Columbine

by Dave Cullen

All two thousand students would return safely on Monday morning, after the prom. But the following afternoon, Tuesday, April 20, 1999, twenty-four of Mr. D’s kids and faculty members would be loaded into ambulances and rushed to hospitals. Thirteen bodies would remain in the building and two more on the grounds. It would be the worst school shooting in American history— a characterization that would have appalled the boys just then finalizing their plans.

Earlier in the year, he’d rescued Rachel Scott, the junior class sweetheart, when her tape jammed during the talent show. In a few days, Eric would kill her.

A custodian loaded a fresh tape every morning around 11:05, and the rotating cameras continually swept the commons, recording fifteen-second bursts of action automatically cut from camera to camera. Day after day, they recorded the most banal footage imaginable. No one could have imagined what those cameras would capture just four months after installation.

Mr. D had one major objective on Friday; Eric Harris had at least two. Mr. D wanted to impress on his kids the importance of wise choices. He wanted everyone back alive on Monday. Eric wanted ammo and a date for prom night.

Eric and Dylan planned to be dead shortly after the weekend, but Friday night they had a little work to do: one last shift at Blackjack. The job had funded most of Eric’s bomb production, weapons acquisition, and napalm experiments. Blackjack paid a little better than minimum: $6.50 an hour for Dylan, $7.65 to Eric, who had seniority. Eric believed he could do better. “Once I graduate, I think I’m gonna quit, too,” Eric told a friend who’d quit the week before. “But not now. When I graduate I’m going to get a job that’s better for my future.” He was lying. He had no intention of graduating.

Eric, however, had made a great impression. Kirgis had trusted Eric enough to leave him in charge frequently, but on Friday, the new owner promoted him. Four days before his massacre, Eric made shift manager. He seemed pleased.

Eric was calm but insistent. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “Brooks, I like you now. Get out of here. Go home.” Brooks thought that was strange. But he shook his head and walked on, away from the school.

Shortly after 11:14, they entered the commons. They moved inconspicuously enough to go unnoticed. Not one of the five hundred witnesses noticed them or the big, bulky bags. One of the bags would be found inches from two tables strewn with food.

At 11:19 they opened the duffel bags at the top of the stairs, pulled out the shotguns, and strapped them to their bodies. They locked and loaded the semiautomatics. One of them yelled, “Go! Go!” Somebody, almost certainly Eric, opened fire.

Rachel Scott and her friend Richard Castaldo were the first down. They had been eating their lunch in the grass. Eric shot Richard in the arms and torso. He hit Rachel in the chest and head. Rachel died instantly. Richard played dead. Eric fell for it.

The shooters kept moving. Lance regained consciousness. He felt someone hovering above him. He reached up toward the guy, tugged on his pant leg, and cried for help. “Sure, I’ll help,” the gunman said. The wait seemed like forever to Lance. He described the next event as a sonic blast that twisted his face apart. He watched chunks of it fly away. Breaths came rapidly: air in, blood out. He faded out again.

Four minutes into the mayhem, much of the student body was oblivious. Hundreds were running for their lives, but more sat quietly in class.

One room at a time, the team worked methodically toward the killers. It would take three hours to reach their bodies.

Two deputies shot back. Others laid down suppressive fire. The paramedics got three students out. Danny was pronounced dead and left behind.

They rescued Richard Castaldo from the lawn around 12:35, an hour and a quarter after he was shot. They made another approach to retrieve Rachel Scott. They brought her back as far as the fire truck. Then they determined she was dead, and aborted. They laid her there on the ground. Finally, they went for Danny Rohrbough, unaware of the prior finding. They left him on the sidewalk.

There were lots of healthy people. The team was shocked to discover dozens of terrified students and staff. They were crouched in storage closets, up above the ceiling tiles, or plainly visible under cafeteria tables. One teacher had climbed into the ceiling and tried to crawl clear through the ductwork out to safety to warn police, but had fallen through and required medical care. Two men were shivering in the freezer, so cold they could barely lift their arms.

Robyn looked over to her friends’ spaces. Eric, Dylan, and Zack had assigned spots, three in a row. Zack’s car was there. Eric’s and Dylan’s were missing.

Tom Klebold called 911 to warn them his son might be involved. He also called a lawyer.

The stations also caught glimpses of a disturbing scene playing out in a second-story classroom in another wing of the building, far from the library, in Science Room 3. It was hard to make out exactly what was going on in there, but there was a lot of activity, and one disturbing clue. Someone had dragged a large white marker board to the window, with a message in huge block letters. The first character looked a lot like a capital I but turned out to be a numeral: “1 BLEEDING TO DEATH.”

Then a fresh story zipped through the pack: twenty students—or thirty or forty—were still inside the school. They were not hostages; they were hiding, barricaded in the choir room with equipment piled high against the door. The parents gasped. Was that good news or bad? Dozens more students were in danger, but dozens more confirmed alive—if it was true.

The first FBI agent on the scene at Columbine was Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier. He had shaken the Cajun accent, on everything but his name. FUSE-uh-lay, he said. Everyone got it wrong. He was a veteran agent, a clinical psychologist, a terrorism expert, and one of the leading hostage negotiators in the country. None of that led Dr. Fuselier to Columbine High. His wife had called. Their son was in the school.

By now, many of the killers’ buddies suspected them. It was a scary time to be Eric’s or Dylan’s friend.

Patrick had gone to the library to finish his stats homework. Four friends had joined him. None of them had called the Irelands because every one of them had been shot.

