Chapter One Double Coupon Days Evil Descends upon the Heartland ON MY FIRST TRIP to Littleton, Colorado, I arrived on a steamy afternoon in July 1999, two months after the shootings that killed fifteen and wounded twenty-three, at Columbine High School. It took those two months for my magazine, Christianity Today , to assign me the task of writing "the Columbine story," in part because we couldn't quite figure out exactly what "the story" was for the magazine. I went to Colorado with a blank slate, expecting to hear "the story" from the people who lived it. In my research and on subsequent trips, I met with family members of those who had been murdered, pastors, students, teachers, friends, and administrators. I spoke with countless others intimately connected to the event. I believe I have heard "the story." This book is an attempt to convey and interpret it as it was told to me. Amanda Meyer, seventeen, described how it felt to recover from the worst school shooting in United States history: "I wanted to curl up and die. But I couldn't. I found that there is a strange concept called time and it made you keep going. It would be ten o'clock and I'd have to go to bed. The morning would come whether you wanted it to or not, and you'd have to get up. You'd have to go somewhere. I didn't want to live anymore but I couldn't help it. My heart just kept beating and my lungs made me breathe." She was a junior at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, the day Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, taunted and massacred twelve fellow students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves. Amanda lost two close friends that day--Rachel Scott, with whom she had worked at a Subway sandwich shop (the scene, less than a year later, of the killing of two more Columbine students), and Cassie Bernall, who was one of Amanda's best friends. People like Amanda, Cassie, and Rachel--and Eric and Dylan--took center stage in a cultural drama that "opened a sad national conversation." Something about what happened that day touched more people more profoundly than previous school shootings, horrific as those other tragedies were. The rampage at Columbine was one in a long line of shootings--including urban gang violence and domestic homicides--that have plagued this nation for decades. While homicide rates generally have decreased, however, the phenomenon known as "rampage killing" has occurred with dramatically increased frequency during the past decade. In the wake of Columbine, the New York Times undertook an extensive investigation of rampage killings--"multiple-victim killings that were not primarily domestic or connected to a robbery or gang"--extending back to 1949. In many ways, Columbine carried the marks of the "typical" rampage school shooting (to be addressed in due course). Still, the Times called it "probably the most shocking." At the same time, aspects of this event defied these categories and left the nation, including journalists like me, wondering what really had happened that day. In its aftermath, Nancy Gibbs wrote in Time: "With each passing day of shock and grief you could almost hear the church bells tolling in the background, calling the country to a different debate, a careful conversation in which even Presidents and anchormen behave as though they are in the presence of something bigger than they are. Some in the community, perhaps weary of the spectacle made of their once-anonymous existence, couldn't fathom the significance this event carried for anyone other than those whom it had directly touched. One community leader told me, "I have not been persuaded that this is a watershed event. I am not going to say it is not true, but I don't see it." Outside the boundaries of Littleton, however, stories persisted about people whose lives changed almost instantly when they heard about Columbine. There was the aloof father who raced home to hug his kids and recommit himself to their nurture; there was the mother who sobbed unabashedly in front of her bewildered children as images from Littleton poured from her television. There was the teen who resolved to say "I love you" every time he walked out the front door. People who hadn't darkened the door of a church or synagogue in decades found a way back. Hearing responses like these made me wonder what it was about this event that generated such emotional resonance. I began to sense that Columbine, at its heart, was a religious story. As the narratives in this book will reveal, many whose lives intersected with the event saw it that way. My research confirmed it. I came across the religious aspect of this story time and again not because I am a religious person and my magazine covers news from that viewpoint. I came to see Columbine as a religious story because, among other reasons, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold made it one. They brought "God" into this event at almost every turn. In the planning stages Harris documented the rampage in the blue spiral notebook he called "the book of God." On videos they made prior to their rampage, Klebold