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Dave CullenA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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While Cullen points out that Eric’s rants made him, in all likelihood, sound insane to most readers of his journals, Agent Fusilier “ticked off Eric’s personality traits: charming, callous, cunning, manipulative, comically grandiose, and egocentric, with an appalling failure of empathy. It was like reciting the Psychopathy Checklist.” Cullen goes on to add: “Diagnosis didn’t solve the crime, but it laid the foundation. Ten years [after the Columbine shooting], Eric still baffled the public, which insisted on assessing his motives through a ‘normal’ lens. Eric was neither normal nor insane. Psychopathy … represents a third category Psychopathic brains don’t function like those in either of the other groups, but they are consistently similar to one another. Eric killed for two reasons: to demonstrate his superiority and to enjoy it” (239).
Cullen follows with more background on psychopaths and psychopathy, saying that psychopaths have “likely plagued mankind since the beginning, but they are still poorly understood.” They have a duo of distinguishing characters: “The first is a ruthless disregard for others … The second is an astonishing gift for disguising the first” (240). Cullen adds that lying is a signature characteristic of psychopaths, and that symptoms are often reported even prior to kindergarten. Psychopaths ‘are not individuals losing touch with … shame and fear. They never developed them from their start” (242). Psychopaths have a strong sense of indignation and “develop a handful of primitive emotions closely related to their own welfare … anger, frustration, and rage” (243).
Eric seemed to fit this type of personality. Psychopaths are both lazy and have trouble sticking to one career path; Eric was smart enough to have been a straight-A student, “but collected A’s, B’s, and C’s” (244). While Eric spoke with a Marine recruiter, he never made an effort to follow up and had no plans for after high school, save for continuing work at Blackjack Pizza.
Next, Cullen talks of the dyad: “murderous pairs who feed off each other,” and uses both Bonnie and Clyde and the 2002 Beltway snipers as examples. Cullen adds, “little research has been done on them,” due to their small sample population, but “an angry, erratic depressive [Dylan] and a sadistic psychopath [Eric] make a combustible pair” (244).
The FBI organizeda “major summit on school shooters” three months after Columbine (247). Fuselier, who believed Eric was a psychopath, had his opinion backed by others at the summit. While Fusilier’s conclusions werebacked by his peers, he was not allowed to share these conclusions with the greater Columbine community, as local Jefferson County officials didn’t want a Federal presence overshadowing the case. Cullen deems this “a staggering lapse of judgment” (248). Further, the file that local officer Mike Guerra had on Eric Harris, which included copies of Eric’s death threats from his website were taken off the police computer and removed physically, thereby covering up that the police had prior knowledge about Harris’sstate of mind.
Cullen shifts focus to the victims of the attack, focusing first on Patrick Ireland, who is just starting to be able to lift his legs, and then Anne Marie Hochhalter. Hochhalter’s “spinal cord was ruptured” during the attack, “causing unbearable nerve pain” (249). Kept in a “delirious” state on morphine, she has no idea what has happened to her. In time, she learns she won’t walk again. Ireland does re-learn how to walk. A third victim, Sean Graves—one of the three boys who ran toward the initial gunfire—is permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Lance Kirklin, the other surviving member of that trio (Danny Rohrbough was the third) has to have extensive facial reconstruction surgery.
Since the attack, “Columbine High had leapt to second place, behind the Rocky Mountains, as Colorado’s most famous landmark,” and tourist buses began to arrive at the school: “The buses would pull up in front of the school, and tourists would pile out and start snapping pictures: the school, the grounds, the kids practicing on the athletics field … The students felt like zoo specimens” (250).
On June 2, all students are afforded “two hours to go back inside [the school] and retrieve their backpacks and cell phones and everything else they had abandoned when they ran for it” (251). There are only a handful of transfers out of the school for the following school year, and overall enrollment goes up.
Renovation of the school is pegged at $1.2 million and redesign becomes a point of contention between different groups of survivors. A lawyer for the parents of shooting victim Isaiah Sholes bring a lawsuit for a quarter of a billion dollars against the parents of Eric and Dylan. In the first two months, $3.5 million in donations is raised for survivors and victims’ families. On May 28, Kathy Harris, mother of Eric Harris, writes condolence letters to the families of the thirteen killed in the attack. Local authorities disallow the letters from reaching victims. Sue Klebold, mother of Dylan, also writes condolence letters.
As Chapter 42 opens, Cullen discloses, “A year before the attack, the boys settled on a time and place, April 1999, in the commons” (256). Agent Fuselier sees Eric’s arrest and the “fallout from the crime as accelerant to murder rather than the cause” (256); Fuselier posited that Eric’s psychopathy would bring about something like the Columbine attack at some point, even if in different form. Eric “loved control—he couldn’t wait to hold lives in his hand,” with “one contradiction to Eric’s control fetish [being] his willingness to entrust power to Dylan” (257). At the end of the preceding school year, in the junior-year yearbooks, Eric and Dylan write both intimations about the attack and, in Dylan’s case, “page after page of specific murder plans” are written (258).
