Columbine

On April 25, the first Sunday after the shooting, and following packed church ceremonies, a mass vigil is set up in a shopping center across from Clement Park. Organizers plan for 30,000 people. More than 70,000 show up. Much of the vigil is Christian-focused. Cullen remarks that of the Columbine victims, Cassie Bernall was “the heroine”: “Word spread quickly that her killer had held [Bernall] at gunpoint and asked if she believed in God. ‘Yes,’ she’d answered. She’d professed her faith and had promptly been shot in the head. Vice President [Al] Gore recounted her story to the crowd and cameras” (178).

National media continues to focus on Columbine. Cullen states that USA Today, even a week after the shooting “was still running ten separate Columbine stories in a single edition,” and that “it would be nearly two weeks before the New York Times would print an issue without a Columbine story on page 1” (178).

Cullen next focuses on Craig Scott’s story of survival. Scott, hiding under a table with shooting victims Matthew Kechter and Isaiah Shoels, says he heard Eric or Dylan yell, “Get anyone with a white hat!” (179). Scott took his off and hid it in his clothing. Matt and Isaiah are shot. Scott is not. He helps a wounded girl flee. Later, he learns that his sister, Rachel, was the first person killed by Eric and Dylan.

Bernall’s death gets nationwide attention. A teen evangelical rally in Michigan focused on Bernall attracts 73,000 people. TV show 20/20 runs a piece on her as well. Bernall’s parents appear on Oprah. 

Chapter 33 looks back to two years before the shootings. Eric and Dylan continue their vandalism missions, often drinking while conducting them. Dylan begins referring to people as “zombies” (182). In the summer of 1997, after sophomore year ends, Eric and Dylan build a pipe bomb. This is summer that Eric begins his website; he will not start his journal until spring of 1998. On his site, Eric lists the many things he hates. Both Eric and Dylan show narcissistic tendencies in their respective writings, even while Dylan’s writings also show intense self-loathing. Eric and Dylan begin to set off the bombs they’re making.

By early August of 1997, the sheriff’s department is aware of Eric’s website due to an anonymous tip that Cullen says was “apparently Randy Brown,” father of Brooks Brown (185). Eric and Dylan, along with friend Zack Heckler, begin work at Blackjack Pizza.

Cullen writes that when Agent Fuselier “examined a crime, one of his primary tactics was to begin ruling out motives.” Fuselier believes Dylan is a “classic depressive,” but isn’t positive about it. He attempts to deduce if Eric and Dylan were psychotic and clinically insane at the point that they carried out the mass shooting. Fuselier also considers psychopathy, which is different from the term psychotic. Psychotic can cover “a variety of severe mental illnesses, including paranoia and schizophrenia,” while psychopathy, “in psychiatry, denotes a specific mental condition,” with most psychopaths “being nonviolent…but the ones who turn sadistic can be monstrous.” Cullen cites convicted serial killers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer as examples of the latter. Fuselier does not believe Dylan to fall under this label; in Fuselier’s opinion, “Dylan’s journal read like that of a boy on the road to suicide, not homicide” (187). Cullen concludes the chapter saying that Fuselier believed “Dylan Klebold was not a man of action. He was conscripted by a boy who was” (188).

The opening of Chapter 34 focuses on the recovery of shooting victim Patrick Ireland, the boy who fell from the window. Ireland is trying to relearn speech after being shot in the head. Ireland keeps saying random phrases that have nothing to do with conversation. Among them is the phrase “picture-perfect marsupials” (189).

Cullen notes that while Ireland “understood that he’d been shot…he didn’t grasp the scale of the [Columbine] massacre” (190). He was unaware he had been on TV, or that the scene of him at the window would remain one of the most memorable images of the attack.

Ireland begins rehab a week after the shooting. He learns that a friend of his was killed in the attack and starts weeping.

Cullen shifts focus to goings-on in the broader community: “Seven days after the massacre, shortly before sunset, a row of fifteen wooden crosses rose up along the crest of Rebel Hill. They stood seven feet high, three feet wide, and were spaced evenly along the length of the mesa…Over the next five days, 125,000 people trekked up the hill to reach the crosses” (192).

The crosses were made by a Chicago carpenter, who “drove them to Colorado in a pickup, planted them on a hill, and drove back” (192). Thirteen of the crosses are for the victims; there is also a cross each for Eric and Dylan. Eric and Dylan’s crosses spawn controversy. Three days after the killers’ crosses go up, Brain Rohrbough, father of Columbine victim Danny Rohrbough, takes down Eric and Dylan’s crosses. The Chicago carpenter who had made the crosses drives back to Jefferson County and hauls the remaining thirteen crosses away, before returning with fifteen new ones and the media in tow. Additionally, the carpenter “built fifteen new crosses and took them on a national tour” (195). Cullen concludes the chapter saying, “The world forgot the carpenter. Few noted his name. Most never knew what a huckster he was, or the lies he told, or the pain he inflicted. But they remember the crosses fondly” (195).

In 1997, Eric and Dylan, along with friend Zack Heckler are caught for breaking into lockers at school and are suspended for three days. Eric and Dylan are grounded for one month and not allowed to see one another. Around this time, Eric’s father, Wayne, discovers one of Eric’s pipe bombs. Wayne Harris, who also kept a journal, never referred to this incident in writing. Towards the end of the year, Eric began “to take notice of school shooters” (199) and researches the ease with which one could carry out such a shooting for a school paper, which he does well on.

On January 30, 1998, Eric and Dylan come across a van filled with electronic equipment on a country road. They break in and steal what they can. A Jefferson County sheriff has been watching the two boys carry out the act the entire time and arrests them. They’re taken to county jail, booked, and released that night.