Columbine

Dylan Klebold is seventeen at the time of the Columbine attack. He is described as “six-foot three and 143 stretched pounds,” with “long, ratty curls [that] dangled toward his shoulders.” Dylan’s nickname is VoDKa, with the D and K capitalized purposefully to signify the initials of his first and last names. Dylan was a “heavy drinker and damn proud of it,” (7), and an “angry, erratic depressive” (244). A senior at Columbine High, Dylan has been accepted for the following fall semester at the University of Arizona. (This is in contrast to Eric Harris, who, also a senior, did not apply to college.)

Cullen consistently presentsDylan as the beta to Eric Harris’s alpha personality. There is some question as to whether Dylan truly wanted to go through with the attack, as the date grew near; however, Dylan is also described as suicidal. Cullen posits that his main impetus for going through with the attack was less about taking the lives of others and more about perceiving the attack as a way of ending his own life. He kills himself after the attack is over, dying next to Eric Harris. 

Wayne and Kathy Harris are the parents of Eric Harris. Wayne works for the military and moves the family often while Eric is young. He is described as a stern disciplinarian, and keeps a journal detailing Eric’s wrongs and the punishments that Wayne himself metes out, in response. Kathy is not discussed to much extent in the book, though Cullen mentions on numerous occasions that neither of the Harrises ever speaks to the press, not in the immediate aftermath of the attack nor in the years that follow. 

Tom and Sue Klebold are the parents of Dylan Klebold. Tom works in the oil industry before starting a successful property management business. Sue works for the community college system. While conjecture, there are multiple moments in Columbine where Cullen seems to intimate that the parents of Eric Harris had at least some understanding of what he may have been doing; this is not the case for the Klebolds, who appear genuinely shocked that Dylan could have been part of the attack. In the days following the massacre, the Klebolds ask a local minister to hold a private, secret funeral service for Dylan. 

Frank DeAngelis is the principal of Columbine High School at the time of the attack, and for many years afterward. He is presented as genuinely liked by the vast majority of the student body at Columbine High and invested in his students, who refer to him as “Mr. D.” DeAngelis directly encounters Harris and Klebold during the attack and is shot at, before leading a group of students to safety. It is DeAngelis’s idea to put surveillance cameras in the cafeteria to have video footage of students who don’t clean up after themselves, a pet peeve of DeAngelis. It is footage from these cameras that will capture the only shots of Harris and Klebold inside Columbine High. After the attack, DeAngelis suffers from PTSD and his marriage ends, though he will eventually re-marry his ex-wife. Some years after the attack, DeAngelis’ contract is up; he almost retires before deciding to stay on in his position as principal. 

Dwayne Fuselier is an FBI agent, clinical psychologist, and hostage negotiator. He is the first federal agent at Columbine High after the attack, due to his son attending school there. Fuselier has a long and storied history with the FBI, one that includes being the chief hostage negotiator in Waco, Texas, for the standoff with the Branch Davidian cult. He will also be chief negotiator during a 2000 prison break by a group of Texas inmates known as the Texas Seven.

Fuselier, unlike local enforcement, realizes quickly that there is no conspiracy surrounding the Columbine attack: no third shooter, no ties to any militant group, and no targeting of specific individuals or peer groups. Rather, Harris and Klebold simply wanted to take as many lives as they could. Realizing this, Fuselier pours over Harris and Klebold’s journals and their Basement Tapes—a series of video recordings made by Harris and Klebold in the weeks prior to the attack. By doing so, Fuselier comes to understand Harris as clinically psychopathic and Klebold as depressive and suicidal. In this manner, the two perpetrators form a successful dyad: a union where two people with murderous instincts feed off of one another’s craven energy.

