Eric Harris was born on April 9th, 1981 to his mother, a homemaker, and his father, a military man. Due to his father’s profession, he had to move around a lot until his father retired in 1993 in Littleton, Colorado. Not long after, he attended Ken Caryl Middle School, where he met Dylan Klebold.
Klebold was born on September 11th, 1981 in Lakewood Colorado to two pacifist parents who regularly attended church. Klebold attended Normandy Elementary in Littleton before moving to Governor’s Ranch Elementary where he was entered into the Challenging High Intellectual Potential Students programme, called CHIPS for short.
Back to Harris, he joined Columbine High School in 1995. In 1996, he made a website to host user made levels for games such as the Doom series, very well known for their graphic violence. On this website, he also made a blog, which he would regularly update with the criminal acts of vandalism among others which he sometimes committed with Klebold. He called these his “Rebel Mission Logs” in reference to Columbine’s football team, the Columbine Rebels. By early 1997, Harris began to use the website to express his anger at society. In a page titled “You know what I hate?” he proceeds to list many of the things he loves and hates about society and things like it, some of which include:
“YOU KNOW WHAT I LOVE!!? When some stupid ass kid blows his fucking hand off because he couldnt figure out that a lit fuse means that the firecracker is going to go off soon!! HAHAHA!DUMBASS!!”
Excerpt from Eric’s Website
“YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!? When there is a group of assholes standing in the middle of a hallway or walkway, and they are just STANDING there and talking and blocking my fucking way!! Get the fuck outa the way or ill bring a friggin sawed-off shotgun to your house and blow your snotty ass head off!”
Excerpt from Eric’s Website
“YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE I HATE!!? Jon binay however the fuck you spell her spoiled ass name Ramsee!!! We dont care! Good fucking riddens!! What the fuck do you expect if you fucking put your kid in all these beauty pagents when shes 4 years old!! SLUUUUUUUUUUUT!!!! I bet her damn dad did it. Fuckin perrrv.”
Excerpt from Eric’s Website
That last one was in reference to Jonbenet Ramsay, a 6 year old beauty pageant queen who was found strangled to death in her own parent’s basement in 1996 in Boulder Colorado, only an hour away from where Harris lived at the time. While for many, her parents were considered the prime suspects, as of late, they have had the accusations dropped and received a formal apology from the Boulder District Attorney.
Later that year, he detailed how to make explosives and explicitly described murderous fantasies he had
“All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can, especially a few people. Like Brooks Brown.”
Excerpt from Eric’s Website
After Brown’s parents raised concern, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office requested a search warrant on Harris’ home. The request was never seen by a judge.
During this time, Klebold had a journal, in which he would vent about his problems, mention how he would go on killing sprees and even detail what he would wear in such a scenario.
“Know what’s weird? Everyone knows everyone. I swear — like I’m an outcast, & everyone is conspiring against me”
Excerpt from Dylan’s journal
“Soon…. either I’ll commit suicide, or I’ll get with [redacted] & it will be [Natural Born Killers] for us.”
Excerpt from Dylan’s journal
The reference to Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers was the code word for the attack. Some believe that this film influenced the young boys into doing the attacks
“I don’t fit in here thinking of suicide gives me hope, that I’ll be in my place wherever I go after this life … that I’ll finally not be at war with myself, the world, the universe — my mind, body, everywhere, everything at PEACE in me — my soul […]. The routine is [monotonous], go to school, be scared & nervous, hoping that people can accept me … that I can accept them.”
Excerpt from Dylan’s journal
This demonstrates some of Klebold’s suicidal ideation, even in his first entry.
Even their school work was plagued with these murderous fantasies. In December of 1997, Harris wrote an essay called “Guns in School”. It contained many ominous messagings including, but not limited to
“Students who bring guns into school are hardly ever detected. This is shocking to most parents and even other students, since it is just as easy to bring a loaded handgun into school as it is to bring a calculator.”
Excerpt from Eric’s Essay “Gun’s in School”
The whole essay is a fascinating read. He advocates for more gun safety in schools, like installing metal detectors. It’s almost like he’s warning or taunting the school, knowing what he’s going to do.
In January of 1998, Harris and Klebold stole tools and computing equipment from a parked van intheir local area. They were arrested and pleaded guilty. They were forced to a juvenile diversion programme involving anger management classes. They were let off early after apparently making quick and good progress.
After this, Eric moved his site back to hosting Doom levels. However, he joined Klebold in writing in a journal. The first line in this journal was
“I hate the fucking world, too much god damn fuckers in it. Too many thoughts and different societies all wrapped up together in this fucking place called AMERICA.”
