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In the weeks just after the murders, nearly all the families of the library victims walked the crime scene with investigators. They needed to see it. It might be horrible--they had to find out. Dawn Anna stopped at the spot where her daughter Lauren Townsend had been killed. First table on the left. Nothing had been changed, except for the removal of the backpacks and personal effects, which had been photographed, inventoried, and returned to the families. "The emotional impact, I don't even know that I can adequately describe it," Anna said. But she could not avoid it. "I needed that connection, as did all of us, to get back and identify, in part, with what had happened there."
The thought of sending any schoolkid back inside was unthinkable. The library had to go. Independently, and collectively, most of the thirteen families came to that conclusion quickly.
Students reached the opposite consensus. They spent the spring battling for the idea of Columbine, as well as the proper noun: the name of a high school, not a tragedy. They were repulsed by phrases bandied about like "since Columbine" or "prevent another Columbine." That was one day in the life of Columbine High School, they insisted.
Then the tourists arrived. Just weeks after the tragedy, even before students returned, tour buses started rolling up to the school. Columbine High had leapt to second place, behind the Rocky Mountains, as Colorado's most famous landmark, and tour operators were quick to capitalize. The buses would pull up in front of the school, and tourists would pile out and start snapping pictures: the school, the grounds, the kids practicing on the athletic fields or milling about in the park. They captured a lot of angry expressions. The students felt like zoo specimens. Everyone still needed to know constantly, How do you feel?
Brian Fuselier was heading into his sophomore year at Columbine. Weeks under the microscope had been miserable; the tourists were too much. "I just want to walk up and punch them in the nose!" he told his dad.
On June 2, most of the student body finally reconnected with the physical Columbine. It was an emotional day. Students had two hours to go back inside and retrieve their backpacks and cell phones and everything else they had abandoned when they ran for it. Their parents were allowed in as well. It gave everyone a chance to face their fears. Hundreds of kids stumbled out in tears. Useful tears. Most found the experience stressful but cathartic.
They were kicked out again for two months, while construction crews renovated the interior. The students had mixed feelings about anything changing, but they were taking that one on faith. The district had open enrollment, so everyone expected a big drop in Columbine's student body the next fall. Students reacted the opposite way: transfers out were minimal. Fall enrollment actually went up. Students felt they had lost so much already, that surrendering an inch of corridor or a single classroom would feel like defeat. They wanted their school back. All of it!
Mr. D and the faculty were focused on the kids: getting them into therapy and watching out for trauma symptoms. School officials formed a design review board to address the library. It included students, parents, and faculty. Consensus came readily: gut the room and rebuild it. Redesign the layout, replace and reconfigure the furniture, change the wall color, the carpet, even the ceiling tiles. It was a drastic version of the plan put together for the entire school. Trauma experts advised the board to balance two objectives: make the kids feel their school had survived and surround them with changes too subtle to identify. The library was the exception: it would feel completely different.
Renovation of the school would cost $1.2 million, and would be tough to complete before school resumed in August. The design board moved quickly, and the school board adopted its proposal in early June. The parents of the murdered kids were aghast. Rearrange the furniture? Slap on some paint and recarpet? The design team saw their plan as a complete overhaul. Their adversaries called it "cosmetic."
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Initially, the students and the victims' families assumed they were all in this together. It took them several weeks to realize they were about to battle each other. Parents of the Thirteen saw that they were outnumbered; they formed the Parents Group to fight back. On May 27, just as they were organizing, a notorious lawyer and media hound flew to Denver for a boisterous press conference. Geoffrey Fieger had become a cable news staple via splashy media trials, like that of Dr. Kevorkian, the assisted-suicide doctor. Fieger teamed with Isaiah Shoels's family to make an ostentatious demand sure to return Columbine to national headlines in the worst possible light: a wrongful death suit against the killers' parents, for a quarter of a billion dollars.
"This is not about money!" Isaiah's stepfather declared. "This lawsuit is about change! That's the only way you get change, if you go rattling their pocketbooks." He was right, but the public was skeptical about motives. Fieger insisted he would spend more money mounting the case than he could hope to recover. Colorado law limited awards from individuals to $250,000, and governmental entities were capped at $150,000. "This lawsuit is a symbol," he said. "There will be cynics who would chalk the lawsuit up to greed."
Lawsuits had been anticipated, but nobody had foreseen one so garish, or so soon. Colorado law gave victims a year to file and six months to declare intent. It had only been five weeks. Families had been talking about lawsuits as means of leverage, and a last resort.
The lawsuit served as a trial balloon that sank. The survivors were particularly repulsed. Many of them had dedicated the next phase of their lives to some form of justice: anti-bullying, gun control, prayer in schools, SWAT protocols, warning signs, or just reclaiming their school or destroying the library. Lawsuits threatened to taint all that. They also shed a bad light on the next big battle, which was already developing when the Shoelses conducted their press conference. That fight revolved around money, too. The public donations had been astonishing, but the good fortune came at a price.
