Warning Signs of Massacre Were Hidden in Plain Sight

It was a steamy Fourth of July last year, the kind of day when, all over America, guys pile into a car and cruise around town, checking out other carloads of guys. That’s just what happened, Peter Maher remembers. He and his buddies stopped for a drink at the 7-Eleven, and when they strode out again, another car had pulled into the lot.

It was a bunch of youths from Columbine High School’s Trench Coat Mafia, the guys who sported long black coats and moody scowls in the school hallways. Maher and his friends peeled away, but they looked out the back window and saw one of the guys, Eric Harris, pull a shotgun out of the trunk and start waving it in the air.

They met up again a few minutes later. Harris, Maher says, got out of the car holding a lead pipe at his side. He accused Maher and his friends of hurling a piece of bread at them back at the 7-Eleven. “He was saying, ‘Who threw the bread, man? One of you is going to be hurting, one of you is going to be sorry for that.’ ” Another boy came up and held a knife “pretty close to my friend’s neck,” Maher recalls.

It was an ominous end to the sort of testosterone-fed standoffs that have populated the small dramas of American youth for generations. The difference here is that, nine months later, Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High armed with four guns and dozens of explosives, launching an assault that left 12 students and one teacher dead and 23 others wounded before the two gunmen took their own lives.

In the days immediately after the massacre, neighbors and friends had the usual things to say about Harris, 18, and Klebold, 17: Sure, they dressed weird; yes, they liked to talk about guns and Nazi stuff and blowing things up. But they were model employees at a nearby pizzeria, good academic achievers, pleasant cutups in class, boys who if your puppy got lost went looking for it. How could we have known?

Now, two weeks later, with years’ worth of notes compared and forgotten anecdotes shared, old reports dug out of files, comes the question that nearly always follows in the wake of such shootings: How could we not have known?

For, in fact, the story of how Harris and Klebold came to descend like avengers on their classmates comes with so many warning flags that the murders seem, like the oft-foreshadowed blood bath in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” to have been eminently foreseeable--if only one had eyes everywhere; if only someone who saw one thing told someone else who saw another thing; if only teenage boys didn’t have the ability to shine one face toward their fathers and quite another toward their friends.

“Every school crisis I’ve ever been involved in, there were warning signs,” said Scott Poland, a Houston school psychologist who led crisis teams for school shootings in Littleton, West Paducah, Ky., and Jonesboro, Ark.

Harris’ creative writing teacher, psychology teacher and video teacher all knew about violent images he was projecting in his school work; but the teachers never knew he had created a Web page in which he talked of killing other students and bragged about building pipe bombs. The Sheriff’s Department knew of the threatening Web page but never told the boys’ parents or teachers. An organization that monitors hate groups on the Internet located Harris’ weapon fantasies but didn’t pass on the information. The magistrate who released Klebold and Harris to a juvenile diversion program after they broke into a van never learned that police had been told about Harris’ potential for violence. Who knew the boys had purchased four guns? Klebold’s girlfriend, for one. Other friends, probably. But no one alerted an adult.

Randy and Judy Brown, whose 17-year-old son, Brooks, was named as a target on Harris’ venomous Web page, were terrified of Harris and phoned the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department eight times to follow up on their initial complaints, which went back as far as 1997. After two meetings with deputies, most of their phone messages were not returned.

“They didn’t act on it. It’s that simple,” Randy Brown said in an interview last week. “We thought, you go to the police with a death threat and talk about making pipe bombs and exploding pipe bombs; we thought the police would do something. Well, live and learn.”

“We all learned a lesson on the 20th of April,” replied sheriff’s Lt. John Kiekbusch. “And I think part of that is we need to take these things in a more serious fashion.”

‘Know What I Love? Freedom of Speech!!!’

You know what I hate? [People] that cut. Why . . . can’t you wait like every other human being on earth does. If you cut, you are the following: Stuck up, self-centered, selfish, lazy, rude and...

You know what I really hate? Liars! Oh Gawwwwd I hate liars. And living in this . . . neighborhood there is thousands of them!!! Why the ---- must people lie so damn much! . . .

You know what I love? Zippo Lighters!!!! . . . You know what I love? Freedom of speech!!!

Some of the reflections from Harris on his Web page sound very much like what any other 18-year-old might distill out of the swirling world around him, the musings of a cyber-age Holden Caulfield. And Harris spent quite a lot of time at his computer.

