Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold

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Template:Cleanup-date Image:Harrisklebold.jpg Eric David Harris (April 9, 1981 – April 20, 1999) and Dylan Bennett Klebold (September 11, 1981 – April 20, 1999), were the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre in Jefferson County, Colorado (near Denver and Littleton) on Tuesday, April 20 1999, killing 12 classmates and one teacher. Both Harris, 18 years old, and Klebold, 17, committed suicide after they killed the students.

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Early life

Eric David Harris was born in Wichita, Kansas. His family included parents Wayne and Kathy (both born in Colorado) and an older brother, Kevin. The family had to move often as Wayne Harris was a U.S. Air Force transport pilot. The Harris family moved to the Littleton area in July 1993, when Wayne retired from the military.

The Harrises rented for the first three years that they lived in the area and during this time Eric met and befriended Dylan Klebold. In 1996 the Harrises bought a $180,000 house just south of Columbine High School. When Eric started attending Columbine he met Brooks Brown riding the school bus. Dylan had been friends with Brooks since the first grade, so the three became good friends. Dylan's neighbors felt that he came from a stable family, but noted that Eric Harris exercised a powerful influence on Dylan after 1996.

Dylan Bennet Klebold was born in Lakewood, Colorado. His family included parents Thomas and Susan and older brother Byron, and they had resided in the area south of Lakewood for many years. He attended Normandy Elementary School (grades 1 and 2), then attended Governor’s Ranch Elementary School where he was part of the CHIPS (Challenging High Intellectual Potential Students) program.

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Warning signs

Klebold and Harris were not popular at their high school, and were said to have been frequent targets of bullying. At the same time, both boys also had a strong interest in various "dark" matters, such as violence and death. By all accounts, both Klebold and Harris were strong "outsiders" within their school, and resented most of their classmates. They frequently displayed a sadistic or nihilistic attitude towards life.

Soon after they became friends, the two boys linked their personal computers on a network and both played many games over the Internet. Harris created a set of levels for the game Doom which later became known as the "Harris levels". Eric had a web presence under the handle "REB" (short for Rebel) Harris' known cyber aliases included "REB", "Rebldomakr", "Rebeldoomer", and "Rebdomine" while Dylan went by the name "voDKa" (with his initials capitalized). Eric's various websites hosted Doom and Quake files and team information for the folks he gamed with online. The sites also openly showed hatred for the people of their neighborhood and the world in general. When Eric and Dylan began experimenting with pipe bombs, they posted results of the explosions on the websites.

In 1997, Jefferson County Sheriff's Office investigator Michael Guerra looked at Harris' website after the parents of Brooks Brown discovered Harris was making threats aimed at their son following a falling out between them. Guerra wrote a draft affidavit for a search warrant, but the affidavit was never filed. This information was not revealed to the public until September 2001, though it was known the entire time.

The two boys got into trouble early for breaking into a locked van and stealing tools. In January 1998, they were arrested on charges of criminal trespassing and theft. Eric and Dylan left a good impression on the juvenile officers, who offered to delete the boys' criminal records if they agreed to attend a diversionary program and stay out of trouble. Eric was forced to attend anger management classes where, again, he made a good impression.

Despite these outward apperances of calm, as time went on, the boys' rage continued to grow. The two made a video for a school project that showed them pretending to shoot fake guns and "snuffing" students in the hallway of their school as "Hitmen for Hire". They both displayed themes of violence in their creative writing projects for school, despite disapproval from their teachers.

Brooks Brown, a student who had once been friends with one of the attackers but later targeted in his rants, saw Eric Harris entering the school on the morning of the massacre and scolded him for skipping a class. Harris reportedly said, "I like you, Brooks. Get out of here." Brown left the school and headed for his home which was close by. When he later heard the gunshots, he phoned the police and told them what he knew.

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Heavily armed

Robyn Anderson, 18-year old Columbine student and old friend of Dylan Klebold's, made a straw purchase of two shotguns and a rifle for Klebold, in violation of the Gun Control Act of 1968. Anderson was never charged for her part in the straw purchase in exchange for her cooperation with the investigation that followed the shootings. After illegally acquiring the weapons, Harris and Klebold sawed off the barrels of the shotguns, an act that is a felony under the National Firearms Act.

The shooters also possessed a TEC-DC9 semi-automatic handgun. The manufacturer of the TEC-DC9 first sold it to Miami-based Navegar Incorporated. It was then sold to Zander's Sporting Goods in Baldwin, Illinois in 1994. The gun was later sold to Thornton, Colorado firearms dealer Larry Russel. In violation of federal law, Russel did not keep records of the sale, yet he determined that the purchaser of the gun was twenty-one years of age or older. He was unable to identify the pictures of Klebold, Anderson, or Harris shown to him by police after the shooting. Two men named Mark Manes and Philip Duran were found to have supplied weapons to the two boys.

