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Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold

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File:Harrisklebold.jpg
Yearbook photographs of the two perpetrators.

Eric David Harris (April 9, 1981 – April 20, 1999) and Dylan Bennet Klebold (September 11, 1981 – April 20, 1999), both high school seniors, were the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre in Jefferson County, Colorado (near Denver and Littleton), U.S., on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, killing 12 classmates and one teacher. Both Harris, 18 years old, and Klebold, 17, committed suicide after the killings.

Early life

Eric David Harris was born in Wichita, Kansas. His family included parents Wayne and Kathy (both born in Colorado) and an older brother, Kevin. The family relocated often as Wayne Harris was a U.S. Air Force transport pilot. The Harris family moved to the Littleton area in July 1993, when Wayne retired from the military.

The Harrises rented for the first three years that they lived in the area, and it was during this time that Eric met and befriended Dylan Klebold. In 1996, the Harrises bought a house just south of Columbine High School. When Eric started attending Columbine he met Brooks Brown riding the school bus. Dylan had been friends with Brooks since the first grade, so the three became good friends. Dylan's neighbors felt that he came from a stable family, but noted that Eric Harris exercised a powerful influence on Dylan after 1996.

Dylan Bennet Klebold was born in Lakewood, Colorado. His family included parents Thomas and Susan (Yassenoff) and older brother Byron. Susan regularly attended her local synagogue and was schooled in the temple. Susan's father Leo Yassenoff, was also an influential member of the Jewish community and actively a part of Temple Israel. The family had resided in the area south of Lakewood for many years. He attended Normandy Elementary School (grades 1 and 2), then attended Governor’s Ranch Elementary School where he was part of the CHIPS (Challenging High Intellectual Potential Students) program.

High school

According to early accounts of the shooting, Harris and Klebold were unpopular outsiders and frequent targets of bullying at their high school. Later investigation showed, however, that the notion they were unpopular and outsiders was largely a myth, although the idea had become ingrained in popular accounts. Regardless, they and their group of friends had often been the target of bullying at Columbine, a fact that has been agreed upon by most investigators to have been the root of their anger. [1] They were also said to be members of a group of goths at Columbine who called themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia, although they had no particular connection with the group, and did not appear in a group photo of the Trenchcoat Mafia in the 1998 Columbine yearbook. [2] However, Harris' father claimed Eric was involved with the Trenchcoat Mafia in a 911 call he made on April 20, 1999. Harris had a brief romantic relationship with a woman seven years older than he, Brenda Parker, about a year before the shootings. [3] Klebold attended the high school prom three days before the shootings with a classmate named Robyn Anderson. [4] Klebold also wrote a love letter to a recipient whose identity the police have withheld, whom Klebold called "the one I truly loved", which referred vaguely to going away soon, suicide, and not being able to survive in this world. [5]

Soon after they became friends, the two boys linked their personal computers on a network and both played many games over the Internet. Harris created a set of levels for the game Doom which later became known as the "Harris levels". Eric had a web presence under the handle "REB" (short for Rebel). Harris' known cyber aliases included "REB", "Rebldomakr", "Rebdoomer", and "Rebdomine" while Dylan went by the names "VoDKa" and "VoDkA". Eric's various websites hosted Doom and Quake files and team information for those he gamed with online. The sites also openly showed hatred for the people of their neighborhood and the world in general. When Eric and Dylan began experimenting with pipe bombs, they posted results of the explosions on the websites.

Harris was a fan of musical groups such as KMFDM, Orbital, The Prodigy, and Rammstein. [6] Soon after the shooting, KMFDM posted material on their website condemning Harris and Klebold's violence and denied that their music had anything to do with it. [7]

In 1997, Jefferson County Sheriff's Office investigator Michael Guerra looked at Harris' website after the parents of Brooks Brown discovered Harris was making threats aimed at their son following a falling out between them. Guerra wrote a draft affidavit for a search warrant, but the affidavit was never filed. This information was not revealed to the public until September 2001, though it was known the entire time.

The two boys got into trouble early for breaking into a locked van and stealing tools. In January 1998, they were arrested on charges of criminal trespassing and theft. Eric and Dylan left a good impression on the juvenile officers, who offered to delete the boys' criminal records if they agreed to attend a diversionary program and stay out of trouble. Eric was forced to attend anger management classes where, again, he made a good impression.

Despite these outward appearances of calm, as time went on, the boys' rage continued to grow. The two made a video for a school project that showed them pretending to shoot fake guns and "snuffing" students in the hallway of their school as "Hitmen for Hire". They both displayed themes of violence in their creative writing projects for school, despite disapproval from their teachers.

Brooks Brown saw Eric Harris entering the school on the morning of the massacre and scolded him for skipping a class. Harris reportedly said, "Brooks, I like you. Now get out of here. Go home." Brown evacuated to his nearby home. Upon hearing the gunshots, he informed the police by phone.

Heavily armed

Robyn Anderson, 18-year old Columbine student and old friend of Dylan Klebold's, made a straw purchase of two shotguns and a rifle for Klebold, in violation of the Gun Control Act of 1968. Anderson was never charged for her part in the straw purchase in exchange for her cooperation with the investigation that followed the shootings. After illegally acquiring the weapons, Harris and Klebold sawed off the barrels of the shotguns, an act that is a felony under the National Firearms Act.

The shooters also possessed a TEC-DC9 semi-automatic handgun. The manufacturer of the TEC-DC9 first sold it to Miami-based Navegar Incorporated. It was then sold to Zander's Sporting Goods in Baldwin, Illinois in 1994. The gun was later sold to Thornton, Colorado firearms dealer Larry Russel. In violation of federal law, Russel did not keep records of the sale, yet he determined that the purchaser of the gun was twenty-one years of age or older. He was unable to identify the pictures of Klebold, Anderson, or Harris shown to him by police after the shooting. Two men named Mark Manes and Philip Duran were found to have supplied weapons to the two boys.

