The best Columbine documentary or book?

What do you think the best non-fiction* book or documentary on Columbine is? Which documentary or book do you think gives the best insight or information on the event?

*Dave Cullen's book isn't non-fiction.

Book- No Easy Answers hands down!! I don't think I need to explain why.

Documentary- Either Columbine:The Final Report or The Columbine Killers even though the narrator's voice was extremely creepy!!

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The Columbine Killers even though the narrator's voice was extremely creepy!!

If you're referring to the guy who read out Eric's journals in The Columbine Killers... I thought he did a top-notch job of capturing Eric's violent mood. It's the best voice work I've ever heard.

"No easy answers" is insightful because of the personal relations hat brooks had with both E & D, but
I like Jeff Kass' book too because he actually did some research and found out new things (like family
backgrounds and Dylan's college application). Many other books just retell the officially released documents
from Jeffco.

I didn't read any Columbine book yet, but having to choose which one to read (first) with my limited knowledge about related books, then I'd pick No Easy Answers (and totally ditch Cullen, that's something I'd read only out of curiosity and not to get more informed of course)

I haven't read Jeff Kass' book. How much more insight does it offer?

snegopady wrote:

I haven't read Jeff Kass' book. How much more insight does it offer?

I think it offers a lot more insight. He has a great deal of information that is not covered in the other books. He does focus quite heavily on the Klebold family history, I found this particularly interesting although some have commented he was a little harsh on the parents. There is also quite a bit of information on the Shoels family in there that I had not previously known. If you are interested in the legal side of things in the aftermath of Columbine he does talk about this and who sued who etc. There is also some more bits a pieces of information from Devon Adams about Dylan and a chapter that talks about the diversion programme and basement tapes (although there was nothing new in this particular section for me). From memory there a few more tidbits of information you may have not come across before, for me the information about the Harris family after the shooting provided some new insight into things i didn't know before.

Sorry if this was a bit of a bad description, these were just things from memory that I recalled about Kass's book. But i would definately recommend reading it.

The main thing for me personally that I love about Kass' book is that he sources and quotes his material. He doesn't, like some others make all kinds of claims and then not explain where he got the information from. He is very persistent in his quest for documents to be released and for me this comes across as if he is genuinely interested in Columbine and exposing the truth. The roads he had to take to gain access to certain information is also very interesting. For me these points are a huge plus.

Thanks for that review. It wasn't bad at all. I'm really interested in reading it now.

Kass is boss.  His reporting style is a bit invasive and it shows (ambushing Wayne Harris for questions at the courthouse urinal, getting no comment, and writing about it?  Seriously?)  but it's quality work.  He also talks about the environment and location of the Littleton/unincorporated Jefferson County area.  Kudos for that.

On the subject of Dylan--and Dylan's apparent inscrutable personality--compare and contrast the varying descriptions of him by his parents.  In Kass, in the 11k, in Far From the Tree.  In the diversion report, trying to cross things out.  Somebody is embarrassed by something. 

Also, the anteater story.  Brings a tear to my eye, it does--beanie babies as a possible source of shame and discomfort, this being a kid who curled up with his stuffed animals in times of crisis, who had his own much-loved koala bear:  See the photo, it's sitting right there.  And he still bought the anteater for Devon.

No Easy Answers, while valuable from a ground-level subjective standpoint, has more filler and conjecture than I prefer.  Also lulzy that Brooks waffled on the violent-media debate, not really taking either side, and now he makes video games for a living.  There goes the Xbox neighborhood.

Documentaries?  They all blend together.  Can't tell one from the other.  Old hysterical grainy media vs. new sleazy high-def media, here's the new boss, same as the old boss.

The documentary with Eric's diary narrated didn't creep me out.  I thought it was funny to hear "Eric" with some kind of English accent and kewl hardass techno backbeat under the reading of diary entries.  My fanboy side rejoiced.

Comprehending Columbine (a book by Ralph Larkin) is interesting too, but it does veer into grousing about masculinity as a toxic horrible thing, which annoys me.  Larkin talks about the spirit of the time period more than others--the section on the paramilitary ethos and Angry White Boys is very illuminating--and the rest of it is political correctoid hand wringing.  He misses the forest for the trees.

But Peter Langman, who wrote Why Kids Kill, misses the forest by such a wide angle that it hits Antarctica.  Emo & Psychopath, pre-Cullen.  Plus, uncomfortably invasive and paternalistic accounts of real teenagers!  In real emotional pain!  With real "emotional disturbances" that are easy to shoehorn into one of his categories.  (I'm hoping I'm NOT one of those case-study kids, pseudonym or no.  Better not be.)  Psychiatrist cooties.  Unclean.

But I think the best Columbine book by far is The 11k.  All of it.

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Comprehending Columbine (a book by Ralph Larkin) is interesting too

I felt that Larkin didn't really understand teenagers. He craps on for a while about the "violent" lyrics in German industrial bands like KMFDM and Rammstein as if it's something unusual for E/D to be listening to that kind of thing. What sort of music does he think teenagers listen to? I doubt KMFDM's Xtort would have even required a parental advisory sticker when it was released. It's computer nerd music. Larkin also said he couldn't figure out the significance of the alternative caps in Dylan's nickname VoDkA. Really? He seems unaware that people use alternating caps on the internet all the time. Larkin is out of touch.

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But Peter Langman, who wrote Why Kids Kill... uncomfortably invasive and paternalistic accounts of real teenagers!  In real emotional pain!  With real "emotional disturbances" that are easy to shoehorn into one of his categories.

I'm glad someone pointed this out. I agree.

Wij zijn maar wij zijn niet geschift. Still only for the happy few who speak dutch. Tim Krabbe has a theory, but he doesn't expect you to think the same way, he just explains why this is his opinion based on facts. Hopefully for you guys it gets translated soon.

Jaan wrote:

Wij zijn maar wij zijn niet geschift. Still only for the happy few who speak dutch. Tim Krabbe has a theory, but he doesn't expect you to think the same way, he just explains why this is his opinion based on facts. Hopefully for you guys it gets translated soon.

I am dying for this book to be translated. Don't know why this hasn't happened yet. Anyone dutch speaking that is willing to translate some juicy excerpts? ;)

Ralph Larkin has provided the best solid proof yet of the fact that E &D were severely bullied and ostracized and of Columbines social structure and how it operated.Very solid and underrated book.

No one mentioned Mark Ames' book Going Postal.

Ames goes as far as to justify E/D's attack. What did other people think of this book?

I came across this e-book on Amazon today.  An interesting "alternative universe" take mayhaps?

Eric goes off to the miltary and Dylan gets his hi-tech job - how does it play out from there...  Final Destination style. ;)

Redeeming Dylan and Eric

Someone gave it a good review but then again, could be a family or friend of the author

InFiNiNcEX5 wrote:

I came across this e-book on Amazon today.  An interesting "alternative universe" take mayhaps?

Eric goes off to the miltary and Dylan gets his hi-tech job - how does it play out from there...  Final Destination style. ;)

Redeeming Dylan and Eric

It sounds really interesting actually!

I know it's fiction, but The Hour I first Believed by Wally Lamb is an amazing book!

StinkyOldGrapes wrote:

No one mentioned Mark Ames' book Going Postal.

Ames goes as far as to justify E/D's attack. What did other people think of this book?

It's a good read, but sometimes things are oversimplified (he tends to defend the perpetrators too much). However the changes in society are quite obvious and "going postal" is a result of these changes. So, in general I enjoyed this book.

I want to add something about Ralph Larkin's Comprehending Columbine:

He ACTUALLY QUOTES THIS WEBSITE in his book!!!!

If that doesn't say enough about this man's researching skills, I don't know what will.

Does the book have interesting points and interviews? Yes, in my opinion it does. That doesn't change the fact that he repeatedly quoted and SOURCED a phony website!!

Seriously, that's as horrendously irresponsible as Cullen including Brenda Parker's "story" in his book as fact.

A great story about Columbine, which many people on this message board have not read, is Michael Paterniti's "Columbine Never Sleeps."

This story was very hard to find for a while because it was print only, but GQ recently made it available.  You might want to print it because they might take it down.

Here it is

Here is the article:

Columbine Never Sleeps
By Michael Paterniti
April 2004

Once upon a time, there was a town. In that town, there was a school. In that school, there were children. And five years ago this month, twelve of those children were murdered by two furious boys who entered Columbine high school and unleashed a hail of bullets. The media descended, myths were made, myths were torn down. And five years later, the people of Littleton, Colorado, are still looking for salvation.

April again, and it's Time to Return. Come. This way. Everything is moving so quickly backward, can you feel it? The drain-suck of five years, as if it were yesterday. Or right this very moment. Even now: It's happening again at this moment. The ghosts return, muscle clasping bone, and become living, breathing bodies again. Round the lake at Clement Park to the school: Its green windows shatter and mend. Blood lifts off the carpet.