More than $2 million rolled in the first month. A month later, the total was $3.5 million. Forty different funds sprouted up. The local United Way set up the Healing Fund to coordinate the distribution of monies. Robin Finegan was a veteran therapist and victim's advocate who had worked closely with Oklahoma City survivors. "It is predictable that this will become a very difficult, painful process," she told NPR. There were too many competing interests. "We're going to leave people, some people, not feeling great about this." That was an understatement.
When a pair of teachers were collectively granted $5,000 for anxiety treatment, Brian Rohrbough blew his stack. "That's criminal," he said. He wanted the money divided equally between the families of the injured and the dead. But was equality fair? Lance Kirklin's father estimated his medical bills at $1 to $2 million; the family was uninsured. Mark Taylor needed surgery for four gunshots to the chest; his mom couldn't afford groceries or pay the rent. The process was humiliating, she said. She felt like a beggar. "My son's in the hospital. I can't work. We're broke and they have millions of dollars in donations. I'm disgusted."
The attorney for the Taylors and Kirklins suggested that some families needed compensation more than others. Brian Rohrbough erupted again. That implied that Danny's life had no value, he told the Rocky Mountain News. For Brian, the money was symbolic: the ultimate valuation of each life. For others it was purely practical.
In early July, the Healing Fund announced its distribution plan: 40 percent of the $3.8 million would go to direct victims. A clever compromise was reached for that money: the four kids with critical injuries got $150,000 each; $50,000 went to each of the Thirteen. That totaled $650,000 for the dead versus $600,000 for the critically injured, giving the Thirteen the appearance of preeminence. Twenty-one injured students got $10,000 each, a fraction of the medical bills for many. Most of the remainder went to trauma counseling and tolerance programs. Roughly $750,000 was earmarked for contingencies, a compromise to cover unpaid medical bills without appearing to favor the injured over the dead.
Brian Rohrbough backed off once he felt heard.
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Tom Klebold was dealing with a lot of anger. "Who gave my son these guns?" he asked Reverend Marxhausen. He also felt betrayed by the school culture that picked on kids outside the mainstream.
Tom did his best to shut out the angry world. His job allowed him to hunker down at home, and he took full advantage. Sue was not wired that way. "She has to get out," Marxhausen said.
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May 28, Kathy Harris wrote condolence letters to the Thirteen. Many of the addresses were unpublished, so she sealed each one in an envelope with the family's name, put them all in a manila envelope, and mailed it to an address the school district had set up as a clearinghouse for correspondence to victims. A week later, Kathy sent a second batch for the families of twenty-three injured. The school district turned them all over to the sheriff's department as potential evidence. It sat on them. Officials decided not to read them or deliver them.
In mid-July, the media discovered the snafu. "It's really not our job" to distribute them, Sergeant Randy West said. The letters had no postage or addresses, so commanders decided to return to sender. West complained about the family's refusal to meet without immunity, and said his team had trouble reaching their attorneys. "They're busy, we're busy and we can't seem to connect with them," Sergeant West said. "I guess if you want to make things easier you could just talk to us."
The Harrises broke their three-month silence to issue a statement disputing "misstatements" on the letters. Their attorney insisted Jeffco had never tried to contact him about them.
The letters were eventually returned.
Sue Klebold also wrote apologies in May. She mailed them directly to the Thirteen. Brad and Misty received this handwritten card:
Dear Bernall family,
It is with great difficulty and humility that we write to express our profound sorrow over the loss of your beautiful daughter, Cassie. She brought joy and love to the world, and she was taken in a moment of madness. We wish we had had the opportunity to know her and be uplifted by her loving spirit.
We will never understand why this tragedy happened, or what we might have done to prevent it. We apologize for the role our son had in your Cassie's death. We never saw anger or hatred in Dylan until the last moments of his life when we watched in helpless horror with the rest of the world. The reality that our son shared in the responsibility for this tragedy is still incredibly difficult for us to comprehend.
May God comfort you and your loved ones. May He bring peace and understanding to all of our wounded hearts.
Sincerely,
Sue and Tom Klebold
Misty was moved--enough to publish the full text in the memoir she was drafting. She generously described the act as courageous. Tom and Sue lost a son in the same disaster, she wrote. At least Cassie had died nobly. What comfort did the Klebolds have? Misty also addressed the charges against the killers' parents. Should they have known? Were they negligent? "How do we know?"
42. Diversion
A year before the attack, the boys settled on the time and place: April 1999, in the commons. That gave Eric time to plan, build his arsenal, and convince his partner it was for real.
Shortly after starting Diversion, Eric and Dylan received their junior yearbooks. They swapped and filled page after page with drawings, descriptions, and rants. "We, the gods, will have so much fun w NBK!!" Dylan wrote in Eric's. "My wrath for january's incident will be godlike. Not to mention our revenge in the commons."
January's incident was their arrest. Eric was pissed about it, too. "Jan 31 sux," he wrote in Dylan's. "I hate white vans!!"
The arrest was a critical moment--the yearbooks confirmed Fuselier's tentative conclusion on that score. Eventually, Fuselier would see it as the single most important event in Eric's progression to murder. The arrest was followed, in rapid succession, by Eric detonating his first pipe bombs, threatening mass murder on his Web site, confiding worse visions to his journal, and settling on the outlines of his attack. But Eric was already headed that way. He did not "snap." Fuselier saw fallout from the crime as accelerant to murder rather than cause.
