Book Reviews
Columbine
A decade after the Columbine school shootings, a journalist shines a light into the dark corners of the case.
By April Austin | April 13, 2009 edition
4/13/09 Monitor Books podcast
Ten years after Columbine, the memory of a suburban high school under siege from two teenage gunmen has not faded. The details that found their way into press reports at the time only heightened the sense of shock and did little to explain the killers’ motives.
Dave Cullen, a Web journalist who covered the tragedy, has spent the last decade shining a light into the dark corners of this case, including the minds of the perpetrators. The result is his dark but compelling new book Columbine.
(Cullen’s isn’t the only Columbine book coming out this month: A reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, Jeff Kass, has published “Columbine: A True Crime Story.” A piece by Kass will also appear in the April 19 issue of the Monitor’s weekly print edition.)
The Columbine backstory was unusually complicated. It involved a law-enforcement coverup, exhaustive media coverage, lawsuits, and federal investigations.
Cullen draws together the threads of this tangled narrative in a style that sometimes mimics hard-boiled police detective novels. He uses slang and quotes from the killers’ journals and videos, with no obscenities held back. The book is arranged in a manner that lets him tell two stories: the evolution of two troubled teenage boys into killers and background on the investigation.
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., and started randomly shooting. They had planned the attack for months, assembling an arsenal of weapons with the intention of killing hundreds of people. Their bombs failed, but the boys shot 13 people dead and injured 24 more before committing suicide.
At the time, it was the nation’s deadliest school shooting.
Early in the media coverage of the shootings, conjectures were rife about the killers’ motives: Harris and Klebold were said to be members of the Trench Coat Mafia; they were victims of relentless bullying on the part of jocks; they idolized the nihilistic music of Marilyn Manson; they were racists who bought into Nazi ideology.
Very little of this turned out to be true. The reality, as Cullen explains it, was far more complicated.
Instead of anger against just a few individuals or cliques, Harris’s rage encompassed the entire human race. He craved Armageddon. Harris didn’t “snap” on the day of the shooting. Instead, his writings show he had been moving toward such violence for years.
Harris was a smart, engaging kid who believed he was a superior being. He was obsessed with killing, conflagration, and weapons, but he wrapped these ideas into school assignments in a way that, with one exception, earned him praise for his creativity, rather than censure or suspicion. He was a convincing liar when confronted by his father. These and other traits, as experts assess them in hindsight, indicate Harris may have been a psychopath.
“Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it,” writes Cullen.
Klebold was another story. He was a quiet, lonely boy, according to Cullen. He had a history of depression and suicidal thoughts. He admired Harris and looked to him for direction and approval. Indications are that Klebold wavered until the last minute about whether to take part in the attack, but he apparently decided that if life was not worth living, he would take as many people with him as he could.
The two began their downward spiral by vandalizing property and progressed to petty theft. They boldly declared their plans to annihilate the human race in journals and other writings, but few people took them seriously. Harris began building pipe bombs and other devices, which he hid in his bedroom closet. He kept his parents at bay by admitting to tiny infractions but lying to cover his larger transgressions. He was good at telling adults what they wanted to hear and pulled down good grades.
More than a year before the killings, Harris and Klebold were arrested for breaking into a van. Harris was also known to police for threats posted on his website, but in the wake of the shootings, county officials, fearing blame, covered up that paper trail.
The boys’ parents, teachers, friends, along with school officials and the police, failed to put together information about their activities that might have raised red flags.
Cullen’s minute-by-minute account of the shootings is gripping, not to mention deeply disturbing. Student witnesses reported that Harris and Klebold’s demeanor was haughty, derisive, and their manner of killing arbitrary. The media, at pains to ascribe a motive, latched onto the notion of two outcasts taking their revenge, and filtered every piece of evidence through that lens, according to the author.
Cullen’s assessment is that, based on Harris’s profile as a psychopath, nothing short of incarceration would have stopped him from committing a horrendous act of violence. Klebold, conversely, would have been unlikely to kill anyone other than himself; he needed Harris’s influence to turn his anger outward.
Whatever ultimately motivated the teenagers, much has been learned in the aftermath of their deed. Columbine has served as a catalyst for school officials across the country to add security measures such as metal detectors, and the mistakes by law-enforcement personnel during the siege led to a rethinking of response tactics.