Everything plays backward. The hordes of children who flee from the entrance on this blindingly sunny spring day are now running in reverse, feet flailing in funny kicks, back into the school, then slowing to a walk, smiling as they pass the principal—Mr. D—who smiles, too, first the end of a smile and then its beginning. The students regather in class or the library, where their fingers lift pens and their heads bow like sunflowers over their work.
Elsewhere, the disgraced reverend, the one who was driven from town afterward, rewinds, too. He rises from a table at which he sits with an inmate from the Adams County Jail and is drawn out through a series of locked jailhouse doors, travels back through five years of lost peregrinations and soul-searching, past his own supposedly unforgivable sin committed in the aftermath of the coming tragedy, until he's the beloved pastor again of his thousand-strong congregation and he, too, can see the school, color of sandstone, out over the baseball fields on that blindingly sunny day.

And here is the wan, handsome mother of a boy named Patrick Ireland, who softly releases her hands from the head of her pale son. For months she's sat vigil with him in the hospital, trying to pray his brain back together, willing the torn neurons to reattach, hoping for a miracle that will allow him to speak again, forget, walk or run. Now she lifts her hands like wings, rises, removes her lips from his brow, and is gone, her car racing rear-fender-first back to the school as she turns younger by the mile, certain of finding her son there, whole again.

And what of the father of the boy named Danny Rohrbough? All the venomous words and blinding anger that have given him unknown stores of courage and scores of new enemies, all of it is dissipating, disappearing back somewhere inside him, all of the bile is being suctioned as he replaces the phone, and the brief amnesia of going backward leaves his mind blank of the bad news, filled with nothing but the day's work at his garage and the promise of Danny coming by after school, to help as he does most every day. He's again a shy but happy man. He wakes at 6 A.M. with the entire world in its proper place.

There are others, too, as they existed in another lifetime, those sixty months, 1,800 days, 2.6 million minutes ago. On that April 20 of 1999. Which just so happens to be now again. And there are two boys, in particular, who, when they reappear, throw the strangest shadows, for they seem most at peace when everyone is panicked, most alive among the dead, and then, reeling back in time past their self-created moment of destruction, most distraught when the others in the high school are most happy.

Come here, by the side of this road that runs out of town. It's the night before, and you must understand: It has become urgent to tell this story one last time. Right now, as it happens again—and again. The foothills of the Rockies—the Hogbacks, as they're known here in Littleton, Colorado—rise spookily beneath a waxing moon. The stars shift and rearrange themselves. Jupiter and Venus clash. Tomorrow, the charts say, children will rule the world.

The road running between is what gaffs them. The hook is cold and silver.

The short one, who goes by Rebel—or just Reb—drives from his cul-de-sac in town out to the house of the tall one, who goes by VoDKa—or just V—who lives down in the canyon, in his parents' chalet perched among red slickrock. Out Chatfield to Wadsworth, then right on Deer Creek, the falsity of strip malls falling away, the hollering churches of heaven-obsessed believers obliterated, and then the last of the instant-housing divisions, dematerialized. Denver becomes a shimmering apparition in the rearview. The last lights go on and off in living rooms, families gather before the big-screen. Their innocence is staggering. And will soon be remedied.

Stand here by the side of this road leading out of town in the early months of 1999. Snow begins to fall. The road turns cold and silver. A mu±ed silence descends, broken only by the two passing cars—a gray Honda (Reb's) and a black BMW (V's)—blasting loud music.

The machinations of their plot complicate even as their days seem like the same humdrum: school, work at Blackjack Pizza, computer games and those long stretches where Reb and V are left to their own devices. They've known each other since seventh grade, and now they're seniors. V is six feet four, shy and awkward, formerly in a program for gifted kids, with a mane of red corkscrew hair shot with a small shock of white, a birthmark of sorts that kinks from the back of his head. Reb is five feet six, moody, shares his buddy's passion for computer games. He has a concave chest, can't get laid and takes antidepressants.

In increments, they've come to occupy the lowest social rank of their high school. Among students of mostly white sameness, these two dress differently: in goth black, wearing combat boots and long dusters. They attach themselves to a group called the Trenchcoat Mafia, but not even among the misfits are they fully accepted. They listen to fringe punk music and begin to act out. They shout "Heil Hitler" in bowling class when they roll strikes. In the cafeteria, sitting down to eat, they suddenly find themselves caught in a downpour, drops sharply stinging their heads, clattering on the table, a fusillade of Skittles fired by the jocks who call them "fags" and "homos." The greater their humiliation, the greater their defiance, until they've built their own country—half real and half imagined—over which they've anointed themselves absolute rulers.

And what is their big idea? When they light on it and finally commit to it, when the guns are secured and the bombs are being built, they spend a month as happy as they've ever been. "What fun is life without a little death?" V writes in his notebook. "It's interesting, when I'm in my human form, knowing I'm going to die. Everything has a touch of triviality to it." But they go on living, too—V commits to the University of Arizona and attends the prom; Reb, who unsuccessfully asks three girls, meets up with everyone at the afterparties, then dutifully shows up for work at Blackjack Pizza the next night, betraying nothing.

Meanwhile, Reb's room contains an arsenal, most of it bought at gun shows: a double-barrel twelve-gauge shotgun, a pump-action shotgun, a nine-millimeter carbine, 250 nine-millimeter rounds, fifteen twelve-gauge slugs, forty shotgun shells, four knives and four ten-round clips for the carbine. V has a TEC-DC9 handgun. They have thirty-nine "crickets" and twenty-four pipe bombs. In Reb's basement, they make videotapes. They joke and boast about their fame to come, guess at what director will make the movie of their lives, claim that they will incite mass revolution. Before the camera, where they show off their weapons, they become equal-opportunity bigots. "We hate niggers, spics...and let's not forget you white pieces of shit also. We hate you," says Reb. They pick the date: April 20, Hitler's birthday. Zero Day. The end of time—and the beginning too. If all goes well, they'll bag 250, maybe 500. But even on the tapes, there are strange cracks and disconnections, flashes of two kids trying to talk themselves into something. V admits that the date is problematic because it falls near Passover and his uncle will not be pleased. "Dude, you're Jewish?" asks Reb, stupefied. "Half," says V sheepishly. Reb pauses, then after a time says, "I'm sorry. I really am."

And yet all they have is each other, and this talent they share: an ability to dupe nearly everyone. It's the one thing that separates them—and, to their mind, sets them above everyone else at Columbine High School. It's what protects their secret and draws them more deeply together. One face they wear goes to their parents, one face goes to their friends, one face goes to their school, but who they are, deep down, in the damaged turbines of their being, they save for each other.

The more they get away with, the bolder they become, seeing each new triumph of deceit as proof of their brilliance. In V's English class, he submits a story that depicts a stranger shooting up a town, emerging godlike from the shadows of obscurity. After reading it, his teacher contacts V's parents. When confronted, V merely shrugs, pushes a corkscrew of hair from his eyes. "It's just a story," he says.
Even on the day before the rampage, when the dupe is no longer a game, V imagines the impending scene at school as a kind of ultimate video game. In his notebook, he writes, "When first bombs go off, attack. Have fun!"

The week leading up to the massacre is celebratory, as it always seems to be at this time of year. The days are bright and warming, the wildflowers bloom in the foothills. The end of school fast approaches: Seniors are choosing their colleges, beginning the complicated process of saying good-bye. The prom is Saturday, one of those rites of passage you're supposed to remember forever. The students are giddily nervous about it. Who knows what will happen?

Now sit here in the back row of the auditorium on Friday afternoon. The principal, Frank DeAngelis, has called an impromptu assembly. A man unafraid of emotion—he's quick to cry at certain movies or graduation ceremonies—he always refers to the students at Columbine High as "my kids." He tells the students that he wants to talk to them about making good choices, that he wants to share a couple of stories from his own life about people he knew who are no longer here. It's a principal's job to say the right thing at the right time. And he does. He tells them about a baseball player he once coached who died in a car accident. And at the end, he says, "I want to see each and every one of you back here on Monday morning. Because I love you." Only Mr. D can get away with those words. He releases them, his kids, hopeful that they will return.

One boy who's going to the prom is a junior named Patrick Ireland. He's a stringy kid whose metabolism has just begun to catch up with his growth spurt. He's six feet and weighs 150 pounds, though he seems to gain five more with each passing week. And it shows on the basketball court: The last time he played—he's on a club team with his friends—he had his all-time dream game. He ran the court fluidly, without feeling winded, rebounded hard, scored twenty-four points and sank the game winner at the buzzer. There's a lot to smile about in his life: He's a competitive water-skier, an avid member of the math club, a candidate for next year's valedictorian, with a 4.0 grade point average. He seems to accomplish everything he sets his mind to.