Excerpt from Eric’s Journal
Harris’ journal is much more explicit in nature than that of Klebold’s.
“I just want to be surrounded by the flesh of a woman, someone like [redacted] who I wanted to just fuck like hell, she made me practically drool, when she wore those shorts to work . . . instant hard on . . . I couldn’t stop staring. And others like [redacted] in my gym class […], and others who I just want to overpower and engulf myself in them. Mmm. I can taste the sweet flesh now … the salty sweet, the animalistic movement [I love flesh]. […] Who can I trick into my room first? I can sweep someone off their feet, tell them what they want to hear, be all nice and sweet, and then ‘fuck ’em like an animal, feel them from the inside’”
Excerpt from Eric’s Journal
“Call it teenager hormones or call [me] a crazy fuckin [rapist]. [It’s all the same to me].”
Excerpt from Eric’s Journal
“Heh, imagine THAT you fuckers, picture half of Denver on fire just from me and [Dylan]. Napalm on sides of skyscrapers and car garages blowing up from exploded gas tanks. … oh man that would be beautiful.”
Excerpt from Eric’s Journal
In Eric’s 1998 yearbook, Dylan wrote pages upon pages of manic writing. Specifically, he wrote this of interest.
“Killing enemies, blowing up stuff, killing cops!! My wrath for January’s incident will be godlike. Not to mention our revenge in the [cafeteria]”
Dylan’s note in Eric’s 1998 yearbook
In December 1998, Dylan and Eric recorded a tape, titled “Hitmen for Hire”. In this, they act as members of the Trenchcoat Mafia, a clique within Columbine High School. They walk around school dressed in black trench coats, pretending to shoot bullies with fake guns. In actuality, the Trenchcoat Mafia never had Klebold and Harris in the group. They wore the same trench coats on the day of the shooting, with the tape perhaps being somewhat of a dress rehearsal for the shooting.
In March 1999, another tape was recorded in Rampart Ranch in the foothills of a mountain near Littleton. It was of Klebold and Harris doing target practice with the guns they would use in the massacre, two 9mm firearms, two 12 gauge shotguns and a Carbine rifle. Only 2 months later, history would be made.
On April 20th 1999, Brooks Brown was loitering outside Columbine High School, smoking a cigarette during lunch break. He spotted a student walking into school in a black trench coat and holding a duffle bag, he recognised the student, Eric Harris. After a falling out over Harris throwing ice at Brown’s car, they had managed to make up not too long before the 20th. He walked up to Harris and scolded him for skipping classes that morning, as it was very unlike Harris as he was considered quite an academic student. Harris responded “It doesn’t matter anymore. Brooks, I like you now. Get out of here. Go home.” Worried, Brooks walked home.
At around 11:14, a security guard had to change the tapes of the security cameras at Columbine High school. It is suspected that around this time, Klebold and Harris placed some duffle bags inside the school cafeteria. Inside these duffle bags were bombs made of propane. These bombs, thankfully, never detonated. If they had, they would’ve killed or injured the 488 students in the cafeteria at the time. These were intended to detonate for the first round of lunch which started only a minute later
At 11:19, Rachel Scott and Richard Castaldo were sat on the grass next to the west entrance of the school eating lunch. Hearing an explosion, from a pipe bomb that Klebold had thrown, they believed it to be a prank from some of the senior students. The two students were then approached by Harris and Klebold. Scott was killed after being shot 4 times, one in her skull. Castaldo was shot 8 times and fell unconscious. After the incident, Castaldo was forever paralysed from the chest down.
After the first murder, Klebold’s TEC-9 jammed and was forced to reload. At this time, Harris ran down the steps towards 3 other students, Daniel Rohrbough, Sean Graves and Lance Kirklin. He fired ten shots at the students, killing Rohrbough and injuring Kirklin and Graves. William Sanders, a school teacher, heard the gunshots from the cafeteria and began telling students. Harris then turned west and shot at 5 students, injuring 2. One played dead while the other 4 ran off.