The state of Colorado passed legislation making it more difficult for juveniles to obtain guns, but stopped short of closing every loophole in the law governing gun-show sales. Schools are more alert to signs of psychological disturbance in their students. These policy changes have undoubtedly contributed to lives saved in subsequent actual or potential school attacks.
Columbine stands as a grievous event, one that defies efforts to understand or come to terms with what happened. But Cullen’s humane approach, and especially his side trips into the recovery efforts of survivors, offers welcome perspective on what can be learned from this bleak tale.
April Austin is a former Monitor education writer.
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Comments
2. starviego | 04.13.09
If you want to find out what really happened at Columbine I suggest you read what the eyewitnesses had to say:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/columbineeight.php
PS: Forgot to add great post!
3. John Byrnes | 04.14.09
Research has determined that from the Moment of Commitment (the point when a student pulls their weapon) to the Moment of Completion (when the last round is fired) is only 5 seconds. If it is the intent of a school district to react to this violence, they will do so over the wounded and/or slain bodies of students, teachers and administrators.
Educational institutions clearly want safe and secure schools. Administrators are perennially queried by parents about the safety of their schools. The commonplace answers, intended to reassure anxious parents, focus on the school resource officers and emergency procedures. While useful, these less than adequate efforts do not begin to provide a definitive answer to preventing school violence, nor do they make a school safe and secure.
Traditionally school districts have relied upon the mental health community or local police to keep schools safe, yet one of the key shortcomings has been the lack of a system that involves teachers, administrators, parents and students in the identification and communication process. Recently, colleges, universities and community colleges are forming Behavioral Intervention Teams with representatives from all these constituencies. Higher Education has changed their safety/security policies, procedures, or surveillance systems, yet K-12 have yet to incorporate Behavioral Intervention Teams. K-12 schools continue spending excessive amounts of money to put in place many of the physical security options. Sadly, they are reactionary only and do little to prevent aggression because they are designed exclusively to react to existing conflict, threat and violence. These schools reflect a national blindspot, which prefers hardening targets through enhanced security versus preventing violence with efforts directed at aggressors. Security gets all the focus and money, but this only makes us feel safe, rather than to actually make us safer.
Some law enforcement agencies use profiling as a means to identify an aggressor. According to the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education’s report on Targeted Violence in Schools, there is a significant difference between “profiling” and identifying and measuring emerging aggression; “The use of profiles is not effective either for identifying students who may pose a risk for targeted violence at school or – once a student has been identified – for assessing the risk that a particular student may pose for school-based targeted violence.” It continues; “An inquiry should focus instead on a student’s behaviors and communications to determine if the student appears to be planning or preparing for an attack.” We can and must assess objective, culturally neutral, identifiable criteria of emerging aggression.
For a comprehensive look at the problem and its solution, http://www.aggressionmanagement.com/White_Paper_K-12/
4. Ben Leichtling | 04.18.09
Whose fault was the killings at Columbine High School? And how can we help our children resist bullies, not become bullies themselves and thrive after horrible killings?
Seven of the most common targets of blame are:
1. The bullies who pushed Harris and Klebolt over the edge.
2. The parents of the bullies who didn’t stop their children.
3. The school principal who didn’t stop the bullying of Harris and Klebolt, or stop the earlier violence of the killers.
4. The parents of the killers who didn’t raise their kids better and didn’t had them incarcerated or committed.
5. Harris and Klebolt were simply psychopathic, psychotic killers.
6. A society that is violent and corrupt.
7. A society that has lost its connection with God.
Looking to blame and then fix one part of human life is the wrong way to go. Our efforts to change our school and legal system are necessary, useful and laudable, but they’re not a solution that will prevent future massacres.
Face reality. Bullies, psychopaths and killers are like the weather – they’ve always been with us and always will be. Assigning blame won’t change that.
The useful question for us is how we prepare our children and teenagers for a world in which they’ll face crazy, violent people.
We must teach our children not to use bullying tactics, and to be resilient in the face of bullying and to learn how to stop bullies in their tracks. Obviously, Harris and Klebolt never learned this. The hardest task for parents is to recognize when our children have gone bad and to do something about it.
Answering these difficult questions will help us teach our children better than hand wringing or assigning blame.