Other boys and girls hover, in these chrysalis days, on the verge of new lives: There's a freshman named Danny Rohrbough who has already made a radical, seemingly grown-up decision that his future lies not in going to college but in working beside his father, in the garage at his father's successful company, installing car stereos and home entertainment centers. Danny's parents split when he was 5, and though his mother and father have remained good friends, there was, as there is in every divorce, a period of adjustment, of wondering about the hows and whys of the conjugal relationship that brought you into the world but has become untenable. Was he somehow the cause of their split? Working next to his dad answers that question: The grown-up world that floats above is complicated, but his father's love is not. Theirs is a partnership, a daily act of creativity.
And what of this boy here, Brooks Brown, a senior so preternaturally smart and distractible he's bored at school? He's friends with different people, in different cliques—athletes, brains, computer nerds—and yet regards himself, with somewhat melancholy pride, as a geek loser. In the halls of Columbine, he feels isolated and alone. The difference between him and Reb and V, both of whom he knows well, is that he doesn't feel violence toward his school or himself. But he will. Soon after his life is ruined by Reb and V, he will.

So return and stand here for one last moment, out near the baseball fields, as the kids exit on this Friday afternoon, a euphoric, flowing river of humanity. From the outside, gazing upon this scene, Columbine High School is a happy place. Out front, the kids are horsing around, singing and yelling their good-byes until they see one another again at the prom. People linger, delightedly on the cusp of adulthood. About to cross over. From a spot in the senior parking lot, two cars back out: a gray Honda belonging to a boy named Eric Harris and, adjacently, a black BMW belonging to Dylan Klebold. Reb and V go their way, unnoticed.

Tonight belongs to the innocent.

Everything after belongs to them.

Stand here on zero day, on the grassy hill by the side of the parking lot. Eleven A.M. on the Tuesday after the prom, and Reb and V pull back into the parking lot, their cars riding closer to the ground now, lurching under some great weight. For perhaps the first time all year, they don't park next to each other.

It's about to begin.

Reb is the first one out, wearing a T-shirt that reads NATURAL SELECTION. He removes a heavy duffel from his Honda, lugs it into the cafeteria, past the chaos of hundreds eating, and leaves it in the kitchen. Inside the bag is a twenty-pound propane tank with nails taped to the exterior, set with an igniter and a bell clock. Then he scuffs back to the parking lot.

It has taken them a year to plot this, to get the guns and ammo and propane, to figure out how to build the bombs and homemade Molotov cocktails—and test it all. After the first explosion in the cafeteria, they plan to open fire on anyone trying to escape from the school. After that, they will hunt their avowed enemies, the ones whose names are compiled on a hit list headed by Brooks Brown. Finally, Reb and V have rigged their cars to explode, killing anyone lucky enough to make it out alive.

In the parking lot at Columbine, the boys keep waiting for the cafeteria explosion that never comes. And as they wait, Brooks Brown appears, cutting choir, heading out for a smoke. The timing of this meeting is full of cosmic irony and will be questioned long after the fact. Only last year, Eric Harris posted death threats against Brooks on the Internet, threats that the Browns then took to the police, who filed a report and forgot about it.
Brooks just assumed that Eric Harris was threatened by his friendship with Dylan Klebold, whom Brooks had known since they were in the same Cub Scout troop at the age of 7. So Brooks tried to make peace with Eric recently, as a matter of high school survival. And somewhere in his planning for this judgment, Reb checked his list, and, checking it twice, crossed out Brooks's name. In the margin, he scrawled the words, Let live.

Now, Reb turns to Brooks. "I like you," he says. "Get out of here."

Reb straps on a black vest loaded with ammo. V, in combat boots and a T-shirt that reads WRATH, turns his baseball cap backward, picks up his TEC-DC9. The two boys cross the parking lot, and no one stops them. It's not clear who lofts the first pipe bomb up on the school roof, where an air-conditioner repairman, believing war has come to Columbine, takes cover. They seem to move now as one organism. At the side door of the cafeteria, Reb peers in—yup, 500 students dumbly eating lunch like bovine. This is the golden moment, exactly what they've been waiting for. "You've given us shit for years," V says in a Jack Daniel's-fueled rant during one of the videotapes. "You're fucking going to pay for all that shit. We don't give a shit because we're going to die doing it." But do they hate enough? Are there sudden misgivings? Instead of entering for the slaughter, Reb pulls back, and he and V move past the cafeteria and toward the grassy hill that runs up the side of the school. Some kids are eating lunch in seventy-degree weather or just taking a little air. A finger pulls a trigger, and then the two of them are unleashing bullets like Skittles.

The first down is a girl named Rachel Scott. Reb pierces her temple as she eats, killing her instantly. Meanwhile, the boy named Danny Rohrbough has slipped out of school for a cigarette with two of his buddies when the bullets find them standing there, not yet having lit up. Two shots rip through Danny's torso, and he falls dead, curled facedown on the cement. Of his friends, one is shot in the spine, instantly paralyzed; the other, who is shot in the face, will live.

Is this enough hate?

The killers now start up an outside stairwell, twenty-five steps in all. Inside, some students believe a senior prank has begun. But teachers are screaming for everyone to get down. In the cafeteria, hundreds hide under tables; in the library, upstairs, thirty or so huddle in small groups beneath more tables. Reb and V swing open the outside door on the main floor, about fifty feet from the library, going from dazzling sunlight to the shadowed insides of the school.

Underneath a table in the library, Patrick Ireland hears popping noises, coming closer and closer, until the two killers enter, V wielding the TEC-DC9, Reb with a shotgun. They go from table to table, peering under, pulling people up, humiliating them. "What do we have here?" says Reb just before he shoots a student in the chest. "A nigger." Reb asks one girl if she believes in God, and when she answers in the affirmative, blasts her with his shotgun. Another student remains crouched in a ball while those on either side of him are murdered. He ends up alive, covered in their blood.
And then they come to Patrick Ireland's table. What's happening here? Patrick is holding the hand of his friend Mikai Hall, who's praying, repeating God's name. Patrick prays along with him until the pops become deafening. Suddenly, Patrick sees dark red liquid running from Mikai's knee and soaking his pants, and he instinctively reaches out to clamp his hand over the wound, and the top of his head slides out from under the table. V takes aim and shoots, buckshot passing directly into Patrick's brain, which is how the boy disappears in a black wave.

After sixteen minutes and twelve murders, the killers go on. The principal, Frank DeAngelis, has been told of gunshots and, in disbelief, bolts from his office out into a long hallway that runs from the front to the back of the school, only to see a shadow at the far end, maybe eighty yards away, firing a gun in his direction. When the plate-glass windows shatter behind him, he's certain he's going to die.

At this point, children are flooding from the school in shocked droves, running hard, feet flailing, some of them bloodied, all of them now intensely aware that this was never meant to be a prank at all but somehow, impossibly, a massacre. Students identify the killers to police as Harris and Klebold; others report that there may be three, four, five gunmen. Rumors circulate that the killers have left the building, and children flee through the neighborhoods. Literally take off running. A group of thirty lie quietly in the darkened basement of a friend's house nearby, for hours. The police secure the perimeter of the building but don't make a concerted effort to enter it for what will be several hours.

Inside, Reb shoots at a short man who has just emerged from the principal's office, misses, and then is distracted by a teacher coming up a nearby set of stairs. He turns and fires on Dave Sanders, one bullet passing through his neck, another through his chest. Then he and V head downstairs to the cafeteria, where surveillance cameras catch them drinking from water bottles left on tables and shooting at the propane-tank bomb they've left, hoping to ignite it—but to no avail. They light a small bomb that sends several students scurrying. And yet, in the next twenty minutes, the killers don't fire on another soul. With hundreds still hidden in lockers and behind classroom doors, Reb and V wander quietly, almost as if in a postcoital trance. A streamlet of blood drips down Reb's face, his nose having been broken by the recoil of his shotgun. V sticks his head up into a ceiling crawl space and comes face-to-face with a friend of his with whom he was, just last night, playing fantasy baseball—but does nothing. They're already receding—or perhaps have lost heart. Later, some will call this the Quiet Time.

Tired of roaming, they return to the cafeteria, drink again from left-behind water bottles. Then they climb the stairs back to the library. There are twelve bodies left for dead here. They take their place among them, and Reb takes a shotgun, puts it in his mouth and fires, blowing off the top of his head. V raises his TEC-DC9 and shoots himself in the temple. Their feet nearly touch as they lie in the shadow of a bookstack.

At 12:08 P.M. on Zero Day, the fire alarms make a deafening sound, the sprinkler system is watering the cafeteria, but the children remain silent and unmoving. Time has ended. Pencils lie atop papers with half-finished sentences. There are, at this moment, fourteen dead, twenty-two injured and one teacher hovering somewhere between. The whir of news copters can be heard outside, as well as sirens. Hundreds of law-enforcement officers and the sheriff's deputies stand at the ready, paralyzed by orders not to enter.

The sun moves into a new quadrant of sky. The stars, unseen in the glare of midday, shift back into view. The children are dead.
Time has stopped: Let the terrible glare of time begin again.