said, "[W]e're going to have followers because we're so ... godlike.... We're not exactly human." Harris said, "We have a ... religious war." The videotapes abound with biblical imagery and ravings against God and Christianity. Harris said, "The apocalypse is coming and it's starting in eight days." Witnesses claim that during the shooting they heard one of the boys ask some victims if they believed in God. Some doubts have arisen about whether this was so in the case of Cassie Bernall (addressed in chapter 5), but, at the very least, this scenario was consistent with the rage against religion the killers exhibited in their videos. In any case, there was no disputing the fact that the gunman posed that question in the library to Valeen Schnurr, who survived. Then there have been the strange aftershocks that further hinted at a religious aspect. For example, when fifteen memorial crosses were placed on the knoll near Columbine High School known as Rebel Hill immediately following the tragedy, the inclusion of two crosses representing the killers aroused emotional dissent from one victimized family. As a public protest, one member tore down the killers' crosses. Then, in late September, nearby West Bowles Community Church planted fifteen trees on its property to honor the families of those who had died, and the same dissenter, along with a few other people, went onto church property and felled two of the trees. (The church did not press charges.) There was the story of Garlin Newton, forty-eight, owner of a construction company in Oklahoma City, who believed that the Lord had spoken to him (his words) and told him to carry a cross from Oklahoma to Columbine High School. He walked, arthritic knees and all, the seven hundred-mile journey from Oklahoma City to Jefferson County carrying a white, vinyl, fifty-pound cross over his shoulder, logging about twenty miles a day. (A small wheel at the base helped it along.) Upon his arrival at the school November 20, 1999, he was greeted with the message: "Go Home." Then there was the spate of untimely violent deaths in the community during the year that followed. Though perhaps not overfly religious in nature, they were inordinate. On October 22, 1999, Carla Hochhalter, forty-eight, mother of paralyzed Columbine shooting victim Anne Marie Hochhalter, committed suicide in a local pawn shop. The body of eleven-year-old Antonio Ray Davalos was found in a dumpster near CHS on February 1, 2000, and on Valentine's Day, two Columbine High School sweethearts, Nick Kunselman, fifteen, and Stephanie Hart, sixteen, were gunned down in the Subway shop where Rachel Scott had worked, a few blocks from the school. A week later a man shot himself in the head a block away from that Subway. Before the first anniversary of the high school shooting, community church leaders felt as if their town was under a cloud of spiritual attack and sponsored a prayer walk. Covering a one-mile perimeter of the area marked by these killings, more than two thousand walked and prayed against the dark forces that seemed to be at war with this otherwise peaceful community. Shortly after the anniversary, the community was shaken again when CHS junior and basketball star Greg Barnes killed himself in his family's garage. Other religious aftershocks were more positive in nature. Darrell Scott, Rachel's father, has traveled the country speaking in churches and at large youth rallies, often accompanied by Greg Zanis, who displayed the original crosses that stood on Rebel Hill. They have seen young people by the thousands literally fall down before these crosses and commit their lives to service for God. Churches in the Littleton area noted a marked increase in attendance at regular services and youth programs in the months that followed the tragedy. A spokesman for a local church said, "There's a continuing impact on the spiritual receptivity, especially among youth." During my research, I noticed that, despite the persistent religious overtones attached to this event, much of the reporting did little to note it. This was due, in part, to the insistence of investigators from the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department that what happened at CHS was not "a God-thing." Reporters depended upon the information passed along to them from the sheriff's office, and investigators were inconsistent and selective about what they released and the spin they put on it. Many inside the investigation did not see any religious motivation behind what took place in the school and have said so publicly. Instead, the tragedy was dissected into many disparate parts: the need for greater gun control; the problem of uncensored access to dangerous information on the Internet; the influence of a violent media culture; the trauma associated with the clique-ish school culture; the issue of parental vigilance; the question of separation of church and state. I understood the desire to "solve" this "problem." Each of these aspects, perhaps in nudges, contributed to the final cataclysmic moments. No parent, myself included, can bear the thought that, in