Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold
 | It has been suggested that sections of this article be split out into articles titled Eric David Harris and Dylan Bennet Klebold. (Discuss) |
| It has been suggested that sections of this article be split out into another article titled Dylan Bennet Klebold. (Discuss) |
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 parents were Wayne and Kathy, and he had an older brother, Kevin. The family relocated often as Wayne Harris was a U.S. Air Force transport pilot; Kathy was a homemaker. The Harris family moved to the Littleton area in July 1993, when Wayne retired from the military.
The Harrises lived in rented accommodation for the first three years that they lived in the Littleton 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. Eric's brother Kevin started at the University of Colorado, where his A-average and status as tight end on the football team caused some to speculate that Eric was troubled by "sibling rivalry" [1].
Dylan Bennet Klebold was born in Lakewood, Colorado. His parents, Thomas and Susan, and older brother Byron, attended a Lutheran church with their children,[2] the boys attending confirmation classes in accordance with Lutheran tradition; at home, the family also observed Jewish rituals in keeping with Susan's familial heritage [3][4]. Susan's grandfather, Leo Yassenoff, was an influential builder and philanthropist. Dylan's father, Thomas, was raised by a brother 18 years his senior, as each of his parents had died while he was young.
The family had resided in Deer Creek Canyon, south of Lakewood, since 1990. Thomas ran a small real estate business from home, whereas Susan was an employment counselor. Dylan 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 [5].
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 an 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 and/or people they knew 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. They were also said to have been part of a group 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 [6]. 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.
Klebold attended the high school prom three days before the shootings with a classmate named Robyn Anderson [7]. 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 [8]. The letter ended with a request for the girl to leave a note in Klebold's locker, which was near the school library--the place where Klebold and Harris killed most of their victims, including themselves. It is unknown if the girl responded.
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 Rammstein, KMFDM, Orbital, and The Prodigy [9]. 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 [10].
In March 1998, 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 by 60 Minutes, though it was known by the police 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 (ie:community service) 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 [citation needed].
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 the school grounds, upon hearing the gunshots, he informed the police by a neighbors cell 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 Harris and 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 to a length below 18 inches, 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.
Motivations
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 or the day corrolating with 420 (cannabis culture). In the perpetrators' journal entries, the pair often wrote about events such as the Oklahoma City bombing, Waco, and other 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 back.
People who knew the perpetrators have stated that they were not obsessed with Nazism nor did they worship or admire Adolf Hitler, as has been speculated in the media. A journal of Eric Harris, released in July 2006, did however confirm a strong admiration of Nazism, Social Darwinism and genocide.[11] 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 [12].
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. 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; the autopsy reports showed that he had Luvox in his system at the time of death.[1]
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 member of the group, Chris Morris, and that most of the primary members of the Trenchcoat Mafia had left 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
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' actions 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 attended compulsory seminars that encouraged tolerance and condemned bullying. The results of this have been debated. Some see the increased emphasis on bullying prevention as helpful toward decreasing the chance of such an incident happening again. Others see the programs as useless, either failing to lessen bullying or failing to decrease the chance of other school shootings. A third group of people see the increased emphasis on bullying prevention as a beneficial result of the school shootings, but ultimately feel that since bullying wasn't the cause of the shootings, or at least not the sole cause, the seminars won't ultimately decrease the chance of another school shooting.
Sources And External Links
- www.dylanklebold.com - Information on school shootings
- A Columbine Site - Comprehensive, frequently updated information on the school shooting
- Crimelibrary feature
- The Columbine Report - 11,000 page report on investigative findings
- Makers of Luvox sued by victims' families
- ^ The Columbine Tapes, TIME 20 December 1999