Let the terrible glare of time begin again. But never forget what has happened here, nor the names of the dead: Cassie, Steven, Corey, Kelly, Matthew, Daniel, Dan, Rachel, Isaiah, John, Lauren and Kyle. Inside Columbine High School, after three hours with no rescue, the teacher, Dave Sanders, dies gazing on wallet-size pictures of his children, wrapped in the T-shirt tourniquets of his students, one of whom is a boy who stays with him until the end. And hard as it is to look on the body of that well-loved teacher, it's harder to look on the face of that boy looking at Mr. Sanders, the basketball star who couldn't save him.

Time has entered the library as fourteen bodies lie motionless on the floor. One of the bodies belongs to Patrick Ireland, who's been shot in the head.
A moment ago, he was a 4.0 student doing his homework with friends, and then a bullet passed through his frontal lobe and lodges in the back of his brain, tearing neurons, deleting memory. But he's not dead yet. His eyelids flutter as he tries to climb back up through levels of consciousness—and then his eyelids open. There's a patch of ceiling above and gauzy light emanating from somewhere behind.

Is this heaven?

What he remembers almost immediately are the killers, and although he's bleeding out all over this carpet, some deep-seated survival instinct urges him to move before they return to finish him off. He knows he's in the library, and he knows the light is coming from a window and that if he can reach that light there may be a way out. But when he goes to get up, when his mind says get up, his body, trying to move all at once, can't move at all.

So it becomes a question of what's possible. It's not possible to roll to his stomach and make forward progress, nor, it seems, is it possible to move his entire right side. However, the left side works, and the left foot—used to anchor and then push, anchor and then push him along on his back—moves his body by inches. After a few feet, he slips into unconsciousness again. Then he wakes, fills with metallic fear that the killers are near and pushes forward a few more inches, straining for the source of light. He zigs and zags and blacks out. He wriggles past dead bodies, brushes right up against them and through warm puddles of blood. He has no awareness but for the light, the killers and the passage of time.

After nearly three hours in that library, Patrick Ireland wedges himself against the wall, near a chair, and using both wall and chair as leverage, pushes himself up into one of the shattered green windows. He feels a warm breeze pouring through, hears the whir of helicopter rotors and from a distance a faint "Hang on, kid. Just stay there and we'll come and get you!"

The boy in the window opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. He tries to raise his right hand, but it won't move. He raises his left hand to say: Yes, I hear you. A SWAT team moves in on the back of an armored vehicle, and when they're in position and yell up for him, Patrick Ireland lets go, dropping like a sack from the window. Days—and then weeks—pass before he has another clear memory.

Meanwhile, parents arrive at a nearby elementary school, a makeshift gathering point, searching for their children, checking posted lists for the names of those who've been confirmed safe. Standing there, Patrick Ireland's parents have no idea that their son's just been taken from a window, as others have no idea that their children lie silently in the library now. By nightfall, the list still doesn't include nearly forty dead or injured kids. Where are they?

One of those left wondering is Brian Rohrbough, the father of Danny. He had gotten a call around lunch at his shop from his ex-wife, Sue, who said, "I think you'd better turn on the TV." He immediately drives to a grade school near Columbine, where he meets up with Sue and some others. The afternoon passes in stark, bright colors, human bodies futilely moving this way and that, sirens screaming and a wall of callous police blocking the school but not entering.

He goes late to his house—and his ex-wife to hers—without any word about Danny. He wakes the next morning to a call from a friend. "I think you'd better see the paper," he says. "There's a picture."

And it's him. Brian Rohrbough confirms the death of his son by a picture in a Denver newspaper, his boy lying in near fetal position on a slab of cement sidewalk, at the base of the stairs leading up the outside of Columbine High School to the library. He gets in his car and drives to the school to demand his son's body. The police tell him the boy may be booby-trapped. But how long does it take to check for a bomb? Twenty-eight hours pass before they remove Danny Rohrbough from the sidewalk.

And in that time something cracks and shifts inside the father. The inhumanity of leaving Danny out like that, through a cold night, exposed, strikes him now as one of many little crimes that will be committed after the massacre. Soon a law-enforcement officer, a friend of the family, comes by to offer his condolences and then admits that he has some questions about whether Danny was accidentally shot by another law-enforcement officer. For Brian Rohrbough, this is the beginning, in Danny's name, of a quest for the truth. To undo that day and play it back in all of its terrible clarity.
The killers' bodies are taken from the school. There's nothing left now but aftermath. The snow begins to fall as they're hauled away. Big, locust flakes, blown by an east wind, banishing the earth, unbelievable except for the fact that they're real and cling to everyone—the camera crews jockeying for tears, the governor's entourage, which has just arrived to inspect the decimated building, and the kids, wearing tranquilized masks, who gather to mourn at makeshift memorials, held up by one another, their hair covered in veils of white.

On the night of the massacre, the minister, Don Marxhausen, calls an impromptu service at his church. "The body of Christ," he murmurs again and again, and near the end of Communion a female parishioner approaches, answering not with "Amen" but "Klebold."
"The body of Christ," he says again, confused, but again the answer: "Klebold." "Don't forget them in their hour of need," she says.

Shortly after, Reverend Don gets a phone call from Tom Klebold, the father of Dylan. "I need your help," he says, "but it has to be confidential."
Reverend Don doesn't shy from complicated spiritual transactions. He goes where he's most needed, reaches out to those who most need lifting. He carries his 240 pounds as if he could still do a little damage in hell if he had to. Among the conservative evangelicals who dominate this place, he's a liberal misfit. If you can't laugh, even in the worst times, he says, if you can't find some smiling note in the dirge—or, at least, forgiveness—then you may as well forget about salvation. So he agrees to do the memorial service for Dylan Klebold because the boy is a misfit, too, and still one of God's children.

When he arrives for the service, Sue Klebold, the mother, embraces him. He can feel her trembling, and she leads him to an open casket in which her son Dylan—the killer formerly known as V—has been laid to rest. The image of him sleeping here, coiffed for good-bye, is startling: He's surrounded by Beanie Babies, a ring of them that runs from one ear to the other.

How does one commend this sweet boy, a mass murderer, to heaven? Reverend Don doesn't even try. "Do you mind if we just talk for a while," he says, "and then we'll worship." And so they do. One couple says that the Klebolds are great parents. And another couple agrees and chimes in, "He was like our son!"

Then Tom Klebold speaks: We don't believe in guns. We've never had any in our house.

And Sue: I don't understand the anti-Semitism. I'm his mother, and I'm Jewish.

It goes like this for forty-five minutes—this confusion and disbelief suffusing everything, though they really try to remember him for the funny, sensitive kid he was. Only Dylan's older brother remains silent. Nothing negative is said, though the enormity of what has brought them here crushes down on everything. How do you reach these parents who have not only lost a son but whose son set out, it seems, to kill an entire town?

Reverend Don tells a story about how, in the Bible, David, the king of Israel, once had a son named Absalom, a beautiful boy who was a fierce rabble-rouser, inciting civil war against his father. In the end, David's loyal general, Joab, was forced to kill Absalom in order to restore the kingdom, and yet David, when confronted by his son's body, was so overcome by grief, he broke down. "Would God I had died for thee," he wailed, "O Absalom, my son, my son!"

It is the perfect parable about the purity and endlessness of a father's love, no matter what the situation. And the Klebolds cling to it. After a few blessings, they're done. Dylan is later cremated—for fear that a grave site would be defiled—and when the minister asks one of the Klebolds' legal representatives what to do in case the media come calling, Reverend Don is mildly surprised when the man says, "Just tell them what you've seen here tonight."

And so he does. He agrees to two nationally televised interviews. To America, he describes the Klebolds as a family in deep, unimaginable pain. About the service, he says he saw two innocent parents "questioning where their son came from." He stays in touch with Tom and Sue, visits occasionally. Tom, a former geophysicist, rarely leaves his house. The driveway has two gates on it, and he sits up in his office, cloistered from the world. Sue has a position with a local college, working with the disabled. She pens letters to the victims' families, expressing her grief. She has so many questions now about her son. She invites a small group over to watch the prom-night video they took of Dylan. He wore a tux and went with a friend, Robyn, a girl who also secretly bought guns for Reb and V. But in the video, they're merely high school seniors, pinning each other with corsages, giggling embarrassedly, then getting into the limo on one of the biggest nights of their young lives. Sue Klebold scours the television screen for clues. There are no clues.

As for Reverend Don, when he twice defends the killer's family on national television, when word leaks out that he led Dylan's memorial service, well, something turns and hooks in his parish, and they begin to hate. There are forty-six families here who had kids inside Columbine High School that day, and suddenly he's Absalom.

On the first-year anniversary of the massacre, even as the reverend addresses thousands in Clement Park, his church council unanimously votes for his firing. Within three months, he sells his house, packs and is banished from Littleton, Colorado, for good.

He sleeps all day and stays up all night, like the vampire they want him to be. He falls into a deep depression, never leaves the house. For the first couple of months, his parents believe he's suicidal. They fill with fury: at the Jefferson County sheriff, at the principal, Frank DeAngelis. For casting a patina of guilt over their boy, who's innocent.

