Alienated Teens Empathize With High School Gunmen

Robin Muske has felt the urge, imagined the moment, occasionally allowed herself the purely hypothetical pleasure of pushing a tormentor off a cliff, out of her life.

“I totally understand,” says the sophomore at New Hampshire’s Portsmouth High School.

“I think everyone has that moment when you think about killing someone.”

Muske by no means condones the coldly calculated slayings last week of 13 people by two teens at a high school in Littleton, Colo. But like a surprising number of young people across the country, she sees the massacre through the prism of someone who was once, she says, “one of the worst outcasts” in school.

For all the revulsion, anger and hatred directed at the Columbine High School killers, the two members of the so-called Trench Coat Mafia have become overnight objects of empathy--sometimes even sympathy--among young people who consider themselves forced to the fringes of their peer groups.

Although these teens generally are horrified by the slayings, they blame the cliquish subcultures of what they call uncaring school systems, rather than the two youths who went on an obscene rampage. The vast communities of chat rooms and bulletin boards on the Internet have been pulsing with I-told-you-so and that-could-be-me missives.

Several teens said they could identify with Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who police say took their own lives at the end of their psychotic stroll through the suburban Denver high school.

“These two boys were pushed so far over the edge that they used their only instinct left as a defense mechanism: to fight back,” wrote one youth on a school violence bulletin board. “Watch out--I could snap next,” he added.

At New York City’s Norman Thomas High School, South Carolina transplant Donovin Ahmad leaned against a wall, hands in his pockets, and talked about the social gantlet a newcomer has to run when he or she arrives at a tough school in a big city.

“I can understand it,” Ahmad, a whippet-thin ninth-grader, said of the frustration. “Everybody gets picked on, and some people take it too far. But it couldn’t have been that bad that they had to kill people.”

The killings in Littleton and a half dozen school-related shootings the previous year have become something of a Rorschach blotter for people to read what they want into what’s wrong with America in general--and its kids in particular. Easy access to guns, violent video games, shocking song lyrics and permissive parenting, not to mention a bad batch of DNA, all have been considered culprits to varying degrees.

For the moment, one of the leading indicators of choice is the old high school caste system that lumps kids into cliques with Darwinian callousness--at least until graduation, after which the high school quarterback may well be offering to check the oil in the geek’s red Ferrari.

Yet some experts believe the Revenge of the Nerds theory doesn’t explain why one designated dork becomes a schoolmate-slaughtering lunatic while another morphs into Bill Gates. And if history is any guide, the more learned about the Colorado case, the more theories--and laws--will be offered as answers, often to fit any number of agendas.

C. Ronald Huff, an Ohio State University criminologist who has studied gang culture and youth violence for 13 years, believes the shootings are symptomatic of a broader erosion of civil society that encompasses motorists trading obscene gestures and inner-city gangsters feeding body counts. And the competitive culture compels parents to insist that their kids take a back seat to no one.

“It’s all about payback,” he said. “And with the easier availability of weapons, the conflicts have become more lethal.”

He drew a parallel between the hopelessness felt by some suburban kids marginalized in their schools and by poor black youths marginalized by society in general.

“Most people who have been marginalized will make a reasonable adjustment to compensate. A smaller percentage will become violent, either to others or themselves,” Huff said. He believes that lack of parental involvement in kids’ lives, along with schools that could care less about incorporating ethics and civility into their lesson plans, are bigger culprits than a violent entertainment media.

Derrick Edwards, a senior at Norman Thomas, says he has “sympathy to a point” for the Columbine killers, even though they purportedly killed one student just because he, like Edwards, was black.

“If African Americans could withstand prejudice, these guys from the Trench Coat Mafia could have,” Edwards said.

Yet for all the brutality of the crime and the neo-Nazi proclivities of the two killers, the tragedy to some extent has become a rallying point for “geek pride.”

Onja Price, a student who exchanged e-mails with a reporter but wouldn’t identify her hometown, said vandals sprayed “death to jocks and preps” and “Trench Coat Mafia” on her school’s tennis court shortly after the killings.

By third period, hundreds of students had gone home, and officials finally closed school before noon “because every student was scared to death,” she said.

At a Web site called Slashdot--”News for Nerds”--the dialogue over the shootings was voluminous and passionate.

Kevin Talbot of Boston talked about how he often was beaten up, spit upon or called a “freak” or a “drama fag” during his years at Hingham (Mass.) High School in the early 1990s. One of his friends, he said, was “beat up one night by a whole carload of jocks. A kid I knew from study hall offered to sell me a gun,” he said. “I envisioned myself walking through the halls of Hingham High, killing everyone who ever beat me up, made fun of me, or ignored me. I knew then that I had a way to make them all pay.

“One thing stopped me. I couldn’t cough up the $50.”

At Slashdot, Internet surfers complained about a post-Littleton trend of “geek profiling”--singling out kids who take on some of the coloration of the Colorado killers.

Jay from the Southeast said he mentioned in his social studies class that he could never condone any killing, but “could, on some level, understand these kids in Colorado, the killers.”

After the class, he said, he was called to the principal’s office and told he had to have five counseling sessions or face expulsion.

Muske says that although she understands why someone would be driven over the edge by tormentors, she no longer considers herself an outcast.

This year, she said, she found herself transcending cliques and making friends with different types of people. “People finally realized that I wasn’t strange just because I didn’t have the money to buy a lot of cool clothes,” she says.

*

Times special correspondent Lisa Meyer in New York contributed to this story.

* SHOOTING INQUIRY: Violence in cafeteria was captured on surveillance tape. A20

* MIKE DOWNEY: Columnist says overreaction to Littleton has just begun. A3

* HOWARD ROSENBERG: Readers debate whether violent entertainment begets tragedies such as Littleton. F1