Who would do something like this? Robyn asked her girlfriends. Who would be this retarded?
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.
____
Nate Dykeman was terrified of who might be responsible. He had called most of his close friends but had held off on Eric and Dylan. He had been hoping to hear from them. Hoping, but not really expecting. Dylan would break his heart. They had been tight for years. Nate spent a lot of time at his house, and Tom and Sue Klebold had looked after him. Nate had a lot of trouble at home, and the Klebolds had been like a second mom and dad.
Dylan did not call. Around noon, Nate dialed his house. Tom Klebold would be home--he worked from there. Hopefully Dylan was with him.
Tom picked up. No, Dylan was not there. He's in school, Tom said.
Actually, no, he isn't, Nate said. Dylan had not been in class. And Nate didn't want to worry Tom, but there had been a shooting. There had been descriptions. The gunmen were in trench coats. Nate knew several kids with trench coats--he was trying to account for all of them. He hated breaking the news, but he had to say it. He thought Dylan was involved.
Tom went up to Dylan's room, checked his closet for the coat. "Oh my God," he said. "It's not here."
Tom was shocked, Nate said later. "I thought he was going to, like, drop the phone. He just could not believe that this could possibly be happening, and his son was involved."
"Please keep me informed," Tom told him. "Whatever you hear."
Tom got off the phone. He turned on the TV. It was everywhere.
He called Sue. She came home. Tom called their older son. He and Sue had kicked Byron out for using drugs--they would not tolerate that behavior--but this was too important.
Tom apparently withheld his fears about Dylan. Byron told coworkers he was terrified his brother was trapped. He was also worried about younger friends still in school. "I've got to see if everybody's OK," he said.
Lots of Byron's workmates were connected to the school. They all headed home.
Tom Klebold called 911 to warn them his son might be involved. He also called a lawyer.
____
The televised version of the disaster was running thirty minutes to an hour behind the cops' view. Anchors dutifully repeated the perimeter concept. The cops had "sealed off the perimeter." But what were all those troops doing, exactly? There were hundreds out there; everyone seemed to be milling about. Anchors started wondering aloud. Luckily, no one seemed to be seriously injured.
Around 12:30, the story took its first grisly turn. Local TV reporters gained access to the triage areas. It was awful. So much blood, it was hard to identify the injuries. Lots of kids had been loaded into ambulances; area hospitals were all on alert.
Half a dozen news choppers circled, but they withheld most of their footage. For a few minutes, stations had broadcast live from the air, but the sheriff's team had demanded they stop. Every room in Columbine was equipped with a television. The gunmen might well be watching. Cameras would home in on the very images most useful to the killers: SWAT maneuvers and wounded kids awaiting rescue. TV stations also held back news of fatalities. Their chopper crews had seen paramedics examine Danny and leave him behind. The public remained unaware.
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."
14. Hostage Standoff
Around one P.M., word filtered out to reporters that kids were trapped in the building. The situation had escalated into a hostage standoff. Publicly, the nature of the attack changed. No telling what the assailants might try. Where were they? The captives seemed to be held in the commons, but reports conflicted.
Word of the ambulance scenes and the hostage standoff traveled quickly to Leawood and the public library. Parents grew tenser, but they worked together, exchanging information and passing around cell phones. It was tough to get a signal. Cell phones were not ubiquitous in 1999, yet everyone in this affluent community seemed to have one. They pounded at them furiously, grilling neighbors, updating relatives, leaving messages for their children on every conceivable answering machine. Some would hit Redial absentmindedly as they swapped information face-to-face, buzzing their own homes, praying that the machine wouldn't pick up this time. Misty kept calling Brad. Still no word on Chris or Cassie.
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. A lot of wild rumors had already come and gone.
At least two to three hundred students were hiding in the school, in classrooms and utility closets, under tables and desks. Some had rigged up protection; others were right out in the open. Everyone was afraid to move. A great number whispered cautiously into cell phones. Many clustered around classroom TVs. They heard banging and crashing and the deafening screech of the fire alarm. CNN carried a live call between a local anchor and a student alone under a desk. What was he hearing? The same thing as you, the student said. "I've got a little TV [and I'm] watching you guys right now." For four hours rumors, confirmations, and embellishments bounced in and out.
The cops were livid. Reporters had no idea hundreds of kids were trapped inside and no concept of the echo chamber in full bloom. The cops knew. The detective force was assembling teams to interview every survivor, and they knew hundreds of their best witnesses were still inside, getting compromised by the minute. But the cops had no means to stop it. This was the first major hostage standoff of the cell phone age, and they had never seen anything like it. At the moment, they were more concerned with information passing to the shooters. Sometimes the kids' revelations scared reporters. On live TV, a boy described sounds he took to be the gunmen: "I hear stuff being thrown around," he said. "I am staying underneath this desk. I don't know if they know I'm up here. I am just staying upstairs for right now, and I just hope they don't know--"
The anchorwoman interrupted: "Don't tell us where you are!"