our well-ordered universe, kids can be shot execution-style by their classmates while studying Macbeth in the school library during fifth-period lunch. This is America; we fix things. Perhaps if there had been more restrictive gun laws, or if Arnold Schwarzenegger hadn't glamorized violence in the Terminator movies, or if the Ten Commandments had been posted in the school hallway, those boys wouldn't have taken in hand their double-barreled sawed-off shotgun, TEC-DC9 semiautomatic assault handgun, sawed-off pump shotgun, and 9 mm semiautomatic rifle to execute their peers. Perhaps. But what happened at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, I came to see, could not be fully understood without giving due diligence to its critical religious dimension. That is the story I heard. It is the story I tell in these pages. Between Two Worlds I didn't know what to expect as I made my way from Denver International Airport south toward Littleton. I had heard Littleton was an affluent Denver suburb that could be likened to my hometown outside of Chicago. After checking in at my hotel, I set out on one sojourn I felt compelled to make before doing anything else. It took twenty minutes going seventy miles per hour to drive from the hotel to Columbine High School in the Columbine Valley, which is west of Littleton in unincorporated southern Jefferson County. Columbine is in a series of subdivisions strung together by strip malls and King Soopers supermarkets. It was west on 470; north on Wadsworth; east on Coal Mine Avenue: north on Pierce Street, and--boom--there it was, on the left. I immediately recognized the curved two-story glass windows of the high school's cafeteria and library. Rachel Scott and Danny Rohrbough died outside those windows. I had studied the maps. I knew which door the killers entered, which exits various groups of students used to escape, which window a wounded student named Patrick Ireland hauled himself through and into the waiting arms of SWAT personnel. I knew where to look--though it was a bit of a trick doing so at forty miles per hour going north on Pierce Street. Barricades prevented me from turning into the school parking lot. I could barely slow down enough to catch more than a glimpse. I drove another hundred yards and pulled into Clement Park, which shares the school's northern perimeter. Entering the park, I saw a walkway that went toward the school, so I was optimistic that I might find a way to get a closer look. The park was abuzz with people, some wandering around, nosing toward the school. Others were oblivious to its haunting presence, tossing Frisbees or lobbing tennis balls. I drove around the outer boundary of the park to get a feel for it. It's huge. The driveway meandered to the north--parallel to Pierce Street--then turned west, winding around to become parallel to Bowles Avenue. It led me to what, I concluded, had to be Rebel Hill, where the fifteen memorial crosses (quickly reduced to thirteen) had been placed shortly after the shootings. I parked and made my way to the hill--or hills, actually. There are two: a smaller one--more like a berm--to the left of a steeper, more commanding one. A well-worn path connected the two. It was quite a hike from the parking lot, across a lawn, and up the incline to the top of the berm. I thought of Greg Zanis, the carpenter from Illinois, lugging those crosses all that way. The ground was dry; it crackled under my feet. It couldn't have been easy digging holes for crosses in that hard earth. Three teenage girls were sitting at the pinnacle of the larger hill. Their hands were clenched and their eyes squeezed shut as they bowed their heads in prayer. "Father God, you hear their breaking hearts," one said. "You hear them mourning." Not wanting to give the appearance of being a shameless media person and disturb them, I stepped away. Still, when they finished I was tempted to ask if they were "from around here." I thought they'd be excellent candidates for providing primary-source material. I had worked the reported events of April 20 over and over in my mind. At 11:17 A.M. that day--Adolph Hitler's birthday--Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold removed duffel bags from their cars and pulled their weapons from the bags. They sauntered up the steps outside the cafeteria, and at 11:19 A.M., started shooting. They shot Mark Taylor, Rachel Scott, Richard Castaldo, and Anne Marie Hochhalter. They walked down the steps and shot Danny Rohrbough, Sean Graves, and Lance Kirkland. They went back to where Rachel lay on the ground crying and shot her through the head. Entering the school by the door outside those steps, they made their way to the second level, shooting as they went. By then all manner of alarms and sprinklers had engaged. Harris and Klebold encountered business teacher Dave Sanders and shot him in the back. They went into the library, shooting people by the computer desks first, then moving to the windows and shooting the people there. Next they moved to the desks nearest the library entrance and shot the people in that section. Then