Some of the bombs that the boys made were crude and made with carbon dioxide canisters, galvanized pipe, and metal propane bottles. The bombs were primed with matches placed at one end of the bomb. The boys had striker tips on their sleeves. When they rubbed against the bomb, the match head would light the fuse.

More complex bombs, such as the one that detonated on the corner of South Wadsworth Boulevard and Ken Caryl Avenue, had timers. The two largest bombs built were found in the school cafeteria and were made from small propane tanks. Only one of these bombs went off, and that one only detonated partially. If they both had gone off, the upstairs library likely would have crashed down on the cafeteria, killing and injuring over 600 people in those areas of the school -- which was Dylan and Eric's mission.

File:Eric harris dylan klebold.jpg
The two perpetrators, captured on Columbine High School's security cameras.

A journal found in Harris's bedroom contained almost every detail that the boys planned to follow after 5:00 a.m. on April 20 1999, a date that may or may not have been deliberately chosen to coincide with the 110th birthday of Adolf Hitler. In the perpetrators' journal entries, the pair often wrote about events such as the Oklahoma City bombing, Waco, and other tragic events that occurred on April 19, including blurbs and notes on how they wished to "outdo" these events, especially Oklahoma City. The fact that the shooters initially planned and failed to blow up Columbine, and not just shoot students, is an indication of how they instead wished to overshadow the events that had occurred, respectively, four and six years earlier. It is believed that the original intended date of the attack may have been April 19, the preceding Monday, but due to problems with the creation of one of the bombs, or perhaps to avoid involving a close friend who was planning on being absent April 20, the date was moved forward. People who knew the perpetrators have also stated that they were not obsessed with Nazism nor did they worship or admire Adolf Hitler, as has been speculated in the media. It is believed that their earliest ideas may have first been discussed in January 1998 after Eric and Dylan were convicted of breaking into a van and each received ten months of juvenile intervention counseling and community service. They were released early from the program due to good behavior, a fact about which they later gloated in the memoirs they taped before the shootings.

The diary contained notes on "good hiding places" and areas with poor lighting that could be utilized. The attack was to start at exactly 11:17 a.m., when Eric had calculated the largest possible number of students would be located in the cafeteria. Additional reports suggest Harris and Klebold considered the prospect of concluding their massacre by hijacking an airliner and crashing it into New York City's Empire State Building [8]. These early writings were most likely outlets for venting frustration rather than true intentions to carry out such ambitious plans.

Harris wanted to join the United States Marine Corps, but his application was rejected shortly before the shootings because he was taking the drug Luvox® (Fluvoxamine maleate, a SSRI antidepressant) that he was required to take as part of anger management therapy. According to the recruiting officer, Eric never knew of this rejection, however. Some theorized that Luvox's side-effects contributed to what happened, though some of Eric's friends theorized that he had stopped taking the drug beforehand (which could have triggered an even more violent reaction, as stopping Luvox suddenly can enhance negative side-effects). The autopsy reports showed that he had low therapeutic levels of Luvox in his system at the time of death.

Media confusion

Initially the shooters were believed to be members of a clique that called themselves the "Trenchcoat Mafia", a small group of Columbine's "outcasts" who wore heavy black trenchcoats. However, it has since been discovered that they were only friends with one of the members of the group, Chris Morris, and that most of the primary members of the Trenchcoat Mafia had graduated or dropped out of the school by the time that Harris and Klebold committed the massacre. Most did not even know the shooters, apart from their association with Morris.

Legacy

Main article: Columbine High School massacre

Today, Harris and Klebold have somewhat of a mixed reputation. Though obviously heavily condemned for their rampage, some still regard the boys as somewhat tragic figures who were victims of circumstance. A great deal of sociological investigation into high school subculture was done in response to the killings, with the hopes of determining what sort of factors led to the boys' breakdown and whether or not future massacres in other schools could be successfully prevented. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks many North American high school students were forced to attend seminars that encouraged tolerance and condemned bullying.

Education activist John Taylor Gatto mentions in a footnote in The Underground History of American Education that Columbine High School was "the site of a much-boasted-of scientific management revolution in 1994. Students, men under military discipline, and employees in post offices, hospitals, and other large systems are forced into a condition of less than complete sanity. They are dangerous, as history has shown again and again." (emphasis added) [9] Little attention has otherwise been given to the possibility that it was the compulsory school environment itself which drove Harris and Klebold to carry out their plan.

  • Heart of America, A Uwe Boll film inspired by the Columbine School Massacre
  • Elephant, inspired by the Columbine massacre; a fictionalized version of events.
  • Zero Day, a film about a school shooting shot home-movie style.
  • Home Room, a film on the more crude aspects of High School, including bullying, drug use and teenage pregnancy. It is a fictionalized version of the Columbine shooting.
  • Bowling for Columbine, a film about the gun culture of the United States, and with a segment on the massacre.
  • Bang Bang You're Dead, a popular high school play concerning a young man pushed to the breaking point. This was later made into a movie starring Ben Foster.
  • Dawn Anna, a movie of Dawn Anna's life, including the murder of her daughter at Columbine.
  • Duck! The Carbine High Massacre a black comedy released in 2000.
  • Hey Nostradamus! a novel written by Douglas Coupland about a fictionalized account of a High School massacre in 1988 based in Vancouver told from four points of view.
  • Give a Boy a Gun, a novel written by Todd Strasser that gives accounts of a school shooting from administrators, students, parents and the shooters that is not unlike Columbine.
  • Columbinus A dramatic theatrical collage depicting the days leading up to the massacre, created by the United States Theater Project
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