Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (27 page)

The two of them took swigs from the water bottles on the school lunch tables. A witness then heard one of the gunmen say: ‘Today the world’s going to come to an end. Today’s the day we die.’

Klebold threw something at the propane bomb. The cylinder failed to detonate, but there was a small explosion. This started a fire which set the sprinklers off.

Denver Metro S.W.A.T. arrived and Jefferson County Undersheriff John Dunaway authorised the S.W.A.T. teams to enter the school. A live bomb was found nearby at Wadsworth and Chatfield, and at 11.55 the command post received a description of one of the suspects. He was, informants said, ‘Eric Harris, five foot ten inches, thin build, shaved blond hair, black pants and white T-shirt, light blue gym backpack.’

Ambulances turned up to evacuate the wounded. Meanwhile Harris and Klebold wandered around the cafeteria, inspecting the damage they had done. They looked in the kitchen, then went back upstairs to the library.

The media had already picked up on the story and the command post asked Channel Seven’s news helicopter to pick up a deputy so he could make an aerial survey of the school. Meanwhile Fire Department paramedics attempted to rescue Lance Kirklin, Sean Graves and Anne Marie Hochhalter who were lying wounded outside the cafeteria, but the gunmen fired on them from a second-storey library window. Deputy Walker spotted the muzzle flashes and returned fire, and Deputy Gardner joined in the firefight. Then, with the Denver police officers providing cover fire, the paramedics managed to retrieve the three wounded teenagers from in front of the cafeteria. The gunfire from the library window then stopped and Deputy Gardner seized the opportunity to evacuate the 15 students who were taking cover behind his patrol car. More students made their escape through the side door of the cafeteria.

At 12.06, the first S.W.A.T. team arrived at the east main entrance to the school. Manwaring then ordered Deputy Allen Simmons to take his Jefferson County S.W.A.T. team into the school through the south-east doors. Using the fire truck as a shield, Manwaring led the second team around to the west side where students had reported gunfire. However, by this time, Harris and Klebold were already dead. They shot themselves shortly after that last gunshot was fired from the library window.

The triage point at Caley and Yukon began dispatching the wounded to hospital by ambulance and helicopter. Bomb squads from Jefferson County, Denver and Arapahoe County were soon supplemented by bomb experts from Littleton Fire Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). They began examining the diversionary device found at Wadsworth and Chatfield, while others were sent to the homes of the suspects.

At the command post on Pierce, there was a report that a gunman and hostages were at the front door of the school. Moments later a lone student came out of the main door and ran to the fire truck. The teenager was quickly checked for weapons. It was soon ascertained that he was not one of the gunmen.

On board Channel Seven’s news helicopter Sergeant Phil Domenico conducted a survey of the school’s roof. Meanwhile extra staff were called into Jefferson County Sheriff’s office which was now inundated with calls from the world’s media. Parents and students were gathered at Columbine Public Library and Leawood Elementary School, where counselling was provided.

An officer from the Salvation Army called in a mobile kitchen, which was set up near the command post. Then the Red Cross moved into Clement Park to provide food and water for the media, students and their families.

At 12.17, a young man wearing a white shirt and black pants and carrying a .22 rifle and a knife was see walking along the west side of the school. He was arrested at gunpoint. The rifle was found not to be loaded. The young man said he had heard of the shooting on the TV and came to ‘help the police’.

At 12.20, a student being interviewed on TV said that the gunmen shot one of his friends. He said that there were two or three gunmen and they were armed with automatic weapons, sawn-off shotguns and pipe bombs. He did not know their names but said they were part of Columbine’s ‘Trench Coat Mafia’.

The Trench Coat Mafia was a loose association of disaffected youths who complained that they were harassed by the school’s athletes – the ‘jocks’. There were some 21 members. Some worked at Blackjack Pizza with Harris and Klebold. Others knew them from school. They identified themselves by wearing black trench coats or dusters. In the senior class photograph of 1999 several members – including Harris and Klebold – posed as if pointing weapons at the camera. Some had actually seen the pipe bombs and CO
₂
cartridge devices Harris and Klebold had made, but none of them knew that they were planning the Columbine killings.

