No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine High School (20th Anniversary Edition)

by Brooks Brown

Those wound up being Eric Harris's last words to me.

ready to close the door on Columbine and declare the whole thing as the work of two sick, deranged kids who represent nothing more than the work of the devil, or of violent video games, or just aberrations in an otherwise perfectly civilized high school. I knew how ludicrous that was. I knew that we were nowhere near closure on Columbine. We still aren't. I knew Eric and Dylan far better than these analysts who were telling us about the harmful effects of Doom. I knew them far better than Principal DeAngelis, who behind his tears and speeches had no time for the kids like us, who existed outside the norm and were punished daily by our peers because of it.

After all, what's the easier sell for a politician: to go out there and tell people that they've screwed up, that they need to take better care of their kids, that they've created an ugly, uncaring society for the next generation, and that we need to search our own souls for a solution? Or to just tell them that the evil entertainment industry is ruining our kids?

“Would you follow the advice of someone who told you that you must fight tuberculosis by confining the treatment to its symptoms—that you must treat the cough, the high temperature, the loss of weight—but must refuse to consider or to touch its cause, the germs in the patient's lungs, in order not to antagonize the germs? Do not adopt such a course in politics.”

Violent music did not just appear one day and unleash violence upon the world. Society created violent music, because there was something happening in society that made that kind of music appealing.

If real-life violence is the problem, would tougher gun laws prevent another Columbine? Not really. Existing laws already state that guns cannot be sold to youths under eighteen, and Eric and Dylan found a way around that. Three of their guns were purchased at a gun show, with the help of a fellow student who was eighteen. Their TEC-9 handgun was bought illegally through a network of friends; the final transaction took place behind a pizza store.

Dylan told me once that he wasn't allowed to have any toy guns in the house.

That fight was the first time I ever saw Dylan's temper. Because Dylan internalized things so much, he would let his anger build up within him until one little thing finally set it off. When that happened, it was like an explosion.

“Each man must live for his own sake, not sacrificing others to himself, or himself to others.”

He hadn't seen Dylan around in some time, and it was a shock the first time he saw him in the halls of Columbine. “He looked like a totally different person,” Aaron said. “I was like, ‘Brooks, is that Dylan?’ I couldn't believe it. He was a lot taller than the last time I'd seen him. He was dressed in all black, looking down, kind of sad. He just had this attitude about him—you could tell that he was very unhappy. He wasn't being accepted at all.”

Well all you people out there can just kiss my ass and die.

Dylan told me he was thinking about applying to the University of Arizona to study computer design. He sounded like he was making plans for his future. I encouraged him.

Throughout all of this, I was still avoiding Eric Harris. And Eric was avoiding me. It was hard for Dylan. He didn't talk much about it, but you could tell. Nobody wants to be in the position of being friends with two people who hate each other. I figured it wouldn't be for much longer, though. By December, we were signing up for spring term of senior year. Only one more semester to go; then Dylan would be off to college, and I would be off to do whatever the heck I decided to do, and we would be free of Columbine forever. Worries about Eric Harris were the farthest thing from my mind.

Several people have suggested to me that Eric found excuses to hate me back in junior year because he felt I was threatening his friendship with Dylan. After all, he had pushed away their other friends one by one. The theory makes sense. When you're younger, and you live in a society like Columbine, you get the feeling that friendship is finite and can be tossed away easily, that starting a friendship with one person means losing friendships with others. Yet you learn through experience that friendship can be infinite.

Eric suggested that, since we were having a camera pointed at us, it would be cool to point imaginary guns back. So the five of us pantomimed doing exactly that. It seemed like a funny thing to do. I never thought twice about it.

Each of these warning signs, by themselves, seemed little more than odd to the people who observed them. Put together, they form a disturbing picture of what was about to happen. No one was in a position to put them together.

Some have suggested that Eric and Dylan never seriously thought they were going to do it until right before they actually did. I don't agree. They knew exactly what they were doing. There's a part of me that would like to believe that Dylan was separating himself emotionally from what was about to happen. Realistically, though, that's not likely.

According to the Jefferson County Sheriff's report, witnesses heard one of the gunmen shout, “This is what we always wanted to do. This is awesome!”

Thank God. Thank God. Those were the only words going through my head as I ran from the car to my house. My little brother was alive. I threw my arms around him and cried.

We knew that Eric was involved in the shooting, but we weren't sure about Dylan. That really had my mom frightened. We were hearing reports on the news of multiple shooters, “clad in black,” and we all knew that wherever Eric went, Dylan was sure to be somewhere nearby.

Right at that moment, the phone rang. It was my mother. She was with the Klebolds, standing outside the house. A police detective was already at the Klebold home. “Have you heard anything?” she asked me. “Do they know who the shooters are?” I took a moment. “Mom, it's Dylan.” “Are you sure? I mean, do you know that for sure or is that just what someone said?” “Mom, they just showed his name on the TV. It's Dylan.”

Then the pair returned to the library for the final time.

Two years after Columbine student Rachel Scott was killed in April 20, 2001, flowers and cards continue to adorn her gravesite in Littleton, Colorado. Rachel was one of Eric and Dylan's first victims. (Photo by Rob Merritt)

PEOPLE HAVE ASKED ME if, in those initial hours after the massacre, I stopped to wonder why Eric had let me leave the school. The truth is, the question didn't even enter my mind until later. That day, my mind was solely occupied with trying to find out who was still alive. Trevor and I left my house and started driving around, looking for familiar faces anywhere we could find them. It didn't matter who they were; every person we saw was one more person who had survived.