During their Diversion program stemming from their stealing of property from the van, Eric’s overall wellbeing seems to improve, while Dylan’s plummets. Eric gets a second job while Dylan quits Blackjack Pizza and does minor yardwork for money. Eric is given “an affectionate signoff” by the Diversion program coordinator while Dylan is simply passed. This difference in reaction aligns with Dylan being depressive and Eric’s psychopathy.
Dr. Albert switches Eric’s medication from Zoloft to Luvox. Eric’s father, Wayne, remains skeptical of Eric’s progress, noting as much in the journal he keeps. He mandates a 10 p.m. curfew for Eric. This would be Wayne Harris’s last journal entry. Cullen says of the Harris family that “a full picture of the family dynamic remains elusive,” due to the Harrises never speaking to the press.
Zack Heckler, the closest person to Dylan and Eric, is left out of the plans for the attack. Cullen says that Eric “went cold” on Zack the summer between junior and senior year, though why he did so is unclear. Dylan stayed closer to Zack but kept full plans secret.
Senior year begins. Eric and Dylan take a video production class they enjoy. Eric reads Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Hobbes, among others. Dylan struggles in his classes and sleeps in class. Eric’s obsession with the Nazis begins, and he writes a paper called “The Nazi Culture,” which opens with Eric asking the reader to imagine a stadium filled with murdered people.
After Dave Sanders dies, his wife, Linda, imagines the house in Wyoming they had envisioned retiring to. Patrick Ireland asks his mom to forgive Eric and Dylan, and while it takes her years, his mother is able to do it. Patrick remains at Craig Hospital—a rehab hospital—for nine and a half weeks. On July 2, he walks out of the hospital using a crutch and with a brace on one leg. Columbine High is set to reopen on August 16. School administrators had “consulted psychologists and cultural anthropologists and grief experts and had come up with an elaborate ritual” they decide to call Take Back the School.
For Take Back the School to work, they needed an adversary; it is decided the media wouldbe that adversary. Cullen observes, “The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News were still running Columbine stories every day—several a day. As the fall semester beckoned, coverage shot back: ten stories a day between the two papers.” With reporters certain to descend upon the school in droves, the Take Back the School rally, which would include a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and “a ceremonial reclaiming of the school,” would “rebuke the press” by recruiting “thousands of parents and neighbors…to form a human shield… [the press] would literally not be able to see what was going on” (271).
Ultimately, the school somewhat relents, and a small group of reporters are allowed to witness and report on the rally’s goings-on. The ribbon is cut, the flags return from half-mast for the first time since the day of the shooting, and Patrick Ireland leads the student body into the school.
Eric begins “assembling his arsenal” just before Halloween of his senior year. He assembles pipe bombs and crickets and writes almost a dozen journal entries over the next sixty days. Cullen remarks that Eric “didn’t have the political agenda of a terrorist, but he had adopted terrorist tactics” (277). By November, Eric starts looking into purchasing firearms.
While in no way glorifying either Harris or Klebold, Cullen consistently presents both youths as highly intelligent. This intelligence is furthered by Eric Harris’s ability to effectively con those around him with his charisma. It’s telling that theywere able to start planning their attack on the school a year ahead of time and that they were able to keep their plans enough of a secret to not be found out. Later, Cullen will point out that would-be copycats of Harris and Klebold leaked what they were planning to do, either by showing off or in an attempt to get others to join them. Neither holds true in the case of Harris and Klebold; the dyad they form, in which they are effectively able to feed off of one another’s respective energy, provides a strong bond where even if Klebold had second thoughts about the attack, he wasn’t going to betray his friend.
Chapter 43, in addition to other chapters in the book, deals with the hard truth that students have to return to Columbine High School and try to begin the new school year. School administrators consult with numerous specialists in an attempt to deduce how best to do this. Interestingly, the consensus is that some group must be made into an adversary. The press becomes the target, and while the school does let a small number of reporters in for the ribbon-cutting ceremony, more are refused entrance.
Throughout the book, Cullen details the long rehabilitation of the survivors of Columbine. Their respective journeys—from being able to again hold a pencil, to simply not being in such terrible pain that they don’t need morphine on a regular basis—illustrate how long and arduous the aftermath is for them, individually, and may also be seen as symbolic of the community’s long journey back toward normalcy. Toward the end of the book, Cullen points out that for most, this does indeed happen; future classes of Columbine High students—those who were in grade school at the time of the attack—do not regard the school first and foremost as ground zero for what Harris and Klebold carried out. However, for families and victims, it’s obviously harder to make this transition. Indeed, some are unable to do it at all, such as the mother of Ann Marie Hochhalter. Hochhalter, terribly injured in the attack, survives, only to have her mother take her own life, afterward. Further, lawsuits will continue to pit community members against one another.