Harris and Klebold spent hours devising new strategies for violent, shoot-’em-up computer games like Doom, and Harris began creating his own escalated versions, which he posted on the Internet.

The two seemed to become more obsessed with games like that, with bloody movies, and they sometimes marched around campus growling in German, sporting swastikas and mouthing the doom-shrouded lyrics of German rock bands.

Mostly, they seemed to resent the popular athletes on campus, who taunted them in the hallways and threw mashed potatoes at them in the cafeteria. Yet among their few friends, they were cheerful and well-liked.

“He was a cool guy. He was just really open, he didn’t really care about what people thought. He was just funny. He made a lot of jokes. I mean, mean jokes, but funny,” Rebecca Heins said of Harris.

But now that people think back on it, both seemed caught up in violent dreams. When asked to write about an inanimate object’s love for something else, Heins said, Harris wrote that he was a shotgun in love with a shotgun shell.

When asked to write a memoir, Harris wrote about how when he was a child, he and his friends would go out and pretend they were battling an army, “and just shoot everything they could to survive. It was like Vietnam. Nobody thought it was weird,” Heins said. “Little boys talk about guns all the time.”

Harris’ teacher was concerned enough to talk with Harris’ father, who explained to her that he was a career military officer and that his son hoped to join the Marine Corps.

But she was worried about Klebold too, who in the same class had written a story that was “pretty violent in nature, to the point the teacher felt it was inappropriate for a class assignment,” school district spokesman Rick Kaufman said. The teacher spoke to both of Klebold’s parents at a parent-teacher conference in early March and talked to Klebold’s guidance counselor about it.

Klebold shrugged and told the counselor it was “just a story, and he didn’t see why they were making it such a big issue.”

Then, in a marketing class, Harris and Klebold created a video commercial in which they and members of the Trench Coat Mafia offered up their services to protect outcast students from the jocks. “These guys were basically hit men,” Kaufman said.

Another video the boys produced, which Kaufman said wasn’t shown on campus, depicted students striding around with what appeared to be fake guns. Some students who have seen the video describe it as a mock-up of a school shooting.

Klebold always seemed to be more of a follower, a quiet boy caught up in Harris’ spell. But his temper could flash. Tara Zobjeck, who had a gym class with Klebold, remembers that he kept tackling people roughly when they were playing tag football. “One time I yelled at him, I just told him to knock it off,” she said. “Bitch!” he screamed at her.

‘Come Here So I Can Kill You’

America: Love it or leave it . . . All you racist(s) (and if you think I’m a hypocrite, come here so I can kill you) . . . who burn our flags and disgrace my land, get out! And to you ---holes in Iraq and Iran and all those other little . . . desert lands who hate us, shut up and die! . . . I may not like our government or the people running it or things like that, but the physical land and location I do . . . love! So love it or leave it!

Randy and Judy Brown had been friends with the Klebolds for years. Their son, Brooks, played with Dylan for as long as he could remember. When Harris joined the group, though, the Browns started to worry. Harris started blaming Brooks for some vandalism that had occurred in the neighborhood in 1997, and the Browns told the Sheriff’s Department they suspected it was Harris who was responsible. Harris, angered, threw a chunk of ice at Brooks’ car, chipping the windshield.

Judy Brown drove down the block and confronted Harris, who became furious and grabbed onto the window of her car. Later, Harris’ father, Wayne, called to tell Brown that his son hadn’t meant any harm.

When Harris came to apologize, she told him if he came back, she would call the police. “I said, ‘Eric Harris, you can pull the wool over your dad’s eyes, but you’re not going to pull the wool over my eyes.’ I told my husband later that this is the Eddie Haskell of Columbine.”

Not long after, Brooks showed them pages from Harris’ Web site. Harris had created a level of Doom based in the Browns’ neighborhood. The target was the Browns’ house.

The Browns printed out several pages and handed them to the Sheriff’s Department in March of last year. They included detailed descriptions of building and exploding pipe bombs. They met with a member of the bomb squad.

But the Sheriff’s Department, Randy Brown said, never called them back. As many as eight times over the spring of 1998, they left messages that weren’t returned.

Kiekbusch said the department ran a computer check that failed to show the boys had been arrested a few months earlier for breaking into a van and stealing electronic equipment. When deputies tried to call up Harris’ Web site, they were unsuccessful, he said.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which monitors hate traffic on the Internet, independently red-flagged Harris’ Web site last fall because of its links to anarchist sites and its talk about building pipe bombs. But it included no specific threats at the time, so the center filed it away, Rabbi Abraham Cooper said.