The boy described more commotion. "There's a little bunch of people crying outside. I can hear them downstairs." Something crashed. "Whoa!"
The anchor gasped. "What was that?!"
"I don't know."
The anchors had enough. Her partner told him to hang up, keep quiet, and try to reach 911. "Keep trying to call them, OK?"
The cops pleaded with the TV stations to stop. Please ask the hostages to quit calling the media, they said. Tell them to turn off the televisions.
The stations aired the requests and continued broadcasting the calls. "If you're watching, kids, turn the TV off," one anchor implored. "Or down, at least."
____
Much of the country was watching the standoff unfold. None of the earlier school shootings had been televised; few American tragedies had. The Columbine situation played out slowly, with the cameras rolling. Or at least it appeared that way: the cameras offered the illusion we were witnessing the event. But the cameras had arrived too late. Eric and Dylan had retreated inside after five minutes. The cameras missed the outside murders and could not follow Eric and Dylan inside. The fundamental experience for most of America was almost witnessing mass murder. It was the panic and frustration of not knowing, the mounting terror of horror withheld, just out of view. We would learn the truth about Columbine, but we would not learn it today.
We saw fragments. What the cam
eras showed us was misleading. An army of police held at bay suggested an equivalent force inside. Hysterical witnesses corroborated that image, describing wildly different assaults. Killers seemed to be everywhere. Cell phone callers confirmed the killers remained active. They provided unimpeachable evidence of gunfire from inside the attack zone. The data was correct; the conclusions were wrong. SWAT teams were on the move.
The narrative unfolding on television looked nothing like the killers' plan. It looked only moderately like what was actually occurring. It would take months for investigators to piece together what had gone on inside. Motive would take longer to unravel. It would be years before the detective team would explain why.
The public couldn't wait that long. The media was not about to. They speculated.
15. First Assumption
An investigative team had assembled before noon. Kate Battan (rhymes with Latin) was named lead investigator. Battan already knew who her primary suspects were. Most of the students were perplexed about who was attacking them, but quite a few had recognized the gunmen. Two names had been repeated over and over. Battan quickly compiled dossiers on Eric and Dylan in the command post trailer in Clement Park. She dispatched teams to secure their homes. Detectives arrived at the Harris place at 1:15, just as the third SWAT team burst into the Columbine teachers' lounge. Eric's parents had gotten word and were already home. The cops found them uncooperative. They tried to refuse entrance. The cops insisted. Kathy Harris got scared when they headed for the basement. "I don't want you going down there!" she said. They said they were securing the residence and removing everyone. Wayne said he doubted Eric was involved, but would help if there was an active situation. Kathy's twin sister was with her. Wayne and Kathy were concerned about the repercussions, she explained; parents of the victims might retaliate.
The cops smelled gas; they had the utility company shut off power, then resumed the search. In Eric's room they found a sawed-off shotgun barrel on a bookshelf, unspent ammunition on the bed, fingertips cut off gloves on the floor, and fireworks and bomb materials on the desk, the dresser, the windowsill, and the wall, among other places. Elsewhere they discovered a page from The Anarchist Cookbook, packaging for a new gas can, and scattered glass shards on a slab in the backyard. An evidence specialist arrived that night and spent four hours, shooting seven rolls of film. He left at 1:00 A.M.
The Klebolds were much more forthcoming. A police report described Tom as "very communicative." He gave a full account of Dylan's past and laid out all his friendships. Dylan had been in good spirits, Tom said. Sue described him as extremely happy. Tom was anti-gun and Dylan agreed with him on that--they wouldn't find any guns or explosives in the house, that was for sure, Tom said. The cops did find pipe bombs. Tom was shocked. Dylan was fine, he insisted. He and Dylan were close. He would have known it if anything was up.
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.
Fuselier got the call in the cafeteria of Denver's Rogers Federal Building, a downtown high-rise thirty minutes away. He was sipping a bowl of bland soup---lowsalt, for his hypertension. The bowl stayed on the table. When he got to his Dodge Intrepid, Fuselier swiped his arm under the seat, groping for the portable police light. He hadn't pulled it out in years.
Fuselier headed toward the foothills. He would offer his services as a hostage negotiator, or anything else they might need. He wasn't sure how his offer would be received.
Cops in crisis tend to be thrilled to have a trained negotiator but wary of the Feds. Hardly anyone likes the FBI. Fuselier didn't blame them. Federal agents generally have a high opinion of themselves. Few try to conceal it. Fuselier didn't look like a Fed, or sound the part. He was a shrink turned hostage negotiator turned detective, with an abridged version of the complete works of Shakespeare in the back seat of his car. He didn't talk past the local cops, roll his eyes, or humor them. There was no swagger in his shoulders or his speech. He could be a little stoic. Hugging his sons felt awkward but he would reach out to embrace survivors when they needed it. Smiling came easy. His jokes were frequently at his own expense. He genuinely liked local cops and appreciated what they had to offer. They liked him.