By the second week, the police arrive to question Brooks Brown, and a few days later the sheriff, John Stone, announces on national television that Brooks is a suspect, a potential collaborator despite having been the first name on Reb and V's hit list. There are others whom Eric and Dylan knew—like Robyn Anderson or Phil Duran at Blackjack Pizza or Phil's friend Mark Manes, who unwittingly aided Reb and V by either selling or brokering guns for them—but it's Brooks who becomes public enemy number one.

He's not permitted to attend the remainder of his classes at Chatfield High, where all of the Columbine students have been moved to finish the year on a staggered schedule. A member of the chorus, Brooks sings at a memorial and is threatened by someone in the choir standing behind him on the risers. People hiss and murmur and sometimes scream when they see him: Murderer! This hate becomes dangerous, and the Browns try to stanch it. They give interviews, fight back against the school and the police, whom they're sure are trying to sacrifice their son. The sheriff's office denies that the Browns ever contacted them about the Internet death threats from Eric Harris, and yet, in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, they used that very same police report as evidence when asking a judge for a search warrant for the Harrises' house. Six months later, when Brooks moves out of his house to live with his girlfriend, the family converts his old bedroom into a Columbine war room: Black binders of evidence fill bookshelves; diagrams of the school hang on the wall, marked with color-coded dots for each of the 350 bullets fired that day, as many as a hundred of which can't be explained.

When Judy sits at the kitchen table, wringing her hands over it all—and she does this nightly—she wonders where this is leading, reliving Zero Day from every angle, reviewing crime-scene photographs, listening to an enhanced 911 tape that broadcasts the killers' voices and the thud of shots fired into human bodies. People in Littleton no longer want to talk about the shootings—and they marginalize those who still do. They want Zero Day to disappear, to become a story that becomes a rumor that time forgets.

So what is this about? Even as the Browns come to be seen by the community as pariahs, this is about saving Brooks. Brooks, who's grown his hair out and dyed it purple. Brooks, who listens obsessively to the Insane Clown Posse and considers himself one of the band's followers, known as Juggalos, whom he defines as "hurt and angry hippy-geeks." Brooks, who molders in the unfinished basement of his house in a Denver-area subdivision, behind three plywood tables set with computers, with two of his buddies, one of whom delivers Domino's Pizza, and plays video games until dawn on the big-screen. "Yeah, some of the games may seem violent," says Brooks, "but it's pretty tongue-in-cheek violence."

So come in. He's down here right now, stuck on Zero Day because what Zero Day did to Brooks was erase an essential part of the hard drive that stores human faith and trust. Even today, years later, a balloon pops and many Columbine kids still hit the deck. A siren sounds and they burst into tears. Others, rather than living with more tolerance, mistrust all misfits, freaks and loners. Brooks just mistrusts himself. How could he have had a friendship with Dylan and not seen what was coming? How could he have prevented it?

At odd times, he remembers Dylan—the kid, not the killer. He remembers being in an economics class with him when the teacher put a bunch of fake money on the counter and told the students to split into teams and take $5,000 each, mock-invest it and see what kind of profit they could turn. The idea was that they would be rewarded with more fake money, depending on their gains. And while everyone sat there, obsessing over their gains and losses, Brooks and Dylan stole to the front of the room, scooped up a pile of money, and won the game. Not exactly the stuff that gets you into Harvard—though both of them had the IQ for it—but just funny shit.

When Brooks remembers this, he can't stop laughing. He seems absolutely lost in that long-ago moment, almost talking to himself. Right now he's 23 and has no college education, no regular job. He plays video games until the early hours, then sleeps late. The Insane Clown Posse sings out: Watch your step to hell.... It's a long fall! And Brooks Brown is remembering.

"Dylan and I, man...with all the money.... It was...just so...so fucking funny."

That he laughs, that he chooses to remember, that he was friends with a boy who morphed into a monster and doesn't pretend otherwise—does this make him guilty or innocent?

Her hands go to his head; her prayers go to his brain. The mother of the boy named Patrick Ireland tries to will her son back together. The buckshot has penetrated the frontal lobe and damaged the seat of speech. He can't make words, and when they give him a chalkboard and tell him to write his answers to their questions, he draws something corkscrewed that looks nothing like a word. Every day now brings her to tears.

For all of his friends who visit and all the celebrities too—Terrell Davis, Shania Twain, Aerosmith—he remains pale, almost gaunt, but something is working inside him. His brain finds ways to refasten itself, to accommodate the buckshot, to focus as if on a math equation. He undergoes physical therapy and speech therapy and makes astounding strides. He becomes a poster boy for a community's recovery. He receives donations, over $200,000—and thousands of letters. The Boy in the Window. A nation seems to believe they know him from one iconic video clip capturing the most horrifying, intimate, unscripted moment of a life. It has made him a folk hero—for just having lived through it.

Others injured in the shootings will never be Patrick Ireland. They become bitter, fixated on the killers. Some argue over donated money; some turn to drugs; some face more tragedy. One day, not long after the shooting, the mother of one girl who has been left as a paraplegic goes to a pawnshop, asks to see a gun, then, while the clerk is distracted, loads it with bullets from her pocket and shoots herself in the head.

Patrick Ireland tries to give up his anger, even urges his mother to forgive the killers whom she refers to as "creatures." He narrows his world to what's necessary, and by the end of summer he's able to walk for short periods of time—and to write. On a symbolic day in August, he becomes the first student to reenter Columbine High School, on crutches. He tape-records his classes and plays them over and over again until he's grasped their meanings. He's named Homecoming King. By late autumn, he no longer needs his speech therapist, though he still struggles to locate words, sometimes seems to disappear for a split second down some back staircase in his mind. And yet, impossibly, by spring, having maintained his 4.0 grade-point average, he's valedictorian. Four years later, he can water-ski again and is ready to graduate college. If he exhibits occasional self-absorption—if he pushes for a happy, heroic ending—he's entitled. When asked what he wants to do with his life, he smiles and says, "Make a lot of money."

So here he is, an American success story. But as able as he is to focus his mind, there's still a tunnel with a bullet at its end that leads to Zero Day. It's there every time he shakes with his partially crippled right hand, every time he loses track of the right word, every time he dreams of playing basketball again, which he'll never do.

Very early on, not long after the shootings, Patrick Ireland has the desire to return to the library before it's gutted and relocated, while everything is still in its exact place, the carpet splattered with red bursts for each body shot that day, including the killers who died ten feet from his table. It seems morbid but necessary. When he goes back, when he studies the blood-smear track of his own progress, one question recurs in his mind: I did that?
And ever after—though he realizes that he's permanently disabled—he falls under a spell of self-delusion that sustains him: If I did that, he repeats to himself, I can do anything.

Something cracks and falls away. Forgiveness, mercy, silence. They took his boy on a blindingly bright spring day, and his body was left for twenty-eight hours, facedown on a cement walkway, alone. The cops strung DO NOT CROSS signs around the high school and tackled anyone who tried. According to whose law is it that once a child dies, his parents suddenly cease to have any parental rights? Why can't a father kiss his son good-bye, or cover him one last time with a coat, on the spot he fell?

Something cracks and falls away—and something rises. America grieves over Columbine but with a fruit fly's attention span, and immediately seeks closure. An out-of-stater appears with fifteen wooden crosses and plants them on Rebel Hill to memorialize everyone who lost their lives at the school. Kids scrawl messages on them, even those of the killers. We love you, Dylan. After a few days, Brian Rohrbough climbs the hill with two signs that say MURDERER, BURN IN HELL, and attaches them to Dylan and Eric's crosses, where they're quickly removed by a local cop. So now speech isn't free when it's the truth?

The next day at dusk, Brian Rohrbough and some friends return before the grieving masses and march up the hill with a CNN camera crew tagging along. He stands before the killers' crosses, regards the messages of love scribbled there, and they rip one—and then the other—from the ground and drag them back down the hill.

Soon a local church decides to plant fifteen trees, and again Danny's father lodges a protest: In the Bible, as he reads it, God will never forgive the killers because the killers never asked for forgiveness. But the church goes ahead anyway, plants fifteen poplars in a horseshoe, surrounding a bench that looks out past the subdivisions to the Hogbacks. Danny's father appears on a Sunday as parishioners arrive to worship and protests the planting. He informs the church that they can make it right, or he will. When the minister ignores him, he walks out with his ex-wife, her husband and some friends, and they cut down two of the trees, laying placards on the stumps bearing the names of the killers.

Is this enough hate?

What rises in an otherwise quiet man is anger: Brian Rohrbough becomes a one-man vigilante squad. There are little crimes everywhere, and wherever he sees them, he rabble-rouses for rectification. The sheriff's department won't turn over his son's clothing from the day of the shooting; he won't rest until he has his green T-shirt and jeans, and when he does, he sends them out for forensic tests. He decides the United Way is misspending national donations for the victims of Columbine, and he sues them—not because he needs money, but on principle. The sheriff's department tries to withhold the ballistics report that may explain who killed his son, and he prepares another lawsuit. The Klebolds and the Harrises refuse to answer his questions, hiding behind lawyers; he sues them for the sole purpose of confronting them in a deposition. Which he does.

