Columbine

  Months after the attack, following a briefing on the killers, Tonelli went to see Fuselier.

  "I have to talk to you," he said. Fuselier sat down with him. Tonelli was racked with guilt. "What did I miss here?" he asked.

  Nothing, Fuselier said. Eric was convincing. He told you exactly what you wanted to hear. He didn't play innocent; he confessed to guilt and pleaded for forgiveness. Civilians always believe a good psychopath.

  Eric bragged about his performances again in his journal, and then took a turn: "goddammit I would have been a fucking great marine, It would have given me a reason to be good." That was unusual for Eric. He usually reveled in his "bad" choice, but just for a moment there he toyed with the other road: "and I would never drink and drive, either," he added. "It will be weird when we actually go on the rampage."

  Dr. Fuselier read the passage with only mild surprise. Even extreme psychopaths show flickers of empathy now and then. Eric was extreme but not absolute. This was the closest he would come to betraying reservations, and it was a logical pass. The plan was becoming real now. Eric finally had the means to kill. He felt the power; he had to make a decision--keep it fantasy or make it real?

  Eric's reflection lasted two lines. The sentences run together as if he was writing rapidly, and the next one envisioned a massive attack. A jumbo ammo cartridge would be great: "just think, 100 rounds without reloading, hell yeah!"

  43. Who Owns the Tragedy

  There is a house, outside of Laramie. It's a rugged Wyoming town on the fringe of the Rockies. That's where Dave and Linda Sanders were going to retire. A quiet college town, Laramie may appear desolate to most eyes, but it teems with youthful energy and is the intellectual capital of the state. Dave's Ford Escort could get them there in under three hours, and they made several trips a year.

  They were closing in on it now--two years away, maybe three. They were looking forward to it. They called it retirement, but it was a work addict's version: off with one career, on to the next. Dave would move up to a college position; Linda had her eye on an antiques store. After twenty-five years at Columbine, Dave had qualified for his teaching pension. It was just a matter of an opening. University of Wyoming was a good bet: he had been scouting for them for years and coaching the summer camp, and was great friends with the head basketball coach.

  They would watch their retirement home glide by from the highway every time they approached town. It was a gray ranch house with a wide porch running all the way around. They would add rocking chairs, and a porch swing for the grandkids.

  Linda Sanders thought about that house in Laramie a lot after Dave died. She thought about how different her struggle was from all the other victims. All the attention was on the students and their parents.

  ____

  Kathy Ireland had wanted to save her boy. Now she wanted to get her hands on the kids who did this to him. She looked into Patrick's eyes. Serene. Like hers, before this horror struck. Kathy had breathed tranquillity into her family, but it took all of her effort to stay calm around Patrick.

  Kathy stood by Patrick's bed and asked if he understood who'd done this to him.

  It didn't matter, he said. They were confused. Just forgive them. Please forgive them.

  "It took my breath away," Kathy said later. At first she assumed Patrick was confused. He was not. He had too much work to do. He was going to walk again, and talk again, like a normal person. And he insisted he would still be valedictorian. Anger would eat him up inside. He couldn't afford that.

  OK, Kathy said. She had been praying incessantly that Patrick would come through this with a sense of happiness--that in time he would find a way to let it go. This, she had not expected. She feared that it was more than she could do, but she would try to forgive, too. It would take her years to let go, and she never shook the anger completely, but she kept looking to Patrick leading the way.

  ____

  Patrick Ireland was struggling. His days at Craig Hospital that first summer were exhausting. Speech therapy, muscle therapy, testing, prodding, poking, and the endless efforts just to communicate. Retrieving the right word often eluded him. At night Patrick would lie quietly in his room, winding down before settling off to sleep. John or Kathy would stay with him. They took turns each night; one of them would sleep on a fold-out chair beside his bed. Just in case.

  They would turn the lights off around eleven or twelve and just sit there in the dark with him, quietly at first; then he would begin to ask questions. He needed to know everything. What exactly happened in the library? How did he respond? What was going to happen now? Patrick wanted to know about the other victims, too, and the killers sometimes--what could make them do something like that?

  "There were certainly times that I was mad," Patrick said later. "But I think a lot of those were more for realizations of what was taken from me, rather than actually what transpired. My life was going be completely changed." Patrick tried not to stay angry on the basketball court. Make a mistake, brush it off. "Keep your eye on the ball," he could hear his dad say. Patrick focused on the present.

  His speech was returning slowly. Short-term memory was a struggle. There were exercises for everything. A therapist would recite a list of twenty things, and he'd have to repeat them in the same order. It was hard.

  Patrick shed his anger toward the killers early, but his condition could be infuriating. Outbursts are typical with head wounds. Anger and frustration commonly last several months. The blue period, they call it. His therapists were tracking that as well. When Patrick shook his fist at them, they would note it in his chart.

  ____

  Patrick stayed at Craig Hospital for nine and a half weeks. He walked out on July 2, using a forearm crutch to support himself. He wore a plastic brace on his right leg. His doctors sent him home with a wheelchair for when he needed to cover long distances. A banner signed by friends welcomed him back.

