there were questions of why they were on a piece of paper,” said prosecutor and later Larimer County District Attorney Larry Abrahamson. A “hate” or “hit” list is one interpretation, he adds.

  Vukodinovich maintains it was the invite list for Meininger’s birthday party. “There were definitely times when I felt it was a real thing, but I don’t think it would have been at the level we spoke about it,” Vukodinovich adds, years later, while sitting in a small conference room at the alternative, residential Eagle Rock School he attended in Estes Park, Colorado.

  “I would suspect,” Abrahamson notes, “if (Columbine shooters) Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were caught before they entered the school, they would have said, ‘We never would have done it.’”

  The Boys and The Girls

  On Friday night, January 12, 2001, Samantha Henry’s brother tried to beat up Meininger at a party. Meininger remembers the girls screaming at him when he told them he would call the police on Henry’s brother. He also called the girls on the phone and threatened to “make their lives a living hell at Preston Junior High,” according to an arrest affidavit. “He also told them that they were now part of the plan and would be the first ones killed when Alex and Scott completed their plan.”

  The way Meininger remembers it, “I was sitting next to my dad. I never threatened them. I said their lives are done at Preston. I meant, ‘Your popularity, your friends, everybody; they’re going to hate you. Because people like me more than you.’”

  He allows that it was a stupid conversation on his part but insists he didn’t threaten to kill anyone.

  The girls say everything they had experienced in the past few months now came together. Prutzman once awoke at the Vukodinovich ranch to find Vukodinovich holding a shotgun to her head. Tynan recalled Vukodinovich putting a knife to her throat and talking of Russian roulette.

  Until Meininger’s phone call, Henry had considered the boys “typical teenagers who were mad at some kids.” After the call, “We were just scared that people were going to get hurt.”

  Tynan said she filed a police report because she “did not want to be somebody that was holding a bunch of information in that could be helpful.”

  Maher said: “We wanted to get Chad kicked out of school.”

  But the girls all agreed the boys were “wrong in the head,” Prutzman said.

  The alleged plan was far enough along that one girl remembers a cop “was blown away” by what they were revealing. “You let all this stuff happen before you came to us?” he demanded.

  Girls Will Be Girls

  In a 2002 study of school attacks, the United States Secret Service found that ninety-three percent of perpetrators “engaged in some behavior prior to the attack that caused others—school officials, parents, teachers, police, fellow students—to be concerned.” The Secret Service also found that in eighty-one percent of the incidents, “at least one person had information that the attacker was thinking about or planning the school attack.” Another study of thirty adult mass murderers—defined as those who killed at least three people in one incident—sixty-seven percent were said to have engaged in leakage.

  Words or actions that may be considered leakage includ
e noticeably unstable emotional responses; explosive outbursts of anger or rage without provocation; suicidal comments about “putting things in order”; empathy with those committing violence; and an increase in unsolicited comments about firearms, other dangerous weapons, and violent crimes, according to the United States Department of Homeland Security.

  When it comes to catching those warning signs, it turns out girls may be the ones most apt to do it. One study found that in eighteen of twenty averted school shootings, girls were the tipsters. In every case, the potential shooter was male. “Girls are more into good citizenship,” McGee explained to Education Week. And girls are more likely to “affiliate” with adults and share “aims and values,” Leonard Sax wrote in Boys Adrift. “Girls are more likely to see the situation from the perspective of the grown-ups,” he added.

  And it’s not just girls. Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002 were three corporate and government whistle-blowers. All women.

  Gil Geis, a University of California at Irvine professor emeritus of criminology, law, and society, said women “tend to be more verbal. They are more comfortable talking and complaining.” He added that men also have a macho roadblock: “Real men don’t tell tales. Real men don’t snitch.”

  Girls are raised to be more nurturing and to take care of others, said University of Colorado sociology professor Joanne Belknap, whose emphasis is on gender and crime. “They sort of tend to feel more socially responsible than boys do.”