Yes, Brian Rohrbough, the father, is filled with uncontrollable rage—and sudden strength. Once he ducked a local television reporter who was doing a puff piece on the success of his business; now he sits on nationally televised roundtables, debating the finest minutiae of the Columbine shootings, pressing the point that a cover-up has occurred. He can speak in graphic detail about how his son died if it will somehow reveal the truth. But of course nothing lessens his son's absence. Not even that very slab of cement on which he once lay. When Columbine High School is remodeled after the shooting, a friend removes the slab and transports it to the house of Brian's ex-wife, Sue. They set it up under a swing, and it becomes sacred ground.

In Littleton, Brian Rohrbough is considered an angry man who should just forget, like everyone else. And forgive. But how can he? On Mother's Day and Father's Day, he and Sue have gotten into the habit of exchanging gifts, things made by Danny over the years. Recently, Sue gave him a wooden cabin Brian made when he was 10. What's hard to communicate to those who would rather forget is that he has a house with a living room with a table with a wooden cabin that was made by the son he no longer has. His is a world full of these mementos, these reminders.
See, until there are answers, it's Danny who gives him the courage to speak, and it's Danny who deserves his courage. His anger is more pure than their amnesia. Their crime is forgetting, and he won't let them.

Behind the sameness of facades, there are hundreds of haunted houses in Littleton, Colorado.
The young basketball star who watched Dave Sanders die commits suicide, hanging himself in his parents' garage. He, too, becomes a casualty of Zero Day.

Within a year of the shootings, two Columbine students are murdered, execution-style, at a Subway sandwich shop two blocks from the high school. The police never find any suspects.

That same month, the body of an 11-year-old boy is left for dead in a Dumpster behind the Bed Bath & Beyond, which sits across the street from Columbine High.

In January 2002, three young locals are killed in a shooting at a nearby bowling alley, and rumors persist that one of the killers is a Columbine student.

But there's nothing more haunted than the high school itself. At first even the principal is frightened by it. Days after the shooting, Frank DeAngelis stands in a snowstorm at 5 A.M., looking from Clement Park to the school, waiting for an early-morning television feed to New York. Strung out on grief and disbelief, running through a litany of self-recriminations, he looks up at the school, lights ablaze from inside while investigators crawl through the wreckage. In that thick snow, a chill runs up his spine. How will he ever enter that sarcophagus again?

But he does. That first Saturday, he's allowed back in. He wanders the halls, backpacks strewn everywhere. He visits the cafeteria. He stands on the spot where he was shot at. He retraces the movements of Dave Sanders, the teacher who had been his best friend. Mr. D is absolutely convinced that Dave diverted one of the murderers from killing him, and for his efforts here, all that's left behind are his bloody knuckle marks smudged on the floor.
Once back in his school, Mr. D never leaves. He works seventy-, eighty-hour weeks. He refuses media interviews and pours himself into the kids, into rebuilding, into recovery. He takes endless abuse for the perception that Columbine was run by white-capped jocks who terrorized others, especially the pariahs in black dusters. The proof is fifteen dead. He's raw and hurt, and when he addresses the students for the first time since before the prom, he sobs uncontrollably, his whole body rocking. "I can only say what I said last Friday," he says. "That I love each and every one of you."
And now everyone clings to him: the teachers, the students, the parents. They need to be carried and hugged and reassured. His redemption, he realizes, can only occur if he gives every last particle of himself to this school, as Dave Sanders did. When he returns home at the end of the day, he's unable to speak to his wife and children. He can't hug—or be hugged. He's empty. He can't read or sleep. He sits alone, processing, questioning, as the phone rings and rings. His parents, his siblings, his friends—no one understands: Why won't Frank come to the phone?

Why is it no surprise that his marriage soon disintegrates? Or that he has heart problems? Or that he's given to panic attacks at the oddest moments? He walks the same halls, inadvertently retreads the path of the killers and on occasion finds himself gazing off, out the window at the mountains, standing on the spot where someone once lay dead. There are days when it feels as if this school is trying to kill him, too.

But then the first anniversary passes—and the second and the third. The freshmen who were at Columbine on the day of the shooting graduate. Teachers leave, and soon there are only a few people who were here that day, those moons ago. At one point, he promised that he'd stay only until the class of 2002 moved on, but now that they're gone, where's he supposed to go?

So stand here in the hall as he passes—again and again, perhaps years from now. He's a short man in a bulky gray suit with a kind face and an easy word for any student who makes eye contact or wants to talk. Usually, he walks purposefully, but today he meanders, tracing the same path down the hallway as he did the day the killers destroyed everything—and then finding the spot where Dave Sanders was shot and left his bloody knuckle prints. Once there, the man so quick to show emotion shows none.

When he walks through the science wing, kids are lying on top of big pieces of construction paper, tracing one another's bodies with black markers. Some lie there giggling; some lie perfectly still, as if bodies at a crime scene. In this moment, the principal smiles uneasily at his kids and steps briskly, wordlessly past, thrown forward into the business of his day, pressing his lips tightly as if holding five years back.

We die many times, says Reverend Don, and experience many different forms of grief. We endure the hatred of others in order to listen, to reach out, to hear the truth, to change one life.

Jail is where Reverend Don now spends his days, working with the inmates at the Adams County Detention Center for $20 an hour. Stand here in his windowless office and there may be room for only one other person. How did he go from a congregation of 1,000 people and a compensation package worth $90,000 a year to this?

Reverend Don isn't shy about telling the story: He got fired, sold his house, slid into a depression, suffering from the aftereffects of Columbine, in an endless loop over Columbine. He moved to Chicago for two years to lead a congregation beset by ills. He's ashamed to say now that he didn't answer a spiritual calling on that occasion; he did it for the money. And then, in Denver, his son had a baby. Reverend Don became a grandfather, and he and his wife decided: Job or no, they were moving back.

Here at the jail, there are 1,200 inmates, some of them the worst of the worst: accused bank robbers and killers and pedophiles. But there's an unusual honesty here, too. You can't really lie about who you are when you're wearing prison pinnies. And if you mean to redeem yourself—both spiritually and personally—well, then, eventually you're going to get around to seeing Reverend Don.

On this day, nearly five years after laying Dylan Klebold to rest, he offers counsel, meets with a handful of inmates to discuss the Bible, conveys information to inmates about sick relatives—and then delivers bad news. Just as he prepares to brave the rush-hour traffic to go home, he's handed a slip of paper. An inmate's aunt has passed away, and it's Reverend Don's charge to break the news.

Reverend Don takes his prisoner, a thin man in on a petty offense, to a private room. He tells him that his aunt is dead, and the man breathes in, once sharply, and then starts hyperventilating. "No, no, no," he keeps repeating. "She was my mother's favorite." The minister asks if his mother's still alive, and the man answers in the negative. "So you're going to be mourning her death again, aren't you?" he says. "Yes, I am," the man says, in a small voice. "My mother." "How many days you got left?" "Eight." "Shit. That's bad luck," says Reverend Don. "That's rotten. You won't make the funeral." "That's right," says the man. And now he seems to dissolve, his eyes welling, his lips moving but making no sound. Reverend Don reaches out and clasps the prisoner's arm gently but with purpose. It's an act of intimacy in a place where knives end up in people for less.
"Hey," he says, "can you look at me?" The prisoner looks up. "I don't know what landed you in prison," says Reverend Don, "but I'm here for you...to talk. Okay? We can talk about anything—your aunt, your mother, the Bible. We can talk about anything." Reverend Don is gazing upon the man, perhaps even as he did the killers' parents, and only sees his suffering. "You're not alone," he says.

So it's time to return. Come. One last time. Everything is moving so quickly backward, can you feel it? Armies drive in reverse through orange sandstorms half a world away, fallen soldiers take their feet again, the injured suddenly are given back limbs—and all of them are placed on transport planes, flying backward, for home. Upon their return, there's an interlude of national mourning, jingoistic rage and confusion, and then, on the southern tip of Manhattan, two jets are miraculously belched whole from inside skyscrapers and rematerialize at 30,000 feet. On the streets, no one bothers to look up. Soon the passengers are walking backward down the gangplanks in Boston, returning home to their families. The skyscrapers empty of people, too, who then return to their families. The public consciousness turns to money, the millions made with every upward burble of the market. And it just keeps going up.

As complicated as this country is, America, on the morning of April 20, 1999—on Zero Day—is a much simpler place than the one it will become that afternoon. There's a girl on the lawn eating her lunch in front of Columbine High School. There's a boy stepping outside with his buddies for a cigarette. And there's another, up in the library, finishing his statistics homework, smiling at the memory of his last-ever basketball game, the fluid up-and-downs on the court, the shot at the buzzer.