Disclosure: In addition to having six children and living in Denver, I’m a practical, pragmatic coach and consultant. I’ve written books of case studies, “Parenting Bully-Proof Kids” and “How to Stop Bullies in their Tracks.” Check out my website and blog at BulliesBeGone (http://BulliesBeGone.com).
5. Ben Leichtling | 04.18.09
In the space of five days, we honor Jackie Robinson’s finally breaking into the major leagues and we also memorialize Eric Harris and Dylan Klebolt’s massacre at Columbine High School ten years ago. They each faced a failed system – but in opposite directions – and they illustrate character and courage – but at opposite ends of the spectrum.
The stories about what was done and said to Jackie Robinson fill volumes. I was born in Brooklyn and was old enough to go to Ebbets Field to see Robinson play in his second year. The insults, curses and threats from the players and fans were still going on then.
The rotten system that kept Robinson out of baseball and harassed him for years was full of anger, hatred and the very real possibility of killing him and his family.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebolt faced a rotten system on the other extreme. They were allowed to be violent, destructive and threaten classmates, but instead of being removed from contact with other students who were their victims, the two were coddled.
A generation in charge of the school and the police falsely believed that if you kept extremely troubled kids in contact with the rest of us and gave them lots of counseling, the troubled kids would stop being crazy bullies. Harris and Klebolt showed a generation what the price was for living that false educational philosophy; each one of those psychopaths could kill about ten innocent people.
We still haven’t righted the system. Thousands of innocent kids are bullied and harassed at school each day while society, the legal system and school principals don’t stop the bullying juvenile delinquents, psychopaths and psychotics.
Jackie Robinson had the character and courage to endure and surmount far worse than the bullying that is claimed to have pushed Harris and Klebolt over the edge. Robinson didn’t give up or explode.
Neither Harris nor Klebolt had character or courage. Bullying didn’t push them over the edge. They ran willingly and repeatedly right to the edge and then jumped off. None of the adults stopped them or removed them.
When will we start protecting the rest of us from the bullies and crazies?
Disclosure: In addition to having six children, growing up in Brooklyn and living in Denver, I’m a practical, pragmatic coach and consultant. I’ve written books of case studies, “Parenting Bully-Proof Kids” and “How to Stop Bullies in their Tracks.” Check out my website and blog at BulliesBeGone (http://BulliesBeGone.com).
7. uoflcard | 04.20.09
starviego-
That is the most preposterous conspiracy theory I’ve ever heard. The anti-gun people staged Columbine so we would be denied our 2nd amendment right? Wow.
9. Julie E | 05.01.09
You folks who have commented about the causes and blame for Columbine without reading Dave Cullens’ book need to do so and get your fact straight. This was not about bullying or racism or school cliques. There were horrifying signs that things were not right with Kelbold and Harris that were passed over, filed away and generally ignored by law enforcement and parents alike. The degree of denial in Eric Harris’ father alone is astounding. He was so certain HIS CHILD couldn’t be continuing to lie and manipulate as he snuck around blowing up pipe bombs and committing crimes that he bought every excuse, every plea that ‘it wouldn’t happen again’.
Face it folks, kids today are not only smart but they have access to horrendous amounts of information.. things that my generation couldn’t have learned about if their lives depended on it are just a click away on the Internet.
Please PLEASE stop perpetuating the lies. Remember that these ‘eyewitness’ accounts were coming from terrorized and traumatized children.. even adults involved didn’t accurately remember some of the facts.
Yes.. stop bullying.. Yes.. teach your children acceptance and compassion. But don’t turn a blind eye and throw blame unless you have the right to be judge and jury.. only God truly knows what brought Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to such desperation.
10. Evan Long | 05.19.09
Dozens of corroborating witnesses to the shooting variously described in detail or named trench coat mafia members Chris Morris (eyeglassses), Robert Perry (heavy acne, crooked teeth), Brian Sargent (bushy eyebrows, kind of fat) and Joe Stair (long blond hair, class of ‘98) as shooters, along with one unnamed adult. The witnesses, in many cases, knew these individuals personally or from around school. You can read all about it, straight from the government witness interview summaries here (documents are included on-site): http://www.TheColumbineCause.tk/
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1. starviego | 04.13.09
If you want to find out what really happened at Columbine I suggest you read what the eyewitnesses had to say:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/columbineeight.php