No matter where we went, I'd find somebody I knew. It didn't matter who it was; we'd throw our arms around each other in relief and cry.

“Rachel Scott's dead,” he said. Aaron was just giving us a name. He didn't realize that we both knew Rachel, or that Steve had dated Rachel for a long time. When Steve heard the news, he fell silent. Then he collapsed.

It amazed me. The fact that we could sit there, two people on such opposite sides of the spectrum of faith, and talk openly about our differences the way that we did—it wasn't something I'd seen before at Columbine.

Rachel's beliefs were strong, yet she accepted people who felt differently. She felt that the path to spiritual enlightenment didn't mean scaring people, lecturing or judging them. She just lived her life the best way she knew how, and hoped other people would follow her example. Imagine what a better place this world could have been throughout history if more people had shared Rachel Scott's viewpoint.

“Then he heard a shot and he didn't know what happened to her. He asked me again this morning: ‘What did I say? Why didn't anybody write it down?’ He's asked me so many times. Richard has cried a thousand tears for Rachel. He has so much guilt inside.”

Here was his former girlfriend, who still meant the world to him, and his body just failed him. Doug and I had to pick him back up and help him out of there. Of course, when I saw Steve lose it, I was right behind him. All the tears I hadn't cried up to that point came gushing out, just like everybody else, as I saw Rachel lying there in that coffin. As we walked out, holding Steve, there was a literal wall of cameras and reporters waiting for us. Taking pictures of us, looking at us, videotaping us. We just wanted it to be over.

There were no answers to be found. Imagine your own best friend. Someone you've known for almost your whole life. Someone who used to laugh and tell you jokes, and showed you his new Wolf badge from Cub Scouts, and chased frogs with you around the creek behind your grade school on Friday afternoons. Someone who, just yesterday, you ditched school with. Someone you always thought you knew.

On the TV, the media are talking about your friends the same way they talk about Ted Bundy or Charles Manson. Investigative specials are tossing out details about your friend's childhood like some kind of Twilight-Zone-tinged episode of This Is Your Life. When your mind tries to take it in and make sense of it all, you realize that you can't. Hell, you can't even ask your friend for an explanation. Because he put a bullet in his brain right after he did it.

It seemed to me that I spent most of those first few days crying.

On the one hand, Eric and Dylan had been our friends. They were dead. They were gone. On the other hand, they had killed thirteen other people. People we had been close to. We had to make a decision: How should we grieve? Many were struggling with that question. Crosses were erected on Rebel Hill, overlooking the school, that represented each of the lives lost: fifteen crosses in all. Those who put them up wanted to recognize that Eric and Dylan were victims too, even if they were victims of themselves.

realize now that crosses for Eric and Dylan should have been erected in a spot far away from those of their victims. People ask me all the time whether Eric and Dylan should be forgiven for what they did. My response is absolutely not.

They were my friends, and nothing will change that. But as far as forgiveness goes, that's not something I am prepared to do. What they deserve is remembrance. Not forgiveness. There's a difference.

“I'm thinking if we don't learn from this, we'll see it again,” she said.

I thought I had steeled myself for anything; I didn't know if Danny's parents would be rude to me, or if they believed I was to blame. What I hadn't expected was my own reaction when I saw Mr. Rohrbough for the first time. I started to cry. “He looks like his son,” I said to my mom.

Eric expresses regret on another tape as well. He recorded one segment while driving alone in his car. “It's a weird feeling, knowing you're going to be dead in two and a half weeks,” he says to the camera. He talks about the co-workers he will miss, and says he wishes he could have revisited Michigan and “old friends.” The officer who viewed this tape wrote that “at this point he becomes silent and appears to start crying, wiping a tear from the side of his face. [H]e reaches toward the camera and shuts it off.”

The man smiled, and in that instant, through no endeavor of my own, I understood his actions.

Richie will never get closure. I will never get closure. This will be a mark on my future forever.

At the back of the room, my father stood up and looked down the row of the House Civil Justice and Judiciary Committee. “Shame on you,” he said quietly.

“It makes you wonder what the system is there for,” Richard said after a moment. I looked over at him. I recognized the look of hopelessness in his face.

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” he said. “Because fiction has to make sense.”

This was vindication, even more than the search warrant a year ago had been. But it didn't make me feel any better. I didn't want to see this information handed down now, when it wouldn't do any good anymore. I wanted it used in 1998. I wanted Eric Harris caught. I wanted Columbine never to have happened.

The arguments evil uses to win are not logic, but feelings. Not hope, but despair. Not reality, but some sort of super-reality that none of us can hope to achieve. But we, the good, use three simple things to prove our points: Reality, truth, and life. We simply want the truth, and we only deal in the truth. We have the chance to take back the world that is rightfully ours.

If you don't know what happened there, Columbine High School looks like any other school in America.

Maybe I'll buy a new multiplayer computer game, and as I start to play, suddenly I'll wonder what Dylan would have thought of it. And then I'll get angry with him and Eric again, for having done something so stupid and cruel. We had so many good times, and those memories are forever tainted now. I hate them for having betrayed me like this. For having betrayed all of us.

In spite of the hell that I lived through, I am still alive. I'm one of the lucky ones.

Why do people wonder where Eric and Dylan came from? I guess they ask because they never look at themselves.