"Part II: After and Before" Study Guide—"Columbine" by Dave Cullen

DISCUSSION GUIDE

COLUMBINE

BY DAVE CULLEN

“Part II: After and Before”

1

COVER PHOTO CAPTION: Grief overcomes Columbine High School students Jessica Holliday, left, and Diwana Perez moments after they fled the school during a violent rampage by two fellow students April 20.

2

OUTLINE “CHAPTER 20: VACANT” • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

“Blankness” Notifications of Victims’ Families Meeting at Light of the World Students “Out of Sync” with Parents Student/Media Relationship Rachel Scott’s Car Killers’ Families Hire Attorneys The Blame Game Conspiracy Theories The Crime Scene Dr. Dwayne Fuseiler Kate Battan John Kiekbusch Likely Conspirators:

Brooks Brown

Chris Morris

Robyn Anderson

9 Others • Collection of Evidence & Crime Scene • Killers’ Handling of Evidence • 500 Interviews in 72 Hours “CHAPTER 21: FIRST MEMORIES” • Harris’s Childhood: Petty Crimes Signs Fireworks Explosions Starting Files Military Brat His Parents Punishment Sports Minority Friends Shy Fear of Failure 3

Dreams of Being a Marine Doom His Brother “CHAPTER 22: RUSH TO CLOSURE” • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

“Healing Begins” Bodies Returned Inflated Accounts DeAngelis & Crying Masculinity & Emotion How Should They Finish Out the Year?

Should the School Be Destroyed?

“The Enemy” Evangelicals Response of Moderate Denominations Re-creation of Attack How Did the Killers Obtain the Guns?

Mistakes Building the Bombs Robyn Anderson’s Police Interview Bomb Squad’s Findings Implications of the Bombs The Media’s Lens

“CHAPTER 23: GIFTED BOY” • Klebold’s Childhood: CHIPS Shyness Parents Sports “Hated to Lose” The Klebold House Judy & Brooks Brown Early Growth Temper • The Killers’ Similarities & Differences: Similarity—Younger of Two Sons Similarity—Two-parent Families Similarity—Two-child Families Similarity—Lived in Small Towns 4

• • • •

Difference—Klebolds Had More Money Difference—Harrises Were More Mobile Similarity—“Each boy grew up in the shadow of a single older sibling: a bigger, taller, stronger brother.”

Similarity—Hobbies Similarity—Classes Similarity—Job Similarity—Friends Similarity—Clothing Choices Similarity—Clubs Difference—”Dylan always saw himself as inferior. The anger and the loathing traveled inward.”

Sue & Tom Klebold’s Biography Sue & Tom Klebold Avoided Spoiling Their Sons The Klebold’s Actual House “Cradle to Reality”

“CHAPTER 24: HOUR OF NEED” • • • • •

• • • • • •

Reverend Marxhausen & the St. Philip Lutheran Church Klebold’s Funeral Arrangements Klebold’s Funeral Service Tom’s & Sue’s Reactions Klebold’s “Just Talk for a While” Eulogies: Tom: “Where did the guns come from?”

Tom: “Where did the violence come from?”

Tom: “What was this Nazi stuff?”

Sue: “And the anti-Semitism?”

Sue: “Dylan was half Jewish, what kind of sense did this make?”

Unnamed Family Friend: “They were such good parents.”

Unnamed Family Friend: “Dylan was a great kid.”

Unnamed Family Friend: “He was like our son!”

Byron: “I love my brother.”

Story of Absalom Klebold’s Cremation Reverend Marxhausen & the Media Congregation’s Mixed Reaction Harris’s Funeral Harris Family & the Media

5

“CHAPTER 25: THREESOME” • • • • • • • • •

How Harris & Klebold Met Brooks Brown Enrolls at Columbine “Three Aspiring Intellectuals” Harris “Breaks Through His Shell” Fake Suicide “I Am” Poem Harris’s Ugly Dreams Kibble “Understands” Klebold Antics of Harris, Klebold, Zack Heckler, Nate Dykeman & Chris Morris • The Threesome: Harris, Klebold & Heckler • Harris’s Improved Doom Skills • “Similarities Between Zeus and I” “CHAPTER 26: HELP IS ON THE WAY” • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Reaction of Dave Sanders’s Daughters Shooting of Sanders Sanders Moved to Science Room 3 First Aid Officials Informed of Sander’s Condition Red Flag & “1 Bleeding to Death” “Tell my girls I love them.”

