Authors: Brooks Brown Rob Merritt
We lived like that for a long time.
Things would still happen. On April 11, 1998, I received a short email from an unknown sender. It said something like, “I know you're an enemy of Eric's. I know where you live and what car you drive.” We reported it to the police, but unfortunately the e-mail was accidentally erased before we could give them a copy.
One time my dad opened the front door in time to see a chain of firecrackers going off on our porch. Obviously, there was no way to prove who had done this, either, but when you read Eric's descriptions of his “Rebel Missions,” it seems pretty obvious.
On another night, we were sitting in the living room at about 11:30 when Aaron suddenly looked up and said, “Did you hear that? I heard some glass breaking or something.” We went outside and looked around, but we didn't see anything.
The next morning, my dad went out to the garage and noticed that his car had tiny red dots all over it. So did half the garage. Then we looked at the windows on the garage door, and there was a little hole in one of them, barely an inch in diameter. Someone had shot a paintball through the window.
The police came and looked at the car, but obviously there was no way to prove who was responsible. However, my parents and I got into the car and drove up and down the neighborhood. We saw that a lot of houses had been shot with paintballs. The path traced right back up to Eric's street.
During this time, I stopped talking to Dylan altogether. I didn't know what to trust him with anymore. I was freaked out about the Web pages, and he was good friends with Eric, so I avoided him.
One thing that concerned me was that after a few months went by, Eric's Web site hadn't been taken down. There were things on the pages that had been changed, but nonetheless, Eric was still posting angry rants. My parents tried to get in touch with Detective Hicks, to see how the investigation had progressed. They were never able to reach him.
In a CBS
60 Minutes II
investigation two years after the assault on Columbine, it was learned that a search warrant had been drafted for Eric Harris's home. However, the warrant was never presented to a judge. Had it been served, the police would have found pipe bombs, gunpowder, Eric's angry journal rants—and perhaps early evidence of a plot he and Dylan were already beginning to hatch
.
Even before they were arrested for breaking into the van in January, Eric and Dylan felt like the whole world was against them. Some have theorized that the trauma of this incident reinforced their feelings of persecution, cementing their bond and making them hungry for revenge
.
Eric's journal indicates that sometime in theirjunior year they devised their plan to attack Columbine High School. Police reports show that in the spring of 1998, Dylan wrote in Eric's yearbook about “killing enemies, blowing stuff up, killing cops! My wrath for January's incident will be godlike. Not to mention our revenge in the commons” (the Columbine High School cafeteria, where Eric and Dylan had suffered at the hands of bullies since freshman year)
.
Eric wrote in Dylan's yearbook, “God I can't wait until they die. I can taste the blood now. . . You know what I hate? MANKIND! Kill everything . . . kill everything . . .”
In a journal entry that was not released until nearly three years after the massacre, the Browns discovered just how seriously Eric had plotted against them—and, twelve months before the shootings, against the school. The entry was dated April 26, 1998:
Sometime in April me and V will get revenge and kick natural selection up a few notches . . . We will be in all black. Dusters, black Army pants, and we will get custom shirts that say R or V in the background in one big letter and NBK
[Eric's nickname for the planned attack, named for the film
Natural Born Killers/in the front in a smaller font . . .
First we will go to the house of . . . Brooks in the morning before school starts and before anyone is even awake. We go in, we silently kill each inhabitant and then pin down Brooks . . . Then take our sweet time pissing on them, spitting on them and just torturing the hell out of them. Once we are done we set time bombs to burn the houses down and take any weaponry we find, who knows me [sic] may get lucky. Then get totally prepared and during A lunch we go and park in our spots. With sunglasses on we start carrying in all our bags of terrorism and anarchism shit into our table. Being very casual and silent about it, it's all for a science/band/English project or something . . .