they went to the middle section and shot several before they walked out. They went down to the cafeteria, tossed some pipe bombs, and tried to detonate the one huge bomb they had planted by shooting at it. The rampage ended about forty minutes after it had begun when the killers returned to the library, aimed their guns at their own heads, and fell dead next to their peers. I had prepared a file for each of the murdered victims; I knew them by name. Cassie Bernall, seventeen, had moved to the school the year before when she was a sophomore, loved Shakespeare, and wore Doc Martens. Steven Curnow, fifteen, loved soccer, which was why his favorite color was green--the color of the soccer field. Corey DePooter, seventeen, gave his best friend's little sister a yellow tulip for her birthday. Kelly Fleming, sixteen, wrote poetry that reflected searching themes. Matt Kechter, sixteen, wore number seventy on the Rebels' football team and played varsity his sophomore year. Daniel Mauser, fifteen, was fascinated by black holes and found loopholes in the anti-handgun Brady Bill. Danny Rohrbough, fifteen, worked in his dad's electronics shop. Dave Sanders, forty-seven, had coached the girls basketball team to a winning season after a twelve-year streak of losses. Rachel Scott, seventeen, liked goofy hats. Isaiah Shoels, eighteen, had undergone two heart surgeries as a child. John Tomlin, sixteen, preferred Chevy trucks over Ford, and Lauren Townsend, eighteen, an artist, had drawn a sketch for her own wedding dress. Kyle Velasquez, fifteen, a special-needs student with a kind heart, was known as "the gentle giant." I had files for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, too. Whatever had possessed them on April 20 to become "killing machines," as one journalist put it, I wanted to keep in the forefront of my mind that they had names, they slept in beds (which, like those of most teenagers, often may have been left unmade), collected baseball cards, and may have had a tube of Clearasil on their bathroom shelves. Eric liked pepperoni and green peppers on his pizza and rolled his eyes at stupid questions; Dylan hung posters of baseball greats Roger Clemens and Lou Gehrig in his bedroom and drank Dr Pepper. I sympathized with the parents of these boys and the desperation they must have felt upon learning their sons had perpetrated this horror. There was a season in my own sojourn as a mother of teenage sons when I had come to the wrenching conclusion that I hadn't a clue about how to influence their choices. I once saw Elton John's mother in a television interview recalling the earlier days in her son's life when he was engaged in all sorts of destructive behavior. The interviewer asked, "Did you know he was doing all this?" Elton John's mother answered, "Yes, but what could I do?" I understood exactly how she felt. Elton John's mother and I carried the same sense of helplessness in our mothers' hearts when our sons made choices we could not condone or control. What can a mother do? Chain them to their beds? And since Eric and Dylan had taken their own lives as the final expression of their rage, no more prayers could be uttered for them by their mothers. Eternity came upon those boys before the smoke had cleared. As I stood atop dusty Rebel Hill, I tried to imagine what it must have looked like before the grieving community made it a pilgrimage site. I was told that the ground used to be green. The throngs of people walking up to view the crosses wore away all the vegetation. Looking out over the school from that vantage point, the scene seemed innocuous enough. The athletic fields were in full view and lent an air of normalcy to the picture. The damage to the library windows wasn't visible. I could see more sky than anything; it was sapphire blue with a lone dark cloud that hung over the valley. Rays of sun sliced through a small crack in the cloud, as though trying to carve its way out. Two monarch butterflies frolicked at my feet, flitting, dive-bombing, retreating, and returning. I decided not to speak to the girls who had been praying. I sensed from the beginning that you don't just go up to people and start talking about this. I made my way back down the hill to the baseball diamond directly behind the school and sat in the bleachers for a few minutes. Bear Creek junior baseball was in progress. The seats were riddled with discarded Coke and Country Time lemonade cans and Big Gulp plastic cups. Moms chatted in twos and threes, some rocking babies in strollers. Dads sat on the edge of their seats, leaning, cupping their hands over their mouths to yell instructions to their kids in the field. "Choke up on the bat." "Keep your eye on it." Nearby, superhero wannabes rolled down the grassy hills and took flight off retaining walls. It was a good day for baseball. I made my way closer to the school. It was "two serving five" as I walked passed the volleyball pit and someone on the tennis court had just made an "incredible" serve. I could tell by the grunting and heaving coming from a pick-up basketball game that somebody would be downing