SWAT Team Doesn’t Remove Sanders Paramedic Enters Sanders Declared Dead Sanders’s Story Gets Out Police Response Questioned Jeffco Sheriff’s Spokesman Lies “Pathetic” Statement “System a Disaster”

“CHAPTER 27: BLACK” • • • • • 6

Harris & Klebold Evolve Harris’s “Look” Klebold’s Lesser Change Outcasts?

Duster Enters

• TCM “CHAPTER 28: MEDIA CRIME” • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

TCM & Goth Myths Unsupported Connections: Why? First Print Story Final Portrait Story Evolves Repeating It Back “Failure to Question” Jock, Hat & Black Myths Student=Witness Denver Post & Rocky Mountain News Clement Park PTSD Survivor’s Guilt Patrick Ireland’s Condition Makai Hall Hope for Patrick Ireland Anger Deflected Gay Rumors Goth Rumors Andrew Mitchell Shows Up Bullying?

“Toxic” “The Data Is There”

“CHAPTER 29: THE MISSIONS” • • • • • • • • • • •

Harris’s “Crucial Step” “The Missions” Tularecito Snowball Incident Brooks Brown Spills His Guts Judy Brown’s Visit Harris Tricks His Dad Judy Brown’s 911 Call Timer Experiments Dean Place Dylan’s Lack of Happiness 7

“CHAPTER 30: TELLING US WHY” • • • • • • • • • • •

Jeffco’s Problem Rough Time for Brown Family “Open Space Meeting” Repeated Lies Disappearing File Wiretap Duran’s Admission Manes’s Confession Fuselier: “Why?” “The Basement Tapes” Harris’s Journal

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS • What’s up with the title of “Part II”?

• Provide a brief character sketch of each killer. Were they similar?

What drew them together?

• Provide a brief character sketch of each killer. Were they similar?

What drew them together?

• How did Dylan see himself? How did his self-image compare to objective assessments (for example, based on his social calendar, how his friends saw him, etc.)?

• Illustrate how Eric Harris fit the profile of a psychopath. Were there any contradictions between his behavior and the profile?

• Pretend you are Sue Klebold. How would “you” (Sue) feel about Dylan and the controversy?

• How do you feel the media handled Columbine?

• How do you feel Jeffco handled Columbine?

8

IMPORTANT QUOTATIONS • “‘You know, he might have lived,’ the Rohrboughs’ pastor would tell fifteen hundred mourners at Danny’s funeral. ‘He chose to stay there and hold the door for others so that they might go out before him and make their way to safety. They made it and Danny didn’t.’”

• “‘I smell the presence of Satan,’ Reverend Oudemolen thundered from the pulpit Sunday morning. ‘What we saw Tuesday came from Satan’s home office. Satan had a plan. Satan wants us to live in fear in Littleton. He wants us to see black trench coats or people in Goth attire and makeup and here’s what he wants us to feel: Look how powerful and scary Satan is!’”

• “Reverend Don Marxhausen disagreed with all the riffs on Satan.

He saw two boys with hate in their hearts and assault weapons in their hands. He saw a society that needed to figure out how and why—fast. Blaming Satan was just letting them off easy, he felt, and copping out on our responsibility to investigate. The ‘end of days’ fantasy was even more infuriating.”

• “Had the propane bombs detonated, they would have incinerated most or all of the inhabitants of the commons. They would have killed five hundred people in the first few seconds. Four times the toll in Oklahoma City. More than the ten worst domestic terrorist attacks in U.S. history combined.”

• “That same day, officials announced the discovery of the big bombs, and their destructive power. It instigated a new media shock wave. But, curiously, journalists failed to grasp the implications. Detectives let go of the targeting theory immediately. It had been sketchy to begin with, and now it was completely disproved. The media never shook it off. They saw what happened at Columbine as a shooting and the killers as outcasts targeting jocks. They filtered every new development through that lens.”

