Columbine (53 page)

"Whoa!" she said. "So is it difficult for you to see that video?"

"No."

"It's not? OK."

He felt good watching it, actually. He felt a sense of accomplishment.

Patrick got a perplexing voice mail one morning in the spring of 2005. It was an old friend he hadn't heard from in a while, wishing him well "today," hoping he was all right.
Huh. Now, what could that mean?

That afternoon, Patrick dated a document at work: April 20.
Was it anniversary time already again?

____

Linda Sanders felt every anniversary. Her mood began to sour each April; she got jittery, she could feel it coming.

She tried dating; that was impossible. Dave lingered, and men resented his presence. He was a national hero--who could compete with that?

"It's, like,
Top Dave Sanders
," she said. "It's not fair to another man to be compared to the man I've built. He's so high on a pedestal he's in heaven."

She knew Dave would have wanted her to find someone. She pictured him up there saying, "Linda, I want somebody to hug you."

"It's impossible," Linda said. "There's nobody coming. I'm destined to be alone because of the way he left."

Linda withdrew. She stopped answering the door, stopped answering the phone. For two years she hardly spoke at all. She sedated herself with Valium and alcohol. "I was like a vacant person," she said, "going through the motions of life. I'd go to the store, I was going places, but I was empty."

Her father worried. What could he do?

"I want my Linda back," he said.

Linda never went back to work. She walks every day, and she looks after her parents. She does not go near the Columbine Lounge--too many memories, and too close to alcohol. She can't watch movies with guns in them or read thrillers.

One of those Aprils, years after getting sober, she felt a sudden, desperate need for help. "I ran out the front door and I looked for any neighbor that was home," she said. "I needed a hug, you know, I needed a hug. So I knocked on my neighbor's door, she wasn't home, so I went to my next neighbor, she was home. I walked in and she was reading a book. 'You're it,' I said. And I can't remember her name. I said I needed a hug. She looked at me and I was crying and she said OK. She gave me a hug."

Linda still gets letters now and then from strangers who hear Dave's story or hers and sense immediately how it was for Linda. Most people don't. Most people see kids and they see parents. Every once in a while, someone gets how it was for the wife. A woman wrote to tell Linda she understood. "That letter came on a real bad day," Linda said. "And it carried me. I hold that letter every night. That woman has no idea what she did for me."

____

Several survivors published memoirs, and Brooks Brown wrote his take on the killers and his ordeal. None garnered a fraction of the attention of Misty Bernall's book.

____

In September 2003, the last known layer of the cover-up finally came out. It had unraveled over the course of a full year. It started when someone in the sheriff's department found some paperwork in a three-ring binder unrelated to the Columbine case. It was a brief police report on Eric Harris. Eight pages from his Web site were attached. They included the "I HATE" rants, boasts about the missions, and descriptions of the first pipe bombs. Eric bragged about detonating one. The report was dated August 7, 1997, more than six months earlier than reports uncovered to date.

The report was brought to the new Jeffco sheriff, Ted Mink. He called a press conference. "This discovery and its implications are upsetting," he said. "The obvious implication... is that the sheriff's office had some knowledge of Eric Harris's and Dylan Klebold's activities in the years prior to the Columbine shootings." He released the documents and asked Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar to conduct an outside investigation.

Salazar assigned a team, which discovered that more crucial documents were missing. Much of Mike Guerra's file related to his premassacre investigation had disappeared--both the physical and electronic copies. In February 2004, the attorney general issued a report stating that Jeffco was not negligent, but should have followed through with the warrant and searched Eric's house more than a year before Columbine. It also said files were still missing.

His team continued investigating. Some people refused to cooperate. The interview report on former sheriff John Stone stated that he was visibly angry and considered the investigation politically motivated. "We were unable to ask Stone any questions or have any meaningful dialogue regarding our investigation due his apparent state of agitation," it concluded.

