US: Information released seven years after high-school massacre suggests the two teenagers were plotting for months, writes T R Reid in Golden, Colorado
"I hate you people for leaving me out of so many things," senior-year high-school student Eric Harris wrote of his classmates. "You had my phone, and I asked you and all, but no, no no don't let that weird looking Eric kid come along I HATE PEOPLE and they better . . . fear me."
Barely two weeks after he scrawled this entry in his diary, Harris and his classmate, Dylan Klebold, carried out the threat, killing 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in suburban Denver. The pair then killed themselves, ending the US's deadliest school shooting.
The local sheriff's department has just released some 900 new pages of documents seized from the killers' homes just after the shootings on April 20th, 1999.
The cache includes school papers and report cards as well as anguished love letters, poems, drawings, to-do lists, journals, and chat-line ramblings from the two teenagers. The documents depict intense levels of nihilism, anger and contempt for schoolmates. They also show that the pair closely tracked the provisions of state and federal gun laws to determine how they could acquire weapons.
The papers suggest that the two dropped several clues about their plans in advance. But it was not enough to prompt intervention.
Two months before the killings, Klebold wrote a short story for an English class about a man who kills nine high-school students with automatic pistols. "I saw emanating from him power, complacence, closure, and godliness," the story ended. "I understood his actions." An unnamed teacher commented: "You are an excellent writer and storyteller, but I have some problems with this one."
The killers, who chose Adolf Hitler's birthday for their rampage, were preoccupied with guns, bombs, murder and the Nazis, their personal diaries show. But this obsession is also reflected in classroom essays.
The same year as his story about the mass murderer, Klebold submitted an outline for a research paper entitled: "The minds and motives of Charles Manson and other serial killers."
Harris, who collected newsletters from anti-gun-control groups, wrote an essay noting that federal gun laws had "loopholes" that meant "criminals who want guns have a pretty good chance of getting them". In another essay, he said: "It is just as easy to bring a loaded gun to school as it is to bring a calculator."
School authorities said they had no reason to fear violence from Harris and Klebold. After warnings from neighbours, the county sheriff's office considered seeking a search warrant to look for weapons at the boys' homes shortly before the shootings but never acted.
The new documents suggest Klebold struggled in class. Asked to write an essay on King Lear, he concluded that the play was "too complicated and too long".
Harris, in turn, filled school and personal writings with historical and literary allusions, and with occasional passages in German. "I just love Hobbes and Nietzsche," he noted in his journal. Writing about his zeal to rebel against school authorities, he compared himself to Caliban, the rebel in The Tempest.
In their diaries, Harris (who used the nickname "Reb") and Klebold ("Vodka") told of their unhappiness and fury at a student body which treated them as outcasts. "Different is good," Harris wrote. "I don't want to be like you or anyone." In a note asking a girl if she would like to go out with him, he wrote: "If you don't, I'll understand, I'm used to it."
"I know that i am different," Klebold echoed in his diary. "As I look for love, i feel i can't find it, ever."
In the months before the attack, they plotted against their perceived enemies. "Hate! I'm full of hate and I love it," Harris said in his journal. "People's human nature will get them killed, whether by me or Vodka."
On a school calendar, Klebold listed steps to follow in an assault on the school: "Bombing. use bomb. cover fire. fall back. suicide - point to head w/ gun."
In the seven years since the shootings, the community of Littleton has been divided by a debate as to whether police and school authorities could have prevented the massacre. An investigation by the Colorado attorney general found that police failed to act on numerous warnings about the killers. - (LA Times-Washington Post service)