Klebold walked down the steps and heard Kirklin weakly calling for help. Klebold responded “Sure. I’ll help you,” before shooting Kirklin in the jaw with his shotgun. Despite being shot point blank in the head, Kirklin survived. A partially paralysed Graves crawled towards the cafeteria entrance, smeared blood on his face and played dead. Upon entering the cafeteria, Graves claims that Klebold stepped over him, saying “Sorry dude”
Klebold entered the cafeteria. A few stragglers remained inside but none of them were shot at by Klebold. Some speculate this was Klebold checking on the bombs that hadn’t detonated like they were supposed to. Klebold then left the cafeteria to go up the stairs to join Harris, who had been shooting from the top of the stairs, injuring and partially paralysing Anne-Marie Hochhalter, before the two of them began shooting aimlessly and throwing pipe bombs. Eventually, art teacher Patti Neilson went to go and tell the boys off while she was on hall duty, believing them to be either filming a video or playing a prank, along side student Brian Anderson. Once they got there, Harris and Klebold shot out the windows. Fragments of glass and shrapnel injured Anderson, before the two of them ran down the corridor to the library, warning students. Neilson hid under the admin desk and called the police.
Dispatcher: Jefferson County, 911
Neilson: Yes, I’m a teacher at Columbine High School. There is a student here with a gun. He has shot out a window. I believe one student… […] I’ve been […] I don’t know what’s in my shoulder…if it was glass or what.
Dispatcher: Okay. Has anyone been injured, ma’am?
Neilson: Yes, I am. […] The school is in panic and I’m in the library. I’ve got…Students down, under the tables kids! Heads down under the tables! Um, kids are screaming, the teachers [are] trying to take control of things. We need police here.
A transcript of a part of Patti’s call to 911
By this time, Harris had fired 47 times, with Klebold only firing 5. Police officers began to arrive and a shootout began. During the shootout, William David Sanders had managed to evacuate the cafeteria of the students and began moving around to secure the rest of the school, with an unidentified student. Klebold and Harris had retreated back into the building, where they encounter Sanders and the other student. Harris and Klebold both opened fire, missing the student but hitting Sanders in the neck and back as they ran away. Sanders managed to take refuge in a science classroom whilst first aid aficionado, student Aaron Lancey, attempted to stop the bleeding. Unfortunately, Sanders died of his wounds.
Whilst Sanders was being bandaged up, Harris and Klebold burst into the library, where 50 students, 2 librarians and 2 teachers were hiding. According to Ralph W. Larkin in his book “Comprehending Columbine” they had allegedly yelled this across the room.
Get up! All athletes stand up! Anybody with a white hat or a sports emblem on it is dead. Today is your day to die.
Either Harris or Klebold threatening the library
The white hat was a sign of being an athlete at Columbine. Because of this order, many students hid their hats. Once no-one complied with the order, Harris said “Fine, then I’ll just start shooting.” Harris then fired his shotgun twice at a desk, with the splinters hitting Evan Todd, who was hiding under the desk, in the eye and back. Then, Klebold walked over to Kyle Velasquez, a disabled student, and fatally shot him in the head. They used the library windows as an advantage point to continue the police shootout whilst killing more students. Steven Curnow was shot fatally in the neck by Harris. He then kneeled down under a desk, finding Cassie Bernall and Emily Wyant. He said “Peek-a-boo” before shooting Cassie one-handed in the face with his shotgun, which recoiled and injured his nose. He then found Bree Pasquale underneath another table and asked her if she wanted to die. She began pleading for her life as Klebold told him to shoot her. Harris refused saying that they were “gonna blow up the school anyway.”
Harris then found Patrick Ireland, helping the wounded from a table that Klebold shot at earlier. Harris shot Ireland in the head. He was knocked unconscious but somehow survived. He walked towards another table finding Isaiah Shoels and Matthew Ketcher. Harris loudly proclaimed that he “found a nigger”, before pulling Shoels, a black student, from underneath the table and shooting him in the chest, while Klebold killed Ketcher. Despite not being shot in the head, Klebold remarked “I didn’t know black brains could fly that far.”
They began shooting again, firing some shots that injured Mark Kintgen, Lisa Kreutz, Lauren Townsend and Valeen Schnurr, before Klebold shot Townsend fatally. Schnurr began crying out “Oh my God!” Dylan kneeled down, asking her if she believed in God. She responded that she did and Klebold simply asked “Why?” before reloading and walking away. Harris shot at another table, injuring Nicole Nowlen and John Tomlin. As Tomlin attempted to move away from the table, Klebold shot him repeatedly, killing him. Meanwhile Harris shot and killed Kelly Fleming. They eventually encountered John Savage, one of Klebold’s acquaintances and told him to leave.
Harris then sprayed the room, clipping Daniel Mauser in the ear. He then attempted to resist the shooters by rushing Eric with a chair, before he was shot point blank in the face, killing him. Klebold then fatally shot Corey DePooter. They then began threatening people, talking about stabbing people and throwing around faulty Molotov cocktails. They then slammed a chair on a desk before leaving and attempting to set off the propane bombs in the cafeteria by shooting them and throwing Molotovs. One successful attempt at detonating the bombs started a small fire, which was quickly put out by the sprinklers. The attempted detonations were all caught on security tape.
