Columbine/Teaching Non-Violence

April 20, 2009, was the tenth anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School, just a few miles from my Denver home. My wife, Joyce, and I visited the school a few days after the shootings and my lasting image of the event was seeing the adults kneel down in the springtime mud and sob, mystified over why our children were killing one another. In recent weeks leading up to this ten-year milestone, America has seen an outburst of mass killings -- in Pittsburgh, Oakland, Seattle, upstate New York, and elsewhere. They've occurred inside a church, a medical facility, and an immigration center. What they all have in common with Columbine is that they've been driven not by any form of personal gain, but purely by emotion. Feelings of rage erupted into gunfire and, in several cases, the killer ended up dead, just like at Columbine. 

            When kids go to school across the United States, they are forced, year after year, to learn about the abstractions of algebra and the complexities of biology or chemistry, but no one teaches them how to manage their emotions. To my knowledge, there are no mandatory classes about dealing with shame, guilt, fear, confusion, abusive comparisons, anger, and jealousy. Students aren't given good alternatives to self-judgment and self-hatred. With a trillion or so dollars on the table to bail out the auto and financial industries, and trillions more spent on the U.S. military, maybe a few bucks devoted to this kind of instruction would save the lives of people we love in the future.

            My 1994 book, Sweet Evil, tells the story of Jennifer Reali, a 28-year-old Colorado Springs wife and mother of two young daughters, who had an affair with Brian Hood, a 32-year-old Prudential salesman, born-again Christian, and father of three young children. During several months, he convinced Jennifer, a sensitive and intelligent woman, that God would never forgive her for their adultery, but wouldn't mind if she dressed up in her husband's army clothes and gunned down his wife, Dianne. Jennifer did just that and two days later walked into the Colorado Springs police station and confessed everything. She got life in prison, while Brian was eligible for parole after a dozen years.

            Prior to the murder, Jennifer had never been in legal trouble or barely had a traffic ticket. She was, according to those who knew her best, a "normal" person who exploded into violence for a few seconds and then returned to herself, crying uncontrollably and apologizing to everyone for what she'd done. It was almost as if she expected the legal system to forgive her after she came to her senses, but it didn't and she's now in the 19th year of her sentence. My wife and I visit her at the Colorado Women's Correctional Facility in Denver and we've gotten to know her and her family. She wants to write about her experience and we're assisting her.

            Over the course of writing ten books about crime, I've come to think of evil not as a person, place or thing, but as a process that ends in tragedy. We're trying to get Jennifer to break down the steps of that process. And to show readers what led her to abuse herself emotionally, first with her husband and then with Brian, and to show how a bright and decent human being can turn into a monster because he or she has no emotional intelligence. Maybe a piece of writing like this could help us understand how someone with no criminal past and no criminal tendencies can gradually turn into a death machine. It might even help deter a future killer. Who knows? Perhaps one day our culture will begin to value this kind of knowledge as much as photosynthesis and higher math.             

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