  The summer went quickly. Patrick wasn't ready for school to start. He was overbooked already: occupational, physical, and speech therapy, and neuropsychology. They were exhausting days. But he was walking more steadily. His speech was pretty intelligible, and the extended pauses while he searched for words grew briefer. A sentence might be interrupted only once now, or sometimes not at all. The blue period passed.

  As he continued working, Patrick thought more about the lake. He knew he couldn't get on the water. He could hear the buzz of the boat, smell the water lapping the pier. Eventually, Patrick convinced his father to take him out to watch his sister make some practice runs. He loved waterskiing. John started the boat. As the engine sputtered, Patrick smelled the fumes, closed his eyes, and he was out there riding the surface again. He sat on the dock reliving it all. Then he began to cry. He shook violently. He swore. John rushed over to comfort him. He was inconsolable. He wasn't angry at his parents or himself or Eric or Dylan--he was just angry. He wanted his life back. He was never going to get it. John assured him they would get through this. Then he held on to Patrick and let him cry.

  ____

  Four months after the police tape went up, Columbine was set to reopen. August 16 was the target date. The atmosphere that morning would mean everything. If students came home feeling like they had made a clean break over the summer and moved on, then they would have. The first few minutes of that morning would set the tone for the entire year. Administrators had gathered students, faculty, victims, and other stakeholders and brainstormed all summer. They'd consulted psychologists and cultural anthropologists and grief experts and had come up with an elaborate ritual. It would be called Take Back the School.

  For the ceremony to have impact, they needed an adversary to overcome. And the more tangible and odious the adversary, the better. It was an easy choice: the media. The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News were still running Columbine stories every day--several a day. As the fall semester beckoned, coverage shot back up: ten stories a day between the two papers. And the national outlets were back. How do you feel? eve
ryone constantly wanted to know. Students started sporting bite me T-shirts, and quite a few faculty members did, too.

  The media had made their lives hell. And reporters could be counted on to appear in record numbers. The rally would include speeches and cheers and rock music and a ribbon cutting, but the heart of the event was a public rebuke of the media and a ceremonial reclaiming of the school--from them. Thousands of parents and neighbors would be recruited to form a human shield to rebuke the press. The shield would function both symbolically and practically. It would prevent reporters from performing their despicable job. They literally would not be able to see what was going on. The rally could have easily been planned for inside--virtually every school rally was. This event would be held outside specifically to stick it to the media. No doors or locks or walls would keep out the media; they would be blocked by a human wall of shame. And the school would dare them to try to cross it.

  ____

  Reporters were kept in the dark about the agenda until seven days before the rally. On August 9, the school convened a Media Guidelines Summit. Forty news organizations attended, local and national. The invitation was filled with conciliatory phrases like "exchange ideas" and "balance the interests." The district lined up a group of trauma experts. A professor outlined bereavement: these kids were still in the early stages, and many were suffering from PTSD. Mental repetition of the trauma trapped them there. The TV stations kept recycling the same stock footage: SWAT teams, bloody victims, hugging survivors, kids running out with hands on their heads.

  Reporters did not like where this was going. Then victim's advocate Robin Finegan introduced the larger idea: kids felt as if their identities had been stolen. "Columbine" was the name of a tragedy now. Their school was a symbol of mass murder. They had been cast as bullies or snotty rich brats. "There comes a point where victims need to have ownership of their tragedy," Finegan said. So far, the media owned the Columbine tragedy. That was about to change, the district said--or good luck getting your precious "Columbine returns" stories. Administrators outlined the gist of the ceremony.

  "What's the human chain for?" a reporter asked.

  "To shield the students from you folk," district spokesman Rick Kaufman said.

  Most media would be excluded. A small pool would be escorted in. Reporters were incredulous. One print reporter? The White House didn't limit its pool that tightly. Reporters for the big national papers huddled in the back of the room, discussing options to "lawyer up."

  The district wouldn't back down, Kaufman said. In fact, the pool would come only with major concessions: no helicopters, no rooftop photographers, and no breach of school grounds. "If we can't get agreement, then there's no pool," he said.

  Try it, reporters threatened; it will backfire. "As long as parents understand that by saying no to everything, again it's going to be a situation where we're coming out of rocks and stuff in order to get sound and pictures," a TV executive said. "And I wonder if the parents really understand, if they think they control us by just saying no, they're really not; they're forcing us to go in other directions."

  Kaufman said his back was to the wall. Angry parents had objected to any pool at all. "Parents and faculty, they have really hit the wall with you folks. They're saying, 'We're done! Enough is enough.'"

  Later that week, a compromise was reached. The pool was expanded slightly, and a "bullpen" was added within the shield, where interested students could approach cordoned-off reporters. The press agreed to all previous demands and two new ones: no kid would be approached on the way to school that morning, and no photographs of any of the injured survivors would be used. The kids finally felt a sense of victory.

  ____

  Mr. D was excited about the rally. But he was also worried about the new kids. It was a principal's thing--the incoming freshmen always commanded his thoughts this time of year. Kids would either assimilate quickly or spend four years struggling to fit in. The first two weeks were crucial.

