Columbine
Few cultural events have effected my life as indelibly as the Columbine High School shooting on April 20, 1999. I was 16 at the time. I’d been into so-called “goth” music like Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails for a couple years at that point, and had been so maligned by my classmates that I’d dropped out of high school the previous January and was in the midst of working towards my GED. It was assumed right after the shooting that the killers were also into Marilyn Manson and had been bullied, that they went to the school that day with the intention of murdering all those who had wronged them, such as jocks, christians, etc. Anti-depressants were blamed. Marilyn Manson actually canceled the remainder of his Mechanical Animals tour. At the time it was the largest school shooting in American history. Some of my notions had since been thwarted, small things, like the killers weren’t actually into Marilyn Manson but they liked German industrial music such as Rammstein and KMFDM. But there is quite a lot else about the shooting and the years-long investigation following it that I think most people are not aware of.
Dave Cullen was one of the first reporters on the scene that day. He spent the next ten years trying to uncover exactly what happened, who might be to blame and what the actual motivations of the killers were. The resulting book, “Columbine,” uses investigative documents, media reports, interviews with survivors, witnesses and close friends, as well as diaries by the killers and their parents to piece together one of the most famous mass murders in American history.
Eric Harris, who was the mastermind, we learn was almost undoubtedly a psychopath in the most clinical sense, encompassing the traits listed in the DSM-IV. He was not bullied, and in fact was charming and had many friends and girlfriends and everyone liked him. He was classically good looking. But he possessed an utter hatred for humanity. He did not plan the massacre with the intention of killing those who had wronged him. His goal was actually to kill everyone in the school. All two-thousand students. He had planted bombs all over the school. His goal was to top the Oklahoma City bombing.
Dylan Klebold is a tougher case. He suffered from severe depression and suicidal ideation, and Harris saw his weaknesses and took him under his wing and influenced him. It seems that right up until the end he was uncomfortable with what they were about to do but did it anyway.
But here’s the real kicker. After storming the school and shooting over two dozen people, their bombs having failed to detonate, they suddenly stopped, even though there were still hundreds of their scared classmates hiding out in the school. They walked by rooms, peered inside, saw other kids huddled together, and walked on, shooting at the ceiling. In the library, where the massacre ended, they left 30 kids alive. The question is why? If the goal had been to kill as many kids as possible, why did they suddenly stop, and then kill themselves?
To me this is the biggest mystery we are left with. Cullen does a masterful job of slowing down time and describing in detail how the massacre unfolded, victim by victim. It’s quite harrowing. But even he does not have an answer here, though he imagines one—that the two teens simply became bored. The bombs didn’t go off, it wasn’t as exciting as they had anticipated.
This might be true, but it feels unlikely. The massacre only lasted about twenty minutes, they were almost certainly still high on adrenaline, the idea that they just got bored doesn’t resonate. I have a different notion, which is that suddenly they were overcome with regret. Not necessarily that they had second thoughts. But it’s one thing to imagine a slaughter, and another to participate in it. Once they saw all the blood, the bodies, the smell, the screams and the terror, it’s possible that the event just became too much for them to integrate. There must have been a moment where they realized what they had done, its irreversibility, and perhaps lost their taste for it.
Of course we’ll never know for sure. This book is extraordinary in its immersiveness. And quite engaging. Here’s a video from the author—