Sheriff’s deputies took no action except to alert the deputy stationed at Columbine High, Neil Gardner, who occasionally approached and talked to the boys.

The juvenile magistrate who sentenced Klebold and Harris in the break-in never knew about the threats. Since it was a first offense for both boys, he sentenced them to a juvenile diversion program under which they went through anger management counseling and community service.

It was in April 1998, a few weeks after the sentencing, that an incident happened that, several friends said, especially angered Harris and Klebold. Four prominent Columbine athletes had been arrested on felony burglary charges but charges against three of them were reduced to misdemeanors.

It was then, sheriff’s officials say, that Harris began writing a diary, a painstaking account he would keep over the next year of his plan, along with Klebold, to launch a shootout at the school.

It was found after the shootings in Harris’ room, along with a variety of Nazi-like literature and the barrel of a shotgun. But Harris’ parents have given no indication that they knew what was in their son’s room. Indeed, after his run-in with Judy Brown, Harris bragged in an e-mail about his ability to deceive his father.

As classes began in the fall, Klebold and Harris began acquiring their arsenal, authorities say. Klebold’s girlfriend, Robyn Anderson, who had turned 18, helped circumvent the law against selling guns to minors by purchasing three, most likely at a local gun show. At the same time, police say, a former Columbine student, Mark E. Manes, illegally sold the boys a TEC-DC9 semiautomatic pistol, which also would be used in the shootings. Barely two months later, the two were discharged from the juvenile diversion program with glowing predictions for their futures.

Of Harris, the probation officer wrote: “Eric is a very bright young man who is likely to succeed in life. He is intelligent enough to achieve lofty goals as long as he stays on task and remains motivated.”

Harris was still working on Doom, refining it into ever more violent modes. The last one was uncovered only recently by Simon Wiesenthal investigators.

“The game that we found to be quite chilling is a version in which he switches the game from a competitive, gory shoot-’em-out to what is basically a massacre,” said Cooper. “He puts it in what is called the ‘God Mode,’ . . . where others can shoot you, but you’re invincible, and you just wipe out everybody you come into contact with.

‘I’m Coming for EVERYONE Soon’

Well all you people out there can just kiss my ass and die. From now on, I don’t give a ---- what almost any of you . . . have to say, unless I respect you, which is highly unlikely . . . For the rest of you, you all better . . . hide in your houses because I’m coming for EVERYONE soon, and I WILL be armed to the . . . teeth, and I WILL shoot to kill and I WILL . . . KILL EVERYTHING! . . . God DAMNIT I AM PISSED!!

Harris had filled out application forms for the Marines, and all was looking well until April 15, when a recruiter came to his home. When his parents disclosed that Harris was taking Luvox, a drug often prescribed for obsessive-compulsive disorder, the recruiter said that disqualified him.

Two days later was the Columbine prom. Klebold took Anderson and met up with Harris, who didn’t go, at the after-prom party. At one of the carnival games, friends said, Harris was throwing balls at a bottle so violently that the game monitor asked him to calm down.

That Monday, neighbors said Klebold drove over to Harris’ house. He asked Harris if he had a metal baseball bat, said Bill Konen, who lives next door.

Later, he heard the sound of glass bashing inside the garage. “In my head, I assumed they were working on some kind of art project,” Konen said.

The next day, the two boys went to their early morning bowling class.

Soon, the gunfire began.

As he heard the news, Kevin Dwyer, a Bethesda, Md., psychologist who coauthored the violence prevention guide that was sent to every school in the country last fall, started to cry.

“Since 1976, we have had more kids who have died due to homicide and suicide than our allied forces died in Vietnam. Yet we don’t have a wall for them. Why?” he asked.

Dwyer and others say schools have failed to devote enough class time to violence prevention and haven’t spent the money needed to hire school psychologists and social workers. “There’s one school psychologist for every 2,300 kids in the United States,” Dwyer said. “This is painful for me even to talk about. I’ve spent the last 25 years saying we’re shortchanging these kids psychologically, and we have proof of that now.”

‘Shame to All of Us for Never Noticing’

At a makeshift memorial near the school, 13 crosses were erected for the students and teacher who died, and two more were put up for Harris and Klebold. Visitors left small messages for the two boys. “God forgives you as you lie with Satan,” said one on Klebold’s memorial.

“Your lives were lost long before this ever happened,” said a message on Harris’. “Shame to all of us for never noticing.”

Times staff writer Julie Cart and researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this story.