ibuprofen before the day was through. I got as close as I could without entering school property and sat down at a picnic table. Birds in the tree above me were in a singing frenzy. Nature seemed unusually animated. The air was fresh; the grass was dry; clouds hung gracefully over the Rockies. Everything seemed as it should be in this perfect world. Yet, not a hundred feet away, a police officer sat in a cruiser in the school parking lot, poised to turn away gawkers and trespassers. People like me. I had heard locals complain that tourists were making Columbine one of their vacation stops, just like Rocky Mountain National Park or the Chatfield Arboretum. They were indignant, and I could understand it. But I saw us more as pilgrims wandering these grounds, trying to come to terms with what had happened here. The property line was only feet away. I pondered crossing it. I could see a memorial for the victims over there under a tree. Thirteen small American flags planted in a circle around the tree's trunk and lots of ribbons--some yellow, others silver and blue, the school colors. Evidently people had entered school property to leave dried flowers, cards, notes, and photographs there. I decided to break the boundary, too. I walked through a small opening in the barricade. The earth did not quake under my feet. It didn't open up to swallow me. Columbine High School seemed no different from the one I had attended twenty-five years earlier, and was no different from the school my sons attend now. Of the nearly two thousand students enrolled at Columbine, about sixty qualified for federally subsidized school lunches. Ninety percent were white. The school had parking spaces for juniors and seniors, some of whose parents had probably bought them cars, and it no doubt sponsored parent curriculum nights, homecoming dances, and Spanish club. The Columbine Rebels brought home their share of state championship trophies. It was, in every way, a typical suburban high school. Except that on April 20, 1999, the minions of hell had burst out of their confines and temporarily planted a flag on these grounds. "You're not supposed to be on school property," the woman in the police cruiser said, leaning out her window. "Could I leave a note at the memorial?" "It's not a memorial. But go ahead, and then please leave." I scribbled a note. I wasn't sure what to say or who would read it. The other notes were addressed to the families of the murdered, though I doubted they ever saw them. I wrote: "To the families: Thank you for your strength and faith that has ignited the hearts of a nation"--or something like that. I tucked the note under a sprig of dried flowers and turned back. King Soopers advertised double coupons that day. I decided to pick up a few groceries before going back to the hotel. Wandering the aisles of the grocery store, I was assaulted at every turn with reminders of my sons. I couldn't help thinking about them and how I would feel if this had happened at their high school and if one of them had been represented by a memorial flag. They prefer Gatorade Frost Glacier Freeze over Cherry Rush and could down an entire package of Double Stuf Oreos in one sitting. They had recently taken to drinking Lipton Brisk; I picked up a twenty-four-pack each week. Klondike Bars are better than Ice Pops. I couldn't fathom how the families who had lost kids in Columbine that day could ever reach the point where double coupons meant something to them again. I could barely get past the sport-drink section without collapsing into tears, thinking of their losses. There wasn't a corner of that store that didn't derive its significance for me from the primary mission of my life: keeping my boys fed. I wanted to ask the man mulling over the cantaloupe, What do you think about the school down the road having temporarily become the epicenter of evil? There was a mother buying her overweight daughter chocolate milk. Did you think it possible that kids could get massacred in the school library? The checkout girl asked me if I had my Soopers card for special discounts, and I told her that I wasn't from around here. I wondered if she suspected I was a journalist. Her graciousness indicated that she didn't. "Do you want to use mine?" she asked. She saved me thirty-eight cents by digging out her Soopers card and passing it over the electronic cash register. "Where are you from?" she asked. "The Chicago area," I said. We haven't had school shootings in my town . Before this happened, they hadn't had school shootings in Littleton, either. If the locals were tired of outsiders horning in and sniffing around for information, for "primary source material," they didn't show it. The people here seemed to go along as though things were normal, as though the events at Columbine High School, just down the street from King Soopers and right next to the park, were all a bad dream that hadn't really happened. What else could they do? It wouldn't help anything to declare a moratorium on pick-up basketball games or do away with double coupons. Copyright © 2000 Wendy Murray Zoba. All rights reserved.
