Columbine by Dave Cullen

I feel like two posts on Columbine 10 years after the massacre is ad nauseum enough; however, I recently finished Dave Cullen's comprehensive investigative retelling of the tragedy, which is an excellent piece of journalism even if it toes the line of sensationalism and cheesy "true crime" book at certain points.

In writing Columbine, Cullen--an investigative journalist who has covered the Columbine tragedy and its aftermath since 1999--fleshes out the complete story, going from the early lives of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to the present day in an effort to tell his audience what really happened, and what really caused it. His information comes from scouring what evidence is out there, including the killers' journals, tapes they made prior to April 20, 1999, police reports, what's already been published in the media, and many interviews with survivors and parents.

He constructs a careful narrative, beginning with the tragedy itself and then going back two years with Harris and Kelbold and examining their personalities and following them as they laid out their plans; concurrently, he deals with a cast of survivors, taking them from that day to 10 years later. To those who prefer something much more linear it might be off-putting, but it works very well because we don't need a long lead-in to what we more or less remember, and his speculation on how the two killers were thinking and feeling while they planned their attack contrasts well with the stories of Patrick Ireland, Misty Bernall, Frank DeAngelis, and several others, and all in an effort to give us the most detail about the event than has ever been given.

See, there are several myths about Columbine that still exist to this day and Cullen does what he can to set the record straight. The most important one, of course, is that the massacre was simply two students "snapping" after they and their group of "goth" friends (referred to as the Trench Coat Mafia) had been teased one too many times. And while bullying is a problem and was more than likely a problem at Columbine high school, the story he tells of the two is the story of two boys with serious mental problems--according to Cullen, Kelbold was suffering from clinical depression and Harris was a psychopath. In fact, Klebold was more suicidal than anything and it appeared he was more or less unconciously "drawn in" to the whole thing by Harris. The two planned to blow up the building and kill at least 500 people using homemade bombs and the weapons they were carrying; that they only killed 13 plus themselves was partially due to Harris's shoddy bomb construction. But the media bit into the bullying story because it fit a theme of the many school shootings that took place in the late 1990s, and the story grew for several reasons, including a police cover up of the killers' past criminal records and warnings from other parents.

That police cover-up and the media's "crafting" many of the stories and hounding the survivors and the community are the focus of much of the "aftermath" portions of the book, as are accounts of recovery from victims and their parents/spouses. Especially notable are Misty Bernall, the mother of Cassie Bernall, who supposedly was asked if she believed in God and replied "Yes," which helps provide the title of her biography, She Said Yes; and Patrick Ireland, who was seen on national television climbing out the library window after having been shot in the head. Cullen diffuses the Cassie Bernall myth very quickly with information that is more or less out there on the Internet--Cassie never said this and there are witnesses to corroborate that, yet despite the truth being known her mother and the publisher went ahead with the book. Patrick's story is a long, poignant tale--he learns to walk and talk again in a way that seems like it's out of a movie. He is one of the heroes of the book and one of the people you feel the most for walking away from it.

I think you're supposed to feel something for Klebold, too. Harris is treated with curiosity and horror, as he is a clinical psychopath who feels no remorse for anything he has done or he is about to do; Klebold is shown as more sympathetic, a lovesick kid who got manipulated into doing this. And you're supposed to feel that their parents are unjustly vilified because they were completely in the dark (especially Harris's, as he is shown as a master manipulator). It works on some level, especially with the parents, but it's hard to excuse Kelbold from his crimes, even if Harris manipulated him.

If nothing else, it's a gripping book. I didn't want to put it down but because everything is so haunting I found that I had to, so that I didn't get too caught up in it. The book has its detractors--read the 1-star reviews on Amazon and you'll see a couple of people who believe that Cullen gets a lot of things wrong and is fabricating others. And I agree that trying to put thoughts into the heads of Harris and Kelbold so that the narrative reads well is a little too sensationalistic for me and takes Columbine a little too much toward fiction.

But the planning, execution, and reaction are shown exactly as they always should have been: complex. The idea that this was revenge on jocks for bullying two poor kids trivializes the entire story, as does the constant blame game that happens to this day with just about any violent incident (the NRA, video games, Marilyn Manson, violent movies, and many others have been blamed for just about every school shooting before and since). To look at Columbine is to see what you may want to be looking for if you're trying to prevent an event like this from happening, or at least to help you understand what is going on in the head of someone who would actually take a significant amount of time to plan and carry something like this out.