By 12.35 Manwaring’s S.W.A.T. team was at the back entrance of the school on west side’s upper level. Their first objective was to rescue two students lying in front of the west doors. The fire truck inched up to the west doors and two Denver S.W.A.T. members grabbed Richard Castaldo. They laid him on the bumper of the fire truck, then Deputy Taborsky transferred him to his patrol car and rushed off to seek medical assistance. Next the S.W.A.T. team tried to retrieve the bodies of Rachel Scott and Daniel Rohrbough. The situation remained chaotic as, at this point, no one knew the gunmen were dead. Students inside the school continued calling 911, their parents and the media with reports of hostage taking, explosions and as many as eight roaming gunmen as well as the sound of gunshots coming from the auditorium, the gymnasium, the music rooms, the science block, the business wing and the school’s offices. The firing they heard probably came from S.W.A.T. team during their rescue of Richard Castaldo at the school’s upper west entrance. Meanwhile other schools in the area were ‘locked down’ with no one being allowed to enter or leave.

Manwaring’s S.W.A.T. team then asked for a floor plan of the school. Soon after another ten-man S.W.A.T. team from Jefferson County, under the command of Sergeant Barry Williams, arrived at the command post on Pierce Street.

Deputy Simmons, leader of the first S.W.A.T. team that entered the school on the east side, called for back up. The school covered 250,000-square-foot and had numerous rooms and hallways that had to be searched. It was full of students hiding, some injured and in need of assistance.

Two S.W.A.T. marksmen positioned themselves on the rooftops of houses on West Polk Avenue, the first street south of the school. From there, they had a clear view over the south car park, the cafeteria and the library windows.

Williams’ S.W.A.T. team moved into position at the north-west corner of the school, directly opposite the point where Simmons’ team had entered the building. They planned to make their way to the cafeteria and the library. But a bomb blocked the outside west doors to the upper level and the library and instead they had to enter by breaking the window of the teachers’ lounge, situated next to the cafeteria.

Inside they were met with the deafening noise of fire alarms and the flash of strobe lights from the burglar-alarm system. Tiles were hanging from the ceiling and water was pouring under the door to the cafeteria. Along with the noise of the sprinklers, there was a hissing sound, which Williams feared might be coming from a broken gas pipe. Quickly his team cleared the kitchen and back storage areas, evacuating the staff and students hiding there through the teacher’s lounge window. They evacuated another 60 students from the school’s music area on the second floor, and continued to work from west to east on the lower level while Simmons’ S.W.A.T. team worked from east to west on the upper.

Simmons’ S.W.A.T. team evacuated 30 students and faculty from south-facing classrooms on the upper level before meeting up with Williams’ team who had, by then, cleared the stairs to that level. The teams continued to receive warnings from the squads inspecting the diversionary bombs placed on Wadsworth that there could be similar devices planted throughout the school, and also received messages from the S.W.A.T. marksmen that there were more injured students on the upper levels, including one student who had hung a banner out of the window with ‘1 bleeding to death’ scrawled across it. A little later three males dressed in black clothing and matching the general description of the gunmen were arrested in a field north of the high school. They were not Columbine students and identified themselves as the ‘Splatter Punks’. They insisted they had shown up at Columbine High School out of curiosity. Cleared of any involvement in the shooting, they were released.

At 2.30, President Clinton was scheduled to make an announcement about the American economy. Instead he talked about Columbine.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, we all know there has been a terrible shooting at a high school in Littleton, Colorado,’ he said. ‘Because the situation, as I left to come out here, apparently is ongoing, I think it would be inappropriate for me to say anything other than I hope the American people will be praying for the students, the parents and the teachers and we’ll wait for events to unfold and there will be more to say.’

In the library, Patrick Ireland, who had been shot, slipped in and out of consciousness. Nevertheless, he slowly made his way to the west window. Sergeant Domenico in the news helicopter spotted him trying to climb out of a broken window on the second floor. Below him was a concrete sidewalk. Deputies sent in an armoured vehicle with members of the Lakewood S.W.A.T. team, who caught the young man as he fell.