A stint on the domestic terrorism task force for the region proved fortuitous. It was a joint operation between local agencies and the FBI. Fuselier led the unit, and a senior Jeffco detective worked on his team. The detective was one of Fuselier's first calls. He was relieved to hear that Dwayne was on his way and offered to introduce him to the commanders on arrival.
The detective brought Fuselier up to speed before he arrived at the school. There were reports of six or eight gunmen in black masks and military gear shooting everyone. He assumed it was a terrorist attack.
It took a certain voice to talk down a gunman. Agent Fuselier was always gentle and reassuring. No matter how erratic the subject's behavior, Fuselier always responded calmly. He exuded tranquillity, offered a way out. He trained negotiators to read a subject quickly, to size up his primary motivations. Was the gunman driven by anger, fear, or resentment? Was he on a power trip? Was the assault meant to feed his ego, or was he caught up in events beyond his control? Getting the gun down was primarily a matter of listening. The first thing Fuselier taught negotiators was to classify the situation as hostage or nonhostage. To laymen, humans at gunpoint equaled hostages. Not so.
An FBI field manual citing Fuselier's research spelled out the crucial distinction: hostages are a means to fulfill demands. "The primary goal is not to harm the hostages," the manual said. "In fact, hostage takers realize that only through keeping the hostages alive can they hope to achieve their goals." They act rationally. Nonhostage gunmen do not. The humans mean nothing to them. "[These] individuals act in an emotional, senseless, and often-self-destructive way." They typically issue no demands. "What they want is what they already have, the victim. The potential for homicide followed by suicide in many of these cases is very high."
Jeffco officials had labeled Columbine a hostage standoff. Every media outlet was reporting it that way. Dr. Fuselier considered the chances of that remote. What he was driving toward was much worse.
To the FBI, the nonhostage distinction is critical. The Bureau recommends radically different strategies in those cases--essentially, the opposite approach. With hostages, negotiators remain highly visible, make the gunmen work for everything, and firmly establish that the police are in control. In nonhostage situations, they keep a low profile, "give a little without getting in return" (for example, offering cigarettes to build rapport), and avoid even a slight implication that anyone but the gunman is in control. The goal with hostages is to gradually lower expectations; in nonhostage crises, it's to lower emotions.
One of the first things Fuselier did when he arrived was organize a negotiation team. He found local officers he had trained, and fellow FBI negotiators responded as well. A neighboring county loaned them a section of its mobile command post, already on scene. The 911 operators were instructed to put through to the team all calls from kids inside the building. Anything they could learn about the gunmen might be useful. They passed on logistical information they gathered to the tactical teams. The team was confident they could talk the gunmen down. All they needed was someone to speak to.
Fuselier shuttled between the negotiation center and the Jeffco command post, coordinating the federal response. When things calmed down momentarily, Fuselier pitched in questioning students who had just escaped the school. He walked over to the triage unit and flipped through the logs. They had evaluated hundreds of kids. He scanned for kids he knew from the neighborhood or the boys' soccer teams. Everyone he recognized said "evaluated
and released." He called their parents as soon as he got a break.
His son's name never came up. Agent Fuselier was grateful to have his hands full. "I had work to do," he said later. "I compartmentalized. Focusing on that kept me from wondering about Brian." Mimi checked in regularly, so Dwayne didn't have to. She had gotten to Leawood, and she had seen a lot of kids. No one had spotted Brian; no one had heard a word.
____
An attack of this magnitude suggested a large conspiracy. Everyone, including detectives, assumed a substantial number were involved. The first break in the presumed conspiracy seemed to come early. The killers' good friend Chris Morris reported himself to 911. He had seen the news on TV while he was home playing Nintendo with another friend. At first he was worried about his girlfriend. And his Nintendo buddy's dad was a science teacher in the building.
The two boys hopped in the car and raced around, trying to find Chris's girlfriend. They kept running into police barricades and collecting scraps of information along the way. When he heard about the trench coats, Chris got scared. He knew Eric and Dylan had guns. He knew they had been messing with pipe bombs. For this?
Chris called 911. He got disconnected. It took a few tries, but he told his story and the dispatcher sent a patrol car by the house. The cops questioned him briefly, then decided to drive him out to the main team in Clement Park. There was a lot of confusion. Who was this kid? "Chris Harris?" a detective asked. Pretty soon he was surrounded by detectives. Cameramen noticed. TV crews came running.
Chris looked the part: squishy features, nerdy, and overwhelmed. He had rosy cheeks, wire-rimmed glasses, and mussy light brown hair just past his ears. The cops cuffed him fast and got him into the back of a patrol car.