Some of the bombs that the boys made were crude and made with carbon dioxide canisters, galvanized pipe, and metal propane bottles. The bombs were primed with matches placed at one end of the bomb. The boys had striker tips on their sleeves. When they rubbed against the bomb, the match head would light the fuse. More complex bombs, such as the one that detonated on the corner of South Wadsworth Boulevard and Ken Caryl Avenue, had timers. The two largest bombs built were found in the school cafeteria and were made from small propane tanks. Only one of these bombs went off, and that one only detonated partially. If they both had gone off, the upstairs library likely would have crashed down on the cafeteria, killing and injuring over 600 people in those areas of the school -- which was Dylan and Eric's mission.

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Ambitious plans

Image:Eric harris dylan klebold.jpg

A journal found in Harris's bedroom stated almost every detail that the boys planned to follow after 5:00 a.m. on April 20 1999. Their earliest ideas may have first been discussed in January 1998 after Eric and Dylan were convicted of breaking into a van and received ten months of juvenile intervention counseling and community service. They were released early from the program due to good behavior, a fact they later gloated about in the memoirs they taped before the shootings.

The diary mentioned notes on "good hiding places" and areas with poor lighting that could be utilized. The attack was to start at exactly 11:17 a.m., when the highest possible number of students would be located in the cafeteria. Additional reports suggest Harris and Klebold considered the prospect of concluding their massacre by hijacking an airliner and crashing it into New York City's Empire State Building. These early writings were most likely outlets for venting frustration rather than true intent to carry out such ambitious plans; a fantasy outlet that would lead to something very real. Coincidentally, Klebold's 20th birthday (had he been alive) would have been September 11, 2001.

Harris wanted to join the United States Marine Corps though his application was rejected shortly before the shootings because he was taking the drug Luvox® (Fluvoxamine maleate, an SSRI antidepressant) that he was required to take as part of anger management therapy. According to the recruiting officer, Eric never knew of this rejection, however. Some theorized that Luvox's side-effects contributed to what happened, though some of Eric's friends theorized that he had stopped taking the drug beforehand (which could have triggered an even more violent reaction as stopping Luvox suddenly can enhance the negative side-effects). The autopsy reports showed that he had low therapeutic levels of Luvox in his system at the time of death.

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Media confusion

Initially the shooters were believed to be members of a clique that called themselves the "Trenchcoat Mafia", a small group of Columbine's "outcasts" who wore heavy black trenchcoats. However, it has since been discovered that they were only friends with one of the members of the group, Chris Morris, and that most of the primary members of the Trenchcoat Mafia had graduated or dropped out of the school by the time that Harris and Klebold committed the massacre. Most did not even know the shooters, apart from their association with Morris.

There were also rumors that the boys were into the goth scene, but individuals who identify themselves as "gothic" hold that the two were not practicing "true goth" culture, and that the media had misidentified them yet again. Eric Harris was known to be a devoted KMFDM fan, and both he and Dylan were fans of Rammstein and violent video games such as Doom. These elements led to a lot of media finger-pointing, and claims that everything from music to the Internet was responsible for the shootings.

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Legacy

In the days and weeks following the Columbine massacre a scattered number of copycat killings occurred across high schools in the United States and Canada, but none came close to matching the scope of the original.

Today, Harris and Klebold have somewhat of a mixed reputation. Though obviously heavily condemned for their rampage, many still regard the boys as somewhat tragic figures who were victims of circumstance. A great deal of sociological investigation into high school subculture was done in response to the killings, with the hopes of determining what sort of factors led to the boys' breakdown and whether or not future massacres in other schools could be successfully prevented. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks many North American high school students were forced to attend seminars that encouraged tolerance and condemned bullying.

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The Columbine massacre

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Related films

  • Elephant, inspired by the Columbine massacre; a fictionalized version of events.
  • Zero Day, a film about a school shooting shot home-movie style.
  • Home Room, a film on the more crude aspects of High School, including bullying, drug use and teenage pregnancy. It is a fictionalized version of the Columbine shooting.
  • Bowling for Columbine, a film about the gun culture of the United States, and with a segment on the massacre.
  • Bang Bang You're Dead, a film about a young man pushed to the breaking point that Eric and Dylan reached.
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External links

sv:Eric Harris och Dylan Klebold

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