• “Absalom skillfully ingratiated himself to his father, the court, and all the kingdom but secretly plotted to seize the throne.

Eventually, he thrust Israel into civil war. He appeared poised to vanquish his father, but David’s generals prevailed. The king was 9

informed first of the triumph, then of his son’s death. ‘David’s grief made the victory like a defeat, and the people stole silently into the city,’ Marxhausen read from 2 Samuel. ‘David wept and cried out, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son.”’”

• “Dylan and Zack needed Eric. Someone had to do the talking. Eric needed an audience; he also craved excitement. He was cool and detached, tough to rattle. Nothing seemed to faze him. Dylan was an unlit fuse. Eric led the parade. Perfect fit.”

• “Eric enjoyed the act of creation. ‘I often try to create new things,’ he wrote in a freshman English paper titled ‘Similarities Between Zeus and I.’ He hailed both of them as great leaders, finding no fault in their pettiness or malice but identifying common inclinations. ‘Zeus and I also get angry easily and punish people in unusual ways,’ he wrote.”

• “For Dylan, different was difficult. For Eric, different was good.”

• “Eventually, after the TCM heyday was over, Eric got himself a trench coat. Dylan followed. They wore them to the massacre, for both fashion and functional considerations. The choice would cause tremendous confusion.”

• “We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened. No Goths, no outcasts, nobody snapping. No targets, no feud, and no Trench Coat Mafia.”

• “The writers assumed kids were informing the media. It was the other way around.”

• “‘Student’ equaled ‘witness.’ Witness to everything that happened that day, and anything about the killers. It was a curious leap.

Reporters would not make that mistake at a car wreck. Did you see it? If not, they move on. But journalists felt like foreigners stepping into teen culture. They knew kids can hide anything from adults—but not from each other. That was the mentality: Something shocking happened here; we’re baffled, but kids know.

So all two thousand were deputized as insiders.”

10

• “Eric totally rocked on the missions. Dylan enjoyed them, too—he liked the camaraderie, especially. He fit in there, he had a role to play, he belonged. But the missions were brief diversions; they were not making him happy. In fact, Dylan was miserable.”

• “Eric would prove the easier killer to understand. Eric always knew what he was up to. Dylan did not.”

11

Sue and Dylan Klebold celebrate Dylan’s fifth birthday. 

A student just evacuated from the school is embraced by friends overjoyed she is safe. 

 The 21 April 1999 front page of the Denver Rocky Mountain News.

Two anguished students embrace near the school early in the siege. “We didn’t think it was real and then we saw blood,” one student said. 

12

Investigators tackle the intricate task of marking evidence. 

 Daniel Rohrbough lies dead on a sidewalk, soda from a can he dropped trickling downhill near him. At left, students crouch behind a car with a police officer who aims his gun at the school.

Dale Napoletano, 16, hugs his sister LeighAnn, 13, during a memorial service honoring Columbine’s victims. The service drew an estimated 70,000 people, including Vice President Al Gore. 

 Bloody shoes and socks lie outside St. Anthony Hospital Central.  Klebold and Robyn Anderson at the prom.

13

DR. ROBERT HARE’S PSYCHOPATHY CHECKLIST glib and superficial charm grandiose (exaggeratedly high) estimation of self need for stimulation pathological lying cunning and manipulativeness lack of remorse or guilt shallow affect (superficial emotional responsiveness) callousness and lack of empathy parasitic lifestyle poor behavioral controls sexual promiscuity early behavior problems lack of realistic long-term goals impulsivity irresponsibility failure to accept responsibility for own actions many short-term marital relationships juvenile delinquency revocation of conditional release criminal versatility

14

DR. ROBERT HARE’S PSYCHOPATHY CHECKLIST FOR JUVENILES gratuitous lying indifference to the pain of others defiance of authority figures unresponsiveness to reprimands or threatened punishment petty theft persistent aggression cutting classes and breaking curfew cruelty to animals early experimentation with sex vandalism and setting fires.

15

lw

LOIBNER-WAITKUS

16