The breakthrough came a month later, when investigators went back for a third interview with Guerra. This time, he was more forthcoming. He spilled the one secret Jeffco officials had been good at keeping: the existence of the Open Space meeting. Investigators quietly began confronting other officials who had attended. They got some colorful responses. Former undersheriff John Dunaway said he believed Guerra was upset that "he might be viewed as some kind of blithering idiot. That he, you know, was sitting on top of all of this."

In August 2004, the Colorado attorney general called a grand jury to flush the file out and consider indictments. The panel swore in eleven witnesses. The file was never recovered, though investigators were able to reconstruct most of it.

The probe turned up other startling discoveries. According to the grand jury report, Division Chief John Kiekbusch's assistant, Judy Searle, testified that in September 1999, he asked her to find the Guerra file. He told her to search the computer network and the physical files, and to do it in secret. He instructed her specifically not to tell the officers involved. Searle testified under oath that she found that suspicious. She normally would have started her search by talking to those officers. Searle searched, and discovered nothing. She gave Kiekbusch the news: there seemed to be no record anywhere, no sign the file ever existed. She watched his reaction. She testified that he appeared "somewhat relieved."

According to that same report, in 2000, Kiekbusch instructed her to shred a large pile of Columbine reports. Searle testified that she did not find the request unusual at the time, because Kiekbusch was preparing to leave the office, and Searle assumed he was purging duplicates. She complied.

The grand jury released its report on September 16, 2004. It found that the Guerra file should have been stored in three separate locations, both physical and electronic. All three were destroyed, it concluded--lapparently during the summer of 1999. It described that as "troubling."

It was also disturbed by attempts to suppress the information--specifically, the Open Space meeting, attended by Stone, Dunaway, Kiekbusch, Thomas, Guerra, and the county attorney, among others. "The topic of the Open Space meeting, the press conference omissions and the actions of Lt. Kiekbusch raise suspicions to the grand jury about the potential that the files were deliberately destroyed," its report stated.

But every witness denied involvement in the destruction, the report said. Given that, the grand jury could not determine whether the suspicious activity "is tied to a particular person or the result of a particular crime." Accordingly, it concluded that there was insufficient evidence to indict.

Kiekbusch filed a formal objection. He said the shredding was limited to drafts or copies. His assistant's perception of his relief was a mystery to him.

He said the grand jury implied that he had attempted to cover up, hide, or destroy documents. He unequivocally denied all of it.

____

Brian Rohrbough got most of what he sought: nearly all the evidence came out, and the national response protocol changed. But he never felt like he'd won. He gave up on justice. No one would pay; nothing would change.

Most of the top officials left the Jeffco sheriff's department. Stone survived the recall petition drive, but did not run for reelection. The one county official to come out of Columbine glowing was DA Dave Thomas. Many victims had perceived him as their champion. In 2004, he gave up his position to run for Congress. Polls indicated a toss-up, and the race gained national prominence and funding. The Open Space scandal broke less than two months before Election Day. Thomas's poll numbers plunged. Money dried up. He lost big. In 2007, he ran for school board. He now helps oversee 150 Jefferson county schools, including Columbine High.

Brian Rohrbough hurled himself into a different passion. He picketed abortion clinics and rose to president of Colorado Right to Life. There, he butted heads with the conservative parent organization, which he considered far too liberal. The last straw came when Rohrbough signed an open letter berating Christian conservative leader James Dobson as soft on abortion. It was published as a full-page newspaper ad. National Right to Life expelled his chapter. Dobson's organization, Focus on the Family, issued a news release calling it "a rogue and divisive group."

Later, Brian ran for office. He joined an obscure third party that got itself on the ballot in three states. It nominated Brian for vice president of the United States.

Brian wasn't always mad. He remarried and adopted two children, who gave him great comfort. At work, he could be surprisingly tranquil. He continued to run his custom audio business, doing most of the labor himself. He loved the precision work: tweaking the acoustic gauges, setting time delays for the front speakers just a fraction of an instant long, so the chords struck the driver's eardrum at precisely the same moment as the sound waves rolling in from the rear. Exquisite harmony. Brian could get lost for hours in his workshop. When a customer stopped by for a consultation, he was as gentle as Mr. Rogers buttoning up his cardigan.