  Mr. D chose to combat the chasm by highlighting it. He met with the academic and sports teams and the student senate over the summer, and he gave every kid and every teacher the same mission: These kids will never understand you. They will never endure your pain, never bridge the gap between social classes that you did. So help them.

  By and large, they went for it. Kids thought they were overwhelmed by their own struggle, but what they really needed was someone else to look out for. They had to salve a different sort of pain to comprehend how to heal their own.

  Mr. D's team brainstormed up a slew of activities to grease the transition. The wall tile project seemed like an easy one. For three years, kids had been painting four-inch ceramic tiles in art class. Five hundred had been plastered above the lockers to brighten the Columbine corridors. Fifteen hundred new tiles would be added before school resumed, representing the single most noticeable change to the interior. For one morning, kids could express their grief or hope or desires visually and abstractly, without the intervention of words that wouldn't come.

  ____

  Brian Fuselier didn't want his parents standing in the human shield. "The more you do that, the more you make it unnatural," he told his dad. Brian was doing OK with the trauma; he just wanted his life back, and his school back, the way it had been.

  "That's just not going to happen," his father said.

  Agent Fuselier took Monday morning off from the investigation to join the chain. Mimi stood beside him. By seven A.M. kids were streaming in with their parents. By 7:30, the shield was five hundred strong. It would grow much larger. The parents applauded each student's arrival.

  Most of the kids wore matching white T-shirts emblazoned with their rallying cry: WE ARE on the front and COLUMBINE on the back. Small contingents had opted for their own messages: YES, I BELIEVE IN GOD OR VICTORS NOT VICTIMS.

  Frank DeAngelis took the microphone and a group of kids screamed, "We love you, Mr. D!"

  He teared up at the welcome, then delivered a touching speech. "You may be feeling a little anxious," he said. "But you need to know that you are not in this alone."

  The school's American flags were raised from half-mast for the first time since April 20, symbolically ending the period of mourning. A ribbon across the entrance was cut, and Patrick Ireland led the student body in.

  44. Bombs Are Hard

  Eric was counting on a slow recovery. He was less concerned about killing hundreds of people on April 20 than about tormenting millions for years. His audience was the target. He wanted everyone to agonize: the student body, residents of Jeffco, the American public, the human race.

  Eric amused himself with the idea of coming back as a ghost to haunt survivors. He would make noises to trigger flashbacks, and drive them all insane. Anticipation satiated Eric for months. Then it was time to act.

  Senior year, just before Halloween, he began assembling his arsenal. Eric sat down in his room with a stack of fireworks, split each one down the side, and tapped the shiny black powder into a coffee can. Once he had a sufficient volume, he tipped the can and guided a fine little trickle into a carbon dioxide cartridge. He measured it out carefully, almost to the rim. Then he applied a wick, sealed it off, and set it aside. One cricket, ready for detonation. He was pleased with his work. He assembled nine more.

  The pipe bombs required a lot more gunpowder, as well as a PVC pipe to house each one. Eric assembled four of those that day. The first three he designated the Alpha batch. Not bad, but he could do better. He set them aside and tried a different approach. He built just one bomb for the Beta batch. Better. Still room for improvement. That was enough for one day.

  Eric drew up a chart to record his production data. He set up columns to log each batch by name, size, quantity, shrapnel content, and power load. Then he rated his work. Six of his eight batches would earn an "excellent" assessment. His worst performance was "O.K."

  The next day, Eric got right back to it, producing six more pipe bombs--the rest of the Beta batch. Lat
er, he would create Charlie, Delta, Echo, and Foxtrot, using military lingo for all of the batches, except that soldiers use Bravo, not Beta.

  Eric penned nearly a dozen new journal entries in the next two months. "I have a goal to destroy as much as possible," he wrote, "so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that."

  It was a mark of Eric's ruthlessness that he comprehended the pain and consciously fought the urge to spare it. "I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom," he wrote. "I have to turn off my feelings."

  Keep one thing in mind, he said: he wanted to burn the world. That would be hard. He had begun producing the explosives, and it was a lot of work. Ten pipe bombs and ten puny crickets after two days' effort. Those would not destroy much. "God I want to torch and level everything in this whole fucking area," he said, "but bombs of that size are hard to make."

  Eric took a few moments to enjoy the dream. He envisioned half of Denver on fire: napalm streams eating the skin off skyscrapers, explosive gas tanks ripping through residential garages. Napalm recipes were available online. The ingredients were readily attainable. But he had to be realistic. "It will be very tricky getting all of our supplies, explosives, weaponry, ammo, and then hiding it all and then actually planting it all," he said. A lot could go wrong in the next six months, and if they did get busted, "we start killing then and there. I aint going out without a fight."

  Eric repeated that last line almost verbatim in an English essay. The assignment was to react to a quote from literature, and Eric had chosen this line from Euripides' tragedy Medea: "No, like some yellow-eyed beast that has killed its hunters let me lie down on the hounds' bodies and the broken spears." Medea was declaring that she would die fighting, Eric wrote. They would never take her without a struggle. He repeated that sentiment seven times in a page and a quarter. He described Medea as brave and courageous, tough and strong and hard as stone. It is one of the most impassioned public essays Eric left behind.