Williams’ S.W.A.T. team eventually reached the library where there were numerous bombs among the survivors. Among the 12 dead they found there were two males who had self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head. They matched the description of the gunmen.

By 4.45, the S.W.A.T. teams had finished their search of Columbine High School. The building had been cleared and the two suspects were dead. The massacre at Columbine was over. Between them Harris and Klebold had killed 12 of their schoolmates and one teacher, and injured 23 others. More fatalities followed. Greg Barnes, a 17-year-old school basketball star who saw his best friend killed in the shootings hanged himself the following year and Carla Hochhalter, the 48-year-old mother of a girl injured in the shootings, shot herself.

But Columbine, it seemed, had got off lightly. According to their video-taped testimony, Harris and Klebold had planned to blow up a sizeable part of the school with hundreds of students in it. As it was it took several days for the authorities to find and defuse all the bombs they had left behind them. The bomb-making factory in Harris’s garage had turned out over thirty pipe bombs as well as the two larger propane devices. Examining their diaries and websites, the police learned that the two had originally conceived a larger plan to reduce the school to rubble, then blow up a plane over New York City. They wanted a film made of their story and discussed who should direct, Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino.

The couple left videotapes to assist with the production. In one, Harris appeared with a sawn-off shotgun he called Arlene, after his favourite character in the video game
Doom
.

‘It’s going to be like f***ing
Doom
,’ he said. ‘Tick, tick, tick… Ha! That f***ing shotgun is straight out of
Doom
.’

They also idolised Hitler. But the motivation for the killings was not clear. One survivor recalled that Harris and Klebold ordered all the jocks who had harassed them to stand up.

‘We’re going to kill every one of you,’ they said.

But in the end the killings were blindly indiscriminate.

‘They shot at everybody,’ said one survivor, ‘including the preps, the jocks and the people who wore Abercrombie and Fitch clothes. But it would be hard to say they singled them out, because everybody here looks like that. I mean, we’re in white suburbia. Our school’s wealthy. Go into the parking lot and see the cars. These kids have money. But I never thought they’d do this.’

In another tape Harris and Klebold also thanked Mark Manes and Phillip Duran for supplying them with the weapons they needed.

Manes was later charged, under a Colorado state law forbidding the sale of handguns to a juvenile, with selling a Intrac TEC-9, 9mm pistol to Klebold for $500. He was also charged with possession of a dangerous or illegal weapon as he had gone shooting with Harris and Klebold in March 1999 and had fired one of their sawn-off shotguns. He supplied one hundred rounds of 9mm bullets to Harris on the night of 19 April. Pleading guilty, he was sentenced to six years in a state penitentiary.

Phillip Duran, who worked with Harris and Klebold at Blackjack Pizza, was charged with brokering the deal with Manes and handling a sawn-off shotgun during target practice. He was sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail. Both Duran and Manes denied any knowledge of Harris and Klebold’s plans.

Eighteen-year-old Robyn Anderson, a friend of Harris and Klebold, also admitted accompanying Harris and Klebold to a gun show in late 1998 and buying two shotguns and one rifle which were later used in the killings. But as the purchase had been made from a private individual rather than a licensed gun dealer, no law had been broken.

Some attempt was made to blame their parents, but both the Harrises and Klebolds seem to have provided an exemplary family life. Both boys felt remorse for their parents.

‘It f***ing sucks to do this to them,’ said Harris on one of the tapes they left behind. ‘They’re going to be put through hell once we do this.’ Speaking directly to them, he added: ‘There’s nothing you guys could’ve done to prevent this.’

Klebold told his mother and father that they had been ‘great parents’ who had taught him ‘self-awareness, self-reliance… I always appreciated that.’ He added: ‘I am sorry I have so much rage.’

In an attempt to explain what they were about to do, Harris quoted Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
, saying: ‘Good wombs hath borne bad sons.’

On the morning of the shootings, just before they set off for Columbine High School, Harris and Klebold made one final videotape, saying goodbye to their parents. Klebold said: ‘It’s a half hour before Judgement Day… I didn’t like life very much… I just know I’m going to a better place than here.’