Can you feel where this is taking us? Time keeps moving backward. The teenagers are becoming children again, as they've always been. A boy named Brooks poses in a picture with his friend Dylan, dressed in Cub Scout uniforms. Now they're running backward out the doors of the elementary school, their feet in funny kicks, to their mothers in waiting station wagons. The children pull apples from their mouths, place them whole on the table and shed their clothes for warm pajamas. Even as their mothers wake them, they fall back to sleep. Long, unbroken hours of sleep during which their hands grow smaller.

Only someone like God could tell us what they dream now, sleeping as they do. But sometime during this night, God temporarily goes missing. A primal force moves the stars. Snowflakes fall like locusts, banishing the earth. Somewhere, in this night, an errant seed lights down. A silver hook fastens. These are not supernatural acts. This is real.

Now let the terrible glare of time begin forward again. It's dizzying, this speed. Can you feel it? The babies become teenagers. The guns are bought and hidden in the closet, waiting. The road is cold and silver, swerving all these years later to Columbine High School, where, in blinding sun on a seventy-in-April day, with laughter floating from the cafeteria, two boys cross the parking lot.

Two boys are crossing the parking lot now—crossing again...and again. And for the last time: These killers are crossing the parking lot again. No one stops them. No one even sees them. What comes next is irreversible: We are eating lunch on the lawn, going for a smoke, finishing our homework.
Listen: There's innocent laughter—and then, in a second, there's none at all.

tfsa47090 wrote:

I want to add something about Ralph Larkin's Comprehending Columbine:

He ACTUALLY QUOTES THIS WEBSITE in his book!!!!

If that doesn't say enough about this man's researching skills, I don't know what will.

Does the book have interesting points and interviews? Yes, in my opinion it does. That doesn't change the fact that he repeatedly quoted and SOURCED a phony website!!

Seriously, that's as horrendously irresponsible as Cullen including Brenda Parker's "story" in his book as fact.

I agree.
I feel like if someone is desperate to find a source for a quote or a source to back up their research no matter how questionable the source is they can find one and are happy to use it. Sometimes i wonder if researchers just think that nobody else will bother to check their sources or don't actually check the sources properly themselves. I think it's highly unlikely Larkin saw this website and thought 'wow what a fantastically credible website for me to use for my book.'

I have not read Comprehending Columbine for a while and i don't own a copy but was intending to read it again soon.

queenfarooq wrote:

tfsa47090 wrote:

I want to add something about Ralph Larkin's Comprehending Columbine:

He ACTUALLY QUOTES THIS WEBSITE in his book!!!!

If that doesn't say enough about this man's researching skills, I don't know what will.

Does the book have interesting points and interviews? Yes, in my opinion it does. That doesn't change the fact that he repeatedly quoted and SOURCED a phony website!!

Seriously, that's as horrendously irresponsible as Cullen including Brenda Parker's "story" in his book as fact.

I agree.
I feel like if someone is desperate to find a source for a quote or a source to back up their research no matter how questionable the source is they can find one and are happy to use it. Sometimes i wonder if researchers just think that nobody else will bother to check their sources or don't actually check the sources properly themselves. I think it's highly unlikely Larkin saw this website and thought 'wow what a fantastically credible website for me to use for my book.'

I have not read Comprehending Columbine for a while and i don't own a copy but was intending to read it again soon.

I read Comprehending Columbine when it was released, which was in 2007, I believe. I'd seen that ridiculous website a few years prior, but didn't connect it immediately while reading the book. I just knew that when I read the multiple references to it in the book, something was inherently wrong with them.

I read it again about a year and a half ago to two years ago, and once again, the quotes from "Eric Harris' 'Trenchcoat Mafia' website" (Larkin's literal description when referencing it) just made me nauseous.

A few months ago, I was looking on conspiracy-esque forums and saw that site linked. I clicked on it, and said "THERE'S that utterly STUPID site! THAT'S the one referenced in Larkin's book!" (I do that now and again---going on weird conspiracy theory websites/forums. Believe it or not, you can find little snippets of information that you can research further on your own that you won't find otherwise. Usually names and dates. Of course, the majority of this type of information is fruitless and nonsensical, but there'd been a few times I found some interesting information through my own searches with a name, date, or location referenced through such mediums. In short, it's a good idea to look everywhere, no matter how deranged the sites may be overall, and then research further on your own).

There's no excuse for this whatsoever. This was written and published eight years after it happened. He is also one of the people who says that it's Dylan filming Eric, Mike V., and Brandi and her friend walking, when we all know it was Erik Veik. He says it right in this book.

Despite all of this, I don't discourage anyone from reading it. I think that when you're researching something, you actually need to and should read everything that you can, from all sides. However, this desperate need (from some people) to find and "officially" name ONE source as the "holy grail", especially in a complicated situation such as this, is never going to be satiated with one single book. It just isn't. They're all flawed; all unreliable in one way or another. One needs to read them all, among other things, and piece everything together themselves. Even then, the whole story is not ever going to be entirely clear.

tfsa47090 wrote:

I read Comprehending Columbine when it was released, which was in 2007, I believe. I'd seen that ridiculous website a few years prior, but didn't connect it immediately while reading the book. I just knew that when I read the multiple references to it in the book, something was inherently wrong with them.

I read it again about a year and a half ago to two years ago, and once again, the quotes from "Eric Harris' 'Trenchcoat Mafia' website" (Larkin's literal description when referencing it) just made me nauseous.

A few months ago, I was looking on conspiracy-esque forums and saw that site linked. I clicked on it, and said "THERE'S that utterly STUPID site! THAT'S the one referenced in Larkin's book!" (I do that now and again---going on weird conspiracy theory websites/forums. Believe it or not, you can find little snippets of information that you can research further on your own that you won't find otherwise. Usually names and dates. Of course, the majority of this type of information is fruitless and nonsensical, but there'd been a few times I found some interesting information through my own searches with a name, date, or location referenced through such mediums. In short, it's a good idea to look everywhere, no matter how deranged the sites may be overall, and then research further on your own).

There's no excuse for this whatsoever. This was written and published eight years after it happened. He is also one of the people who says that it's Dylan filming Eric, Mike V., and Brandi and her friend walking, when we all know it was Erik Veik. He says it right in this book.

Despite all of this, I don't discourage anyone from reading it. I think that when you're researching something, you actually need to and should read everything that you can, from all sides. However, this desperate need (from some people) to find and "officially" name ONE source as the "holy grail", especially in a complicated situation such as this, is never going to be satiated with one single book. It just isn't. They're all flawed; all unreliable in one way or another. One needs to read them all, among other things, and piece everything together themselves. Even then, the whole story is not ever going to be entirely clear.

I also read Comprehending Columbine shortly after it came out. It keeps coming up on my 'recommended reading list' on amazon so I intend to read it again soon and perhaps i can express a better opinion on the book. I have seen that website a few times before as well, but i don't think it was from reading about it in Larkin's book. I really wonder if Larkin has actually taken the time to read and view the website.

I am also prone to exploring the conspiracy-esque websites, there are some frustratingly inaccurate Columbine related ones out there but sometimes as you mention you can gather some interesting tidbits here and there.  

You're right in that there is no excuse for such inaccuracy, especially given the amount of time after the massacre it was written. I have often seen people claiming Dylan is filming the 'Eric in Columbine' video, I assume this is as a result of Brooks Brown saying it was Dylan in 'The Columbine Killers' documentary. Obviously Brooks made a mistake here but you would think if you were writing a book it is extremely important to source your sources and double check everything.

Unfortunately as you mention all the books on Columbine have their flaws, whether they are promoting horrifyingly inaccurate information or are biased because of personal opinion, nothing will be 100% accurate. It is a complicated situation, even the "Official" documents we have access to are flawed in some way making it even more difficult to document a correct account of everything that happened. The only people who have the true answers to everything are not here to tell them.

Kass' book is probably my favourite.

I used to enjoy Cullen's book until I found out that a lot of info he put into the book was fake.

Than I am happy that I ordered Kass´book  

Kass' book is also probably one of my favorites.

I just started reading 'College Killers: School Shootings in North America and Europe" by Gordon Kerr. It was published quite recently as an eBook and the front cover is the famous cafeteria shot of Eric and Dylan. The book covers many of the more well known school shootings and also has a smaller section on Terrorism. I read the Columbine section first.
It's not very long or detailed and is probably as accurate as it is inaccurate. It is stated at the beginning of the book that views expressed in the book are the opinion of the author. These assumptions are clear to see but at times it is unclear if a statement is an opinion or supposed to be a fact. This could be very confusing to someone who is unfamiliar with the case as it portrays false information.
Honestly I don't think there is anything new to be learnt from this small section in this book.

queenfarooq wrote:

Honestly I don't think there is anything new to be learnt from this small section in this book.