Patrick Ireland was confused. He heard someone yell, but couldn’t see anyone or figure out where the voices were coming from. He felt dizzy. His vision was blurry and one big section was blank. He was unaware that blood was streaming down into his eyes.

The kids had to run right past two bodies on the way out, so at some point, an officer moved Rachel farther away.

It was horrible. The room was a shambles; blood spattered the furniture, and enormous pools soaked into the carpet. The tabletops were oddly undisturbed: books open, calculus problems under way, a college application half-completed. A lifeless boy still held a pencil.

Most of the bodies lay under tables. The victims had been attempting to hide. Two bodies were different. They lay out in the open, weapons by their sides. Suicides, clearly. The SWAT team had descriptions of Eric and Dylan. These two looked like a match. It was over.

They talked to a lawyer that night. He related a sobering thought. “Dylan isn’t here anymore for people to hate,” he said. “So people are going to hate you.”

The buses kept coming, every ten to twenty minutes for a while. Then arrivals slowed. Around four o’clock, they stopped. One more bus was promised. Parents looked around. Whose kids would it be?

District attorney Dave Thomas tried to comfort the families. He knew which ones would need it. He had thirteen names in his breast pocket. Ten students had been identified in the library, and two more outside, based on their clothing and appearance. One teacher lay in Science Room 3. All deceased. It was a solid list, but not definitive. Thomas kept it to himself. He told the parents not to worry.

“How could you go home and get dental records?” he asked. “Then what? You know your kid is lying there dead. How do you go to sleep?”

Brian’s son just wasn’t a priority. Brian couldn’t believe they were treating a victim’s body so cavalierly. Then it began to snow. Danny lay out on that sidewalk for twenty-eight hours.

A cop was standing guard. Brad told him Cassie was in there. He implored the cop give it to them straight. “We just want to know if there is anyone still alive in there.” The cop paused. “No,” he said finally. “No one left alive.” They thanked him. “We appreciate your honesty,” Misty said.

Hope gradually dissolved into anger. If Cassie were dead, Misty wanted her body out of that library and attended to.

Wednesday morning, Fuselier entered the ghastly crime scene. The hallways were scattered with shell casings, spent pipe bombs, and unexploded ordnance. Bullet holes and broken glass were everywhere. The library was soaked in blood; most of the bodies lay under tables. Fuselier had seen carnage, but still, it was awful. The sight that really stunned him was outside, on the sidewalk and the lawn. Danny Rohrbough and Rachel Scott were still out there. No one had even covered them. Years later, he shuddered at the memory.

Much of the school looked considerably worse. Pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails had burned through stretches of carpeting and set off the sprinkler system. The cafeteria was flooded, the library unspeakable.

Brian was irritated by the urge to juice the story to make Danny’s death more tragic or meaningful. It was tragic enough, he said.

Reverend Don Marxhausen disagreed with all the riffs on Satan. He saw two boys with hate in their hearts and assault weapons in their hands. He saw a society that needed to figure out how and why—fast. Blaming Satan was just letting them off easy, he felt, and copping out on our responsibility to investigate.

They turned the corner, and Frank saw bloody smears on the carpet. He knew Dave Sanders had gone down there. He had not anticipated the stains. “You could see the knuckle prints,” he said. “He actually was on all fours and there were his knuckle prints—he was struggling. It tore me up.”

Columbine was fundamentally different from the other school shootings. It had not really been intended as a shooting at all. Primarily, it had been a bombing that failed.

“I would see Dylan get frustrated with himself and go crazy,” she said. He would be docile for days or months, then the pain would boil over and some minor transgression would humiliate him. Judy figured he would grow out of it, but he never did.

Tom and Sue received the body on Thursday. The service was conducted on Saturday. It was done quietly, with just fifteen people, including friends, family, and clergy. Marxhausen brought another minister and both their wives. Dylan lay in an open casket, his face restored, no sign of the gaping head wound. He looked peaceful. His face was surrounded by a circle of Beanie Babies and other stuffed toys.

The Klebolds were afraid to bury Dylan. His grave would be defaced. It would become an anti-shrine. They cremated his body and kept the ashes in the house.

Tom and Sue were racked by grief, guilt, and utter confusion, he said. “They lost their son, but their son was also a killer.” He told the story lovingly. He described Tom and Sue as “the loneliest people on the planet.”

Some of his parish, and much of the community, was appalled. Lonely? The Klebolds were lonely? Several of the victims were still awaiting burial. Survivors still faced surgery. It would be months before some would walk again, or talk again, or discover they never would. Some people had trouble rousing sympathy for the Klebolds. Their loneliness was not an especially popular concern.

The family expressed gratitude for the efforts that had been made. As a gesture of goodwill, they invited the full SWAT teams to Dave’s funeral. All the officers attended.

Dylan took to referring to humans as zombies. That was a rare similarity to Eric. But pitiful as we zombies were, Dylan didn’t want to harm us. He found us interesting, like new toys.

Everything about Dylan screamed depressive—an extreme case, self-medicating with alcohol. The problem was how that had led to murder. Dylan’s journal read like that of a boy on the road to suicide, not homicide.

But the rarest of these angry depressives take the reasoning one step further: everyone was mean to them; everyone had a role in their misfortune. They want to lash out randomly and show us all, hurt us back and make sure we feel it. This is the gunman who opens fire on a random crowd.

Patrick understood that he’d been shot. He knew he had gone out the window. He didn’t grasp the scale of the massacre. He didn’t know he had been on TV—or that television shows were interested in him. He had no idea the networks had cast him as The Boy in the Window.