Eventually, the two returned to the library where the two died at 12:08, almost an hour after the shooting started. The circumstances surrounding their death are incredibly murky. Rocky Mountain News claimed that Neilson had told them that they had chanted “One, Two, Three” before both shooting themselves in the head with their shotguns, but Neilson denies having ever spoken to this news outlet. Because Klebold’s gun was under him, some postulate that Eric had shot Harris before killing himself. Some cite that under neath the film where a Molotov had been thrown resided Eric’s brain matter as proof that Eric killed himself first before Klebold shot himself. No matter what the case was, these monsters were dead.
I want to begin by saying that Hillary and I are profoundly shocked and saddened by the tragedy today in Littleton, where two students opened fire on their classmates before apparently turning their guns on themselves.
[…]
A crisis response team is ready now to travel to Colorado, and I strongly believe that we should do whatever we can to get enough counselors to the families and the children as quickly as possible. I know the other communities that have been through this are also ready to do whatever they can to help.
I think that [the Chairman of the Board of County Commissioners] would not mind if I said that, amidst all the turmoil and grief that she and others are experiencing, she said to me just a moment ago that perhaps now America would wake up to the dimensions of this challenge if it could happen in a place like Littleton, and we could prevent anything like this from happening again. We pray that she is right.
We don’t know yet all the hows or whys of this tragedy. Perhaps we may never fully understand it. Saint Paul reminds us that we all see things in this life through a glass darkly, that we only partly understand what is happening. We do know that we must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons. And we do know we have to do more to recognize the early warning signs that are sent before children act violently.
To the families who have lost their loved ones, to the parents who have lost their beloved children, to the wounded children and their families, to the people of the community of Littleton, I can only say tonight that the prayers of the American people are with you.
Bill Clinton speaking on Columbine, the day of the massacre
15 people died that day in Littleton, Colorado, 13 of which were simply victims of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Columbine is, unfortunately, not a unique story. In 1999, there were 22 school shootings in the United States. In 2021, that number reached 249. But ultimately, if Columbine is not a unique story, why is it what people think of when people think of school shootings? It’s not the first shcool shooting, like many treat it is, it’s not the school shooting with the most deaths and it’s not the first or only school shooting with more than one perpetrator. Dave Cullen of The Guardian wrote that:
The legend of Columbine is fiction. [There] are two versions of the attack: what actually happened on 20 April, and the story we all accepted in 1999. The mythical version explained it all so cleanly: a pair of outcast loners from the Trench Coat Mafia targeted the jocks to avenge years of bullying. […] Decades later, a perverse fandom has recast the Columbine killers as champions of the nobodies. Eric Harris ridiculed the nobodies. Neither he nor Dylan Klebold were loners, misfits, or outcasts. They were not in the Trench Coat Mafia. They were not Nazis or white supremacists, and they did not plan the attack for Hitler’s birthday. […] The killers’ audacious plan and misread motives multiplied the stakes and inspired wave after wave of emulation.
Dave Cullen’s forward to his book “Columbine”
Ultimately, his hypothesis is that due to the falsehood and “legend” that surrounded Columbine, Harris and Klebold, many mass shooters have tried to emulate that similar energy, seeing the mythical versions of Harris and Klebold in themselves. However, Evie Blad of Education Week says that Columbine changed America’s views on school safety.
School shootings had happened before the fateful 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. But it quickly became clear that the tragic event, in which 12 students and one teacher died, thrust the country into a new era, forever changing millions of American students’ sense of safety. […] Lockdown drills, a rare practice before 1999, are now a routine part of school for American students. Schools have invested billions of dollars in technology like metal detectors and surveillance cameras—even as school safety experts say policymakers often bypass the core lesson that emerged in the earliest investigations following Columbine, which focused on human behavior, not merely “hardening schools.”
Evie Blad, Education Week
Despite the absolute tragedy that Columbine was, not only on the people who studied, taught and worked there but on the people of America, hardly anything has changed. Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Virginia Tech and countless others have taken the countless lives of thousands of American children, who all had future and promise. And despite this, despite all the lives lost, not a single significant enough effort has been made to limit firearms in the United States. From 1966 to 2012, there were 90 mass shootings in the United States. The next one that came anywhere close was the Phillipines at 18. All these shootings and innocent lives lost need to serve as a reminder to those in power that gun legislation needs to be put into effect, and it should be done sooner rather than later, before another Columbine happens again.