Then he would think about Danny. Or a stray thought would lead him back to Columbine. The scowl returned.

____

Brad and Misty Bernall got out of Colorado. They moved to a hamlet called Blowing Rock, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in the heart of the North Carolina mountains. They hated it out there. More isolation than they'd bargained for. Their marriage was shaky sometimes, but they held on. Nearly all the parents of the Thirteen stayed together.

Brad had struggled mightily in the early days, but as time wore on friends said he came to terms with Cassie's death. Misty smoldered. Nearly a decade later, friends described her as getting angry and frustrated at the mention of the martyr controversy. Misty felt she had been robbed, twice. Eric and Dylan took her daughter; journalists and detectives snatched away the miracle.

____

Mr. D found new ways to amuse his kids at school. For each homecoming assembly, he impersonated a celebrity. One year, the homecoming theme was Copacabana, and Mr. D strode out dressed as Barry Manilow, in a fluffy blond wig, white leisure suit, and Day-Glo Hawaiian shirt.

"Hey, Mr. D, nice shoes!" a girl yelled. He kicked his leg up to show off his four-inch platform heels. The kids ate it up. The assembly was standard high school: cheers, awards, a hands-free cake-eating contest, and a blindfolded obstacle course. Typical raucous confusion ruled the corridors before and after.

Every now and then, on a nice day, Mr. D wandered outside for serenity. The heavy door swung shut behind him, the bolt caught, and the frenzy of nervous energy ceased. It was so still. Each step, he could hear the grass squish beneath his shoes. A teacher strolled to her car in the distance. Her keys tingled--they could be dangling from his own hand. He made the short hike up Rebel Hill. The crosses were gone, their holes filled, but the grass had not grown back along the path.

At the top of the mesa, the back side of Rebel Hill was deserted. When he stopped there long enough, he would see the prairie dogs. At first there was no sign of them, no movement whatsoever, save the overgrown grasses bending softly to the breeze. After fifteen minutes of silence, they began to scurry about the clumps of mountain aster, foraging for food, socializing, grooming each other, fattening up for the winter. Six months after the tragedy, Mr. D had run into a Japanese film crew up there, enraptured by the charming rodents. The crew had come to shoot a documentary about the massacre; they had expected teen angst and American social Darwinism. They were seduced by the tranquillity--less than a hundred yards from the school. They shot hours of footage of the twelve-inch prairie dogs.

The Japanese crew saw this place somewhat differently than Americans did. Their depiction was by turns tumultuous, brutal, explosive, and serene.

____

School shooters faded as a national fear for a while. They worsened in Europe. They returned to the States in an uglier form in the fall of 2006, when a spate of adult killers realized that a school setting would reap attention. There were four shootings in a three-week span, beginning in late August 2006. The shooters used various tactics to resemble the Columbine killers, including trench coats and Web sites mentioning them by name. They appeared to see Eric and Dylan's legacy as a marketing opportunity. National attention focused on five girls killed in a one-room Amish school in Pennsylvania. But in Denver, the Platte Canyon shooting was particularly tough.

Platte Canyon High School was just one county over, and the police force so small that the Jeffco sheriff commanded the response team. It was a big national story for a few hours; then it was over. In Jeffco, it hit much harder. The Denver TV stations stayed live with the story all afternoon. Everyone was transfixed. This time it was a hostage standoff, and the SWAT team did rush the building. The gunman had only two girls left at that point. When the cops rushed in, he shot one in the head, then took care of himself. He died instantly, but the victim was medevaced out. The city watched her helicopter take off and land on the rooftop of St. Anthony's; then viewers waited, hoping, for two hours. Doctors held a press conference early in the evening. She'd never had a chance.

The next morning's
Rocky Mountain News
was filled with photos eerily like April 20: survivors sobbing, praying, holding on tight.