Columbine

1. Mr. D

He told them he loved them. Each and every one of them. He spoke without notes but chose his words carefully. Frank DeAngelis waited out the pom-pom routines, the academic awards, and the student-made videos. After an hour of revelry, the short, middle-aged man strode across the gleaming basketball court to address his student body. He took his time. He smiled as he passed the marching band, the cheerleaders, and the Rebels logo painted beneath flowing banners proclaiming recent sports victories. He faced two thousand hyped-up high school students in the wooden bleachers and they gave him their full attention. Then he told them how much they meant to him. How his heart would break to lose just one of them.

It was a peculiar sentiment for an administrator to express to an assembly of teenagers. But Frank DeAngelis had been a coach longer than a principal, and he earnestly believed in motivation by candor. He had coached football and baseball for sixteen years, but he looked like a wrestler: compact body with the bearing of a Marine, but without the bluster. He tried to play down his coaching past, but he exuded it.

You could hear the fear in his voice. He didn’t try to hide it, and he didn’t try to fight back the tears that welled up in his eyes. And he got away with it. Those kids could sniff out a phony with one whiff and convey displeasure with snickers and fumbling and an audible current of unrest. But they adored Mr. D. He could say almost anything to his students, precisely because he did. He didn’t hold back, he didn’t sugarcoat it, and he didn’t dumb it down. On Friday morning, April 16, 1999, Principal Frank DeAngelis was an utterly transparent man.

Every student in the gymnasium understood Mr. D’s message. There were fewer than thirty-six hours until the junior-senior prom, meaning lots of drinking and lots of driving. Lecturing the kids would just provoke eye rolling, so instead he copped to three tragedies in his own life. His buddy from college had