I'm not trying to be funny but is there anything new we can learn from any of the information that we have so far? Every avenue has been explored, every scenario imagined. Until (or if) we get new material, can we really learn anything new from what we have?

areyoulistening wrote:

queenfarooq wrote:

Honestly I don't think there is anything new to be learnt from this small section in this book.

I'm not trying to be funny but is there anything new we can learn from any of the information that we have so far? Every avenue has been explored, every scenario imagined. Until (or if) we get new material, can we really learn anything new from what we have?

I understand what you mean, perhaps I worded that wrong, I'm tired  What I mean is there is no new perspective or highlighting of under reported pieces of information. This book just covers the very basics, there's no interviews, it's like someone has written a brief summary of what happened.
I think from Kass' book I did learn of a number of new bits and pieces of information I hadn't previously known about that I considered new but they were only new to me. But as far as learning anything groundbreaking or new you are right, everything we have available to us at the moment does seem to regurgitate the same or similar information. Which gets frustrating at times. I'm always hoping i'll read something and discover some information I did not previously know about.
I was so pleased when I found out about the Klebold's section in Far From the Tree but it does feel like now it's a waiting game for something new and unknown to be released.

I personally loved the Zero Hour and Columbine Killers documentaries. I just finished reading Brooks' No Easy Answers, really good stuff!

I was thinking about getting another book though. Is Jeff Kass' Columbine good? Better than Brooks' book?

Marco, I personally preferred Jeff Kass' book to Brooks', but both are good reads I'd definitely recommend you read Jeff's book!

"Columbine Killers"

Someone needs to find the backround music to that special; especially the hard rock segment

Everyone seems to like Kass' book. I didn't care for it to much. It started out with some interesting information at the beginning, but all the legal issues at the end made it seem like an episode of Law and Order.

I think I like Kass' book the best because of what it's running against. I do like No Easy Answers, but I found more interesting research in the Kass book that I hadn't heard before, and I liked the parts about Dylan's funeral and when Kathy and Wayne spoke about Eric and his childhood.

Pretty interesting in the full video of Zero Hour (one that runs for 48 mins), they actually include the scene where Dylan asks Valeen if she believes in god. Just wanted to mention it, in case anyone has only watched the 46-minute one.

Marco1211 wrote:

Pretty interesting in the full video of Zero Hour (one that runs for 48 mins), they actually include the scene where Dylan asks Valeen if she believes in god. Just wanted to mention it, in case anyone has only watched the 46-minute one.

Do you have a link to the full version?

Marco1211 wrote:

Jenn wrote:

Marco1211 wrote:

Pretty interesting in the full video of Zero Hour (one that runs for 48 mins), they actually include the scene where Dylan asks Valeen if she believes in god. Just wanted to mention it, in case anyone has only watched the 46-minute one.

Do you have a link to the full version?

Thank you.

A side note: I was reading Eric's journal today and he was saying that he wonders if anyone will ever write a book about him and if they do, it better be a good book. Only one thought came to my mind when I read that. I wonder what Eric would think of Cullen's book?

Jenn wrote:

Marco1211 wrote:

Jenn wrote:

Marco1211 wrote:

Pretty interesting in the full video of Zero Hour (one that runs for 48 mins), they actually include the scene where Dylan asks Valeen if she believes in god. Just wanted to mention it, in case anyone has only watched the 46-minute one.

Do you have a link to the full version?

Thank you.

A side note: I was reading Eric's journal today and he was saying that he wonders if anyone will ever write a book about him and if they do, it better be a good book. Only one thought came to my mind when I read that. I wonder what Eric would think of Cullen's book?

He'd probably want to shoot him. And blow up a few bookstores to show his rage.

gustopoet wrote:

Jenn wrote:

Marco1211 wrote:

Jenn wrote:

Marco1211 wrote:

Pretty interesting in the full video of Zero Hour (one that runs for 48 mins), they actually include the scene where Dylan asks Valeen if she believes in god. Just wanted to mention it, in case anyone has only watched the 46-minute one.

Do you have a link to the full version?

Thank you.

A side note: I was reading Eric's journal today and he was saying that he wonders if anyone will ever write a book about him and if they do, it better be a good book. Only one thought came to my mind when I read that. I wonder what Eric would think of Cullen's book?

He'd probably want to shoot him. :lol:And blow up a few bookstores to show his rage.

Or maybe he would be pleased: He is afterall the mastemind and the chickmagnet;) 

tragedy79 wrote:

gustopoet wrote:

Jenn wrote:

Marco1211 wrote:

Jenn wrote:

Marco1211 wrote:

Pretty interesting in the full video of Zero Hour (one that runs for 48 mins), they actually include the scene where Dylan asks Valeen if she believes in god. Just wanted to mention it, in case anyone has only watched the 46-minute one.

Do you have a link to the full version?

Thank you.

A side note: I was reading Eric's journal today and he was saying that he wonders if anyone will ever write a book about him and if they do, it better be a good book. Only one thought came to my mind when I read that. I wonder what Eric would think of Cullen's book?

He'd probably want to shoot him. :lol:And blow up a few bookstores to show his rage.

Or maybe he would be pleased: He is afterall the mastemind and the chickmagnet;) 

Haha! That was a good one. 

Earlier today I read a review of the new book about the Newtown shootings:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

My eyes rolled:

Quote :

Perhaps we're simply too close to that violent day to have much perspective about it. After all, Dave Cullen spent a decade writing "Columbine," the best book yet about America's epidemic of mass shootings. In 10 more years, maybe another writer will tackle the tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary and get closer to the truths it has to teach us.

In 2023, a media-whoring Truman Capote wannabe will unleash upon the gullible rubes his magnum hackus - a staggering work of breathtaking genius portraying Adam Lanza as a swaggering psychopathic ladies' man.

I can't wait.

LPorter101 wrote:

Earlier today I read a review of the new book about the Newtown shootings:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

My eyes rolled:

Quote :

Perhaps we're simply too close to that violent day to have much perspective about it. After all, Dave Cullen spent a decade writing "Columbine," the best book yet about America's epidemic of mass shootings. In 10 more years, maybe another writer will tackle the tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary and get closer to the truths it has to teach us.

In 2023, a media-whoring Truman Capote wannabe will unleash upon the gullible rubes his magnum hackus - a staggering work of breathtaking genius portraying Adam Lanza as a swaggering psychopathic ladies' man.

I can't wait.

 

LPorter101 wrote:

Earlier today I read a review of the new book about the Newtown shootings:
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

My eyes rolled:

Quote :

Perhaps we're simply too close to that violent day to have much perspective about it. After all, Dave Cullen spent a decade writing "Columbine," the best book yet about America's epidemic of mass shootings. In 10 more years, maybe another writer will tackle the tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary and get closer to the truths it has to teach us.

In 2023, a media-whoring Truman Capote wannabe will unleash upon the gullible rubes his magnum hackus - a staggering work of breathtaking genius portraying Adam Lanza as a swaggering psychopathic ladies' man.

I can't wait.

Oh no, and i was actually considering buying this book, my main concern was it could have a "Cullen-esque" twist on it. On the topic of swaggering ladies man Adam Lanza, I have come across an article that claimed he had a girlfriend, for some reason i find that quite difficult to believe but if i come across it again i'll post it on here.

Do you guys think we'll ever get a definitive book about what happened at Columbine?

Read No Easy Answers and it was pretty good, still need to read Jeff Kass' book.

They should make sure Cullen's book is in the fiction section, that would be less misleading; and put a caveat on it "for psychopaths and depressives only".

I thought Zero Hour was halfway decent in visualizing the attack, especially on a visceral level. Check the above posted 48 minute video of it, at 46:41 is the very best scene, about a ten second backtracking shot of Dylan and Eric in the library. It epitlmizes the end of the road for the boys. I saw someone had a short clip of it up on their tumblr site or something.

Why the 48 minutes version of Zero Hour has the part of do you believe in god?, in a bad quality? and why it was practically banned in the 46 minutes version?, I loved the documentary but I was criticizing it when that part didnt appear and now I had the chance to watch it completely, something good but that makes me wonder several things because if the answer is that it was banned because is a really strong scene or whatever, I dont believe it, there is stronger scenes. In fact Zero Hour, is my favorite documentary about Columbine but I dont understand that. About books, I cant say anything, I can get those books here but I am thinking about find here on internet the Brooks Brown's book

I don't get it, what would there be to write about the Sandy Hook shooting? Seems pretty straight forward to me.

Mentally disturbed man shoots mother in the head at home, then shoots up an elementary school. The end.

There, I just wrote it, enjoy.

JohnnyB wrote:

"Columbine Killers"

Someone needs to find the backround music to that special; especially the hard rock segment

I know your comment is 3 years old. But I was just about to comment this when other people were mentioning the documentary.

It was composed by Jérôme Echenoz I'm going to find the music

The books on columbine that i've read it's Jeff Kass's book 'Columbine: A True Crime Story' cuz it's a good book and i've read Brooks' book ' No easy answer ' for me it's good too.