IV. Make up a list of rights which a person has in case he has been detained by police.

 

 

MURDER ON THEIR MINDS

The Columbine killers left a troubling trail of clues.

For months Eric Harris had been writing in his journal about murdering all the people who’d ever snubbed him. “Everyone is always making fun of me because of how I look… well I will get you all back,” he wrote five months before his killing spree through Columbine High School. A week later, he wrote about how hard it was going to be to wait until April to get his revenge. But then, for a brief moment, he considered calling off his plan. “If people would give me more compliments, all of this might still be avoidable,” he wrote. But he quickly realized it was useless: “Whatever I do people make fun of me, and sometimes directly to my face.”

As Harris and Dylan Klebold hurtled toward that spring morning in 1999 when they would gun down 13 people at their Littleton, Colo., school, the two seemed to want someone to stop them. Documents released last week by the Jefferson County sheriff’s office show that the boys repeatedly dropped hints at school about their murderous state of mind. Klebold wrote a graphic story about the slaughter of some “preps” and a paper on Charles Manson, while Harris wrote about Nazis and “Guns at Schools.” All over his datebook, amid reminders of when to turn his homework in, Harris scribbled notes about killing and jotted down his massacre to-do list: “get nails, get gas cans, get duffel bags…”

For some of the families of the victims, the documents are full of unmistakable warning signs. Brian Rohrbough, whose son Dan died that day, blames the authorities, the school and the boy’s parents for ignoring what he calls “a mountain of red flags.” Rohrbough hopes the boys’ writings will teach people what to look for in the future – to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy that still haunts this community. “No one can do anything to help my son. My goal is, let’s put the truth on the table and stop other kids from dying,” he says.

Harris’s and Klebold’s journals reveal just how desperately unhappy the boys were, though in different ways. But their distinct forms of suffering would ultimately bring them together to commit the worst school shooting in American history. Like Harris, Klebold wrote in his journal about feeling left out, but he seemed to be less interested in seeking revenge than in ending his own misery. Writing in Harris’s yearbook roughly 12 months before the killings, Klebold did talk a big game – “GAWWWD sooo many people need to die” – but privately, in an undated journal entry, he wrote with quiet despair about his options. “I’m stuck in humanity. Maybe going ‘NBK’w.eric is the way to break free,” he wrote, referring to the scheduled rampage, apparently their code for “Natural Born Killers,” the name of a film about a couple’s homicidal spree. At one point, though, Klebold tried to tally what he had going for him. “I want to die really bad right now – Let’s see what I have that’s good: A nice family, a good house, food, a couple good friends, &possessions. What’s bad – no girls (friends or girlfriends), no other friends except a few, nobody accepting me…” He lamented the fact that his best friend – not Harris – was now busy hanging out with a new girlfriend: “If anyone had any idea how sad I am… I feel so lonely w/o a friend.” Harris evidently came along later to fill the gap.

Klebold, who was 17 when he died, seemed especially tortured by his failures with girls. “I don’t know what I do wrong with people (mainly women) it’s like they set out to hate & ignore me,” he scribbled. But in one entry, Klebold showed a flicker of optimism. He thought he might be in love for the first time. “I just hope she likes me as much as I LOVE her,” he wrote of his crush, making the V into a heart. “The sound of her laugh, I picture her face, I love her.” But when he realized she didn’t feel the same way, he came unglued again. “Want TRUE love… I hate everything, why can’t I die…”

Susannah Meadows

/ Newsweek, July 17, 2006/

 

Set Work