Eric was an injustice collector. The cops, judge, and Diversion officers were merely the latest additions to a comically comprehensive enemies list, which included Tiger Woods, every girl who had rejected him, all of Western culture, and the human species. What was different about the arrest, in Fuselier's eyes, was that it was the first dramatic rein-in on the boys' ability to control their own lives--"the screws are tightening," as Dylan put it. They were juniors in high school now, a time when personal freedom expanded faster than ever before. They had just gotten their driver's licenses, they had jobs with paychecks and their first rush of disposable income, their curfews were getting later, parental oversight was easing, Eric was dating... their universe of possibilities was expanding. They had suffered setbacks before, but those were mild and short-lived. This time, it was a felony. A felony, for the smallest trifle: some moron's van--so what? All freedom was lost. Eric's twenty-three-year-old was dumping him because he was grounded all the time and could never see her. He kept working Brenda, but it didn't look good.
Eric filled Dylan's yearbook with drawings: swastikas, robokillers, and splattered bodies. The dead outnumbered the living. An illustration in the margin suggested hundreds of tiny corpses piling up to the horizon, until they all blended together in an ocean of human waste.
Eric went through his own book, marking up the faces of kids he didn't like. He labeled them "worthless," said they would die, or just made an X over their pictures. Eric had two thousand photos to deface, and eventually he got to almost all of them.
Eric had it in for a couple of traitorous assholes: "God I cant wait till they die," he wrote in Dylan's book. "I can taste the blood now."
Psychopaths want to enjoy their exploits. That's why the sadistic ones tend to choose serial killing: they enjoy the cruelty as it plays out. Eric went a different route: the big kill, which he would relish in anticipation for a full year. He loved control--he couldn't wait to hold lives in his hand. When his day finally arrived, he took his time in the library and enjoyed every minute of it. He killed some kids on a whim, let others go just as easily.
He also used his Web site to enjoy a certain notoriety in his lifetime. He loved the irony of his online world, where all the other kids were posing but his fantasy was real.
One contradiction to Eric's control fetish is apparent in his willingness to entrust power to Dylan. The yearbook exchange represented a huge leap of faith for each of them. They had been talking about murder for months now, and corresponding catchphrases in both journals suggest they had been riffing on these ideas regularly. Eric had gone semipublic with his threats already, posting them on his Web site, but no one seemed to notice or take it seriously. This time, he scrawled out incriminating evidence of his plot in his own handwriting and turned it over to Dylan.
They hinted about plans in a few friends' yearbooks, but it all sounded like jokes. Dylan said he would like to kill Puff Daddy or Hanson, while Eric went with irony: don't follow your dreams, follow your animal instincts--"if it moves kill it, if it doesn't, burn it. kein mitleid!!!" Kein mitleid is German for "no mercy," and a common shorthand for his favorite band, KMFDM. This was just the kind of move that delighted Eric: warn the world, in writing, to show us how stupid we all are.
In each other's books, they took a real gamble, particularly Dylan. He wrote page after page of specific murder plans. They were at each other's mercy now. Exposure of the yearbooks could end their participation in Diversion and bring them back on felony charges. For the final year, each boy knew his buddy could get him imprisoned at any time, though they would both go down together. Mutually assured destruction.
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Dr. Fuselier considered the yearbook passages. Both boys fantasized about murder, but Dylan focused on the single attack. Eric had a grander vision. All his writing alluded to a wider slaughter: killing everything, destroying the human race. In a passionat
e journal entry a month later, he would cite the Nazis' Final Solution: "kill them all. well in case you haven't figured it out yet, I say 'KILL MANKIND.'"
It's unclear whether Eric and Dylan were aware of the discrepancy--neither one addressed it in writing. It's hard to imagine that Eric failed to notice Dylan's focus on a more limited attack. Was he including Dylan in the full dream? Perhaps Dylan just didn't find it plausible. Blowing up the high school, that could actually happen--killing mankind... maybe that just sounded like science fiction to Dylan.
Despite the press's obsession with bullying and misfits, that's not how the boys presented themselves. Dylan laughed about picking on the new freshmen and "fags." Neither one complained about bullies picking on them--they boasted about doing it themselves.
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The boys changed dramatically after they began Diversion--in reverse directions, once again. Eric launched a new charm offensive. Andrea Sanchez became the second most important person in his life. Snowing her was the best way to appease the first, his dad. It also kept the program from diverting Eric from his goal. Eric had a plan now. He was on a mission and he was revved. His grades dropped briefly after the arrest, but they rebounded to his best ever once he had his attack plan. It was a lot of work, which he complained bitterly about in his journal; but he worked his ass off to excel.
Dylan didn't even try to impress Andrea. He missed appointments, fell behind in community service, and let his grades plummet. He was actually getting two D's.
NBK was nothing but a diversion to Dylan--fantasy chats with his buddy about what they would like to do. Dylan didn't believe it; he didn't plan to go through with it. All he knew was that he was a felon now. His miserable life had grown pathetically worse.