Dave Sanders is a teacher at Columbine High School and the only adult to die in the attack. The details of his last hours in the school are offered in Chapter 26. As the attack gets underway, Sanders directs a group of roughly five hundred students from the cafeteria to a higher floor of the school. Sanders is shot in the back and the neck, with the second bullet shattering his teeth. In a room in the science wing, Sanders waits for more than three hours for medical attention, before bleeding out. Students, who are in conversation with emergency dispatchers, are routinely told that help is on the way. In the interim, these students attempt to keep Sanders alive and write a message on a classroom whiteboard, “1 Bleeding to Death,” and put it next to a classroom window. Sanders’ daughter, in the aftermath of the attack, files a wrongful death suit that alleges inaction by the SWAT team was what caused her father’s demise. 

Cassie Bernall is one of the students killed during the attack. An Evangelical Christian, Bernall receives perhaps the most media attention of all the victims after the attack, both in the mainstream and Christian presses. Bernall’s last moments are initially offered as a defense of her faith in the face of death; supposedly, one of the attackers asks if she believes in God, and when Bernall says she does, the attacker shoots and kills her. This narrative is eventually revealed as incorrect, though the story of her alleged martyrdom persists in the media, and Cassie’s mother, Misty, pens a memoir about her daughter’s life that becomes a New York Times bestseller. Even after the Bernalls and the book’s publisher are aware that the narrative regarding Cassie’s last minutes are false, they choose to leave the false narrative in the memoir. 

Patrick Ireland is one of the students who is gravely injured during the attack. The details of Ireland being shot and making his way to a window in the school’s library are detailed in Chapter 16, “The Boy in the Window.” Cullen allots ample space to Ireland’s rehabilitation, which is lengthy and difficult. He graduates from Columbine as class valedictorian and with time goes on to Colorado State University, marrying his college girlfriend.  

Stone is the Jefferson County sheriff at the time of the Columbine High Attack. He is characterized as utterly inept, and, in the immediate aftermath of the attack (and the days that follow), offers misinformation that he has no basis for, including that there were more shooters than just Harris and Klebold and that the body count was double what it actually was. Stone continues to allow for the possibility of a conspiracy well after the time of the attack; after the cover-up by law enforcement officials is exposed, a petition is started to remove him from his post. He survives the recall but does not run for reelection. 

Guerra is the officer who responds to concerns raised by the parents of Brooks Brown regarding death threats made by Eric Harris toward Brooks. Roughly one year before the attack, Guerra obtains a warrant to search the Harris home, where he obtains access to the material on Harris’s website. His file on Harris disappears after the attack on Columbine; further, Guerra is one of the officials who attend the Open Space Meeting, during which those in attendance discuss how to protect their jobs should information surface that local law enforcement was aware of Harris’s threats. 

Brooks Brown is presented as both a friend and an enemy of Eric over the course of the book. Eric has repeated run-ins with Brooks prior to the attack, and it is Brooks’s parents who are, perhaps, the most vocal of anyone in regard to saying that Eric is a real threat and law enforcement needs to step in. Eric sees Brooks before entering the high school on the day of the shooting and tells him, “I like you now. Get out of here. Go home” (42).

Heckler is a friend of Eric and Dylan and, for some time before the attacks, is presented as very close to both Eric and Dylan, but especially Dylan. Past vague implications made by both Eric and Dylan, he is unaware of the plans the two are making; Eric sours on him the summer before their senior year, though Zack and Dylan remain close. 

Cullen describes Anderson as a “pretty, diminutive blonde who hid behind her long straight hair”; she was a “sweet, brainy Christian girl who had helped [Eric and Dylan] acquire three of the four guns” they’d use in the shootings (7). 

Morris is a friend of Harris and Klebold. Shortly before the attack, Eric Harris attempts to recruit him to help him carry out the attack. Morris is one of the first peers of Harris and Klebold to provide knowledge of the fact that Harris and Klebold were seeking firearms in the weeks prior to the shooting. 

Duran functions as middle man between Mark Manes and Harris/Klebold for obtaining one of the firearms used in the shooting.