Once the first wave starts to go off and the chaos begins, V opens fire and I start lobbin' the firebombs. Then I open fire, V starts lobbin' more crickets. Then if we can go upstairs and go to each classroom we can pick off fuckers at our will. If we still can we will hijack some awesome car, and drive off to the neighborhood of our choice and start torching houses with Molotov cocktails. By that time cops will be all over us and we start to kill them too! We use bombs, fire bombs and anything we fucking can to
kill and damage as much as we fucking can . . . I want to leave a lasting impression on the world.
The plan was in place, and no one knew. Not me, not my parents, not the school. The police could have stopped it, had they acted on my family's report. But they didn't.
The warning signs were there. The threats, Eric's Web pages, the “Rebel Missions” in the neighborhood. Today, they're all painfully obvious. But back then, no one was putting them together. Not even me. In the back of my mind, I couldn't imagine why a person would murder anyone else, not even a person who wrote the kinds of things that Eric did.
The following summer, I moved on with my life. I believed the danger had passed.
BY THE END OF MY JUNIOR YEAR, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS WERE MAKING their way into the news.
The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Mississippi. Two months later, in West Paducah, Kentucky, Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. In March of 1998, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Arkansas—one aged thirteen, the other eleven—set off a fire alarm to make their fellow students run outside, then opened fire from the trees. They killed four students and a teacher. Finally, Kip Kinkel went on a rampage in Springfield, Oregon in May of 1998. He murdered both of his parents at home, then went to school, killed two students, and wounded twenty-two others.
Each of these stories made national headlines; the attacks on Paducah and Jonesboro happened right in the middle of my junior year. In fact, I read a great deal about them during debate class. We would hold “extemporaneous meetings” where we went through media clippings from the past week and discussed them, and the shootings came up several times.
Violence had plagued inner-city schools for some time, but these shootings marked its first real appearance in primarily white, middle- to upper-middle-class suburbs. And to me, it seemed the location wasn't the only unusual thing about these shootings. In the past, when a kid shot
somebody at school, it was because he had it in for the victim and had come looking for him or her. Now the motives seemed different. Now we were seeing people go into schools and whip out a gun for no other reason than to randomly wipe out as many people as possible.
When we talked in class about the shootings, kids would make jokes about how “it was going to happen at Columbine next.” They would say that Columbine was absolutely primed for it, because of the bullying and the hate that were so prevalent at our school.
Columbine had already seen its own tragedy that year. In 1998, a student named Robert Craig had killed his father and then himself with a gun at their home.
The students' response varied. Some kids didn't give a shit. Their basic attitude was, “Aw, great, another death-metal guy died. Whoop-whoop.” However, friends of mine who had been close to Robert became very upset. The people who weren't in the popular crowd went through a hell of a time when Robert died; seeing the jocks laughing about it made things even worse.
I had talked to Robert Craig a couple of times. I wasn't close to him or anything, but we had a few of the same friends. He seemed like a good kid, and it upset me a lot when I heard the news; I wrote a poem about it in one of my notebooks, trying to make sense of the whole thing. The violence had seemed to come out of nowhere; Robert had acted depressed sometimes, but plenty of people at Columbine acted depressed. It wasn't something that we thought would end with murdering your dad and then killing yourself.
Still, I didn't dwell on Robert's death for long. Nor did I dwell on my problems with Eric. I spent the summer between junior and senior year playing in a band with a few friends and my little brother. I played drums, Aaron was on keyboards, and my friends Doug and Kevin handled vocals, guitar, and trumpet. We called ourselves “Second Sedition.” The way we
saw it, the first sedition had been in 1776. We were the second one. I wrote a good deal of our lyrics, and Aaron was an absolute master when it came to music.
We recorded a demo CD and sent it out in the hopes of landing a few live gigs around the Denver area. We couldn't make it happen. We did play with a few other bands in Clement Park at the end of our junior year, but we couldn't land any bar gigs. We were told that our sound was “too dark.” To us, that was a compliment, but it didn't exactly help us build up an audience. The band pretty much fell apart by the beginning of senior year, but such is life. It had been fun.
That fall, I picked up again with drama and debate. My favorite high school memories center around our speech contests. Sometimes we would travel for competitions, and have to stay in dorm rooms or something similar overnight. We would pull all sorts of crazy antics when we were on the road.
Nick Baumgart, as always, kept us laughing. One time we were hanging out in our rooms during a competition. There were two beds in the room, and a couple of guys were jumping from one bed to the other, trying to do tricks in mid-air. Nick, not wanting to be outdone, got in on the action. “I'm going to do it,” he said, “and not only that, I'm going to do a somersault!”
So Nick took a flying leap and started spinning. Unfortunately for him, he was a little too enthusiastic, and he hit the ceiling. With his face. It was one of those stucco ceilings, with all of the little points and rough edges; this little shower of tiny stucco pieces came down, and so did Nick. His face looked kind of interesting for a while after that.
Debate competition was becoming better for me each year. My skills were improving, I liked the people I was working with, and by senior year, I was ready to make a run at Nationals. Seniors pair up with freshmen in the debate program each year, to mentor them; I mentored a new kid in
the program named Daniel Mauser. He was a smart kid, and I liked him immediately, so I told him what I could.
In theatre, too, I felt at home. The first play of our senior year was
Frankenstein
, and I won the role of Frankenstein's monster. The play
Frankenstein
isn't anything like the old Boris Karloff movie, with the giant mumbling monster who lurches around with corks coming out of his neck. The stage version of
Frankenstein
is much more loyal to the book's theme of society fearing what it doesn't understand. Frankenstein's monster is a deep, troubled creature who was created by a scientist, then dismissed as an abomination. From there, he wanders alone, labeled as a “freak” by the rest of society and rejected by everyone who sees him. The cruelty eventually leads the monster to seek revenge.
I dove into that role with enthusiasm.
Dylan got himself onto the sound crew for
Frankenstein.
It was the first time I'd really spent any time with him since he'd pointed me toward Eric's Web pages. I had calmed down over the whole mess during the summer, but I still wasn't talking to Dylan until the first day of
Frankenstein
rehearsals in September.
That day, the ice between us broke. We didn't ever mention Eric's Web site; we just started talking again, as if we had silently accepted that the past was the past. That night we went out for coffee at the nearby Perkins.
There were a few things about Dylan that had changed. He'd grown his hair out a lot longer, and he had much more of a “grunge” look to his clothing. Beyond his physical appearance, though, he seemed like the same old Dylan.
He and I started hanging out again during those weeks of play rehearsal. It became a habit to grab a soda or a coffee somewhere and just sit down and talk about things. Sometimes we talked about school. Other times we talked about music. Dylan would tell me about how great
Rammstein and KMFDM were, and I'd fire back with a spirited defense of Insane Clown Posse. Dylan was into very dark, fuck-the-world kinds of music. It wasn't my thing, but we had some great conversations regardless.
Dylan told me he was thinking about applying to the University of Arizona to study computer design. He sounded like he was making plans for his future. I encouraged him.
One time we spent the whole night reminiscing about the old video games we used to play. We laughed about the first time we'd played
Mortal Kombat
in front of our moms. Dylan recalled that
Ninja Gaiden
was the very first Nintendo game we'd ever played together back in grade school.
We loved talking about old times. We knew we would never again be as close as we'd been in those grade school days; he and I were different people now, with our own interests and groups of friends. Still, we had a long history with each other, and those nights after rehearsal—sitting at Perkins with a cigarette and a couple of Cokes, talking about the way things used to be—made for great times.
The seniors in our theatre troupe decided to produce a special video for
Frankenstein.
Not only was it a farewell project for the drama students, it was a farewell to Mrs. Caruthers, who had been one of our favorite teachers over the past four years.
For the first part of the tape, we did interviews with the cast and crew about their favorite memories of Mrs. Caruthers. We then added in footage from rehearsal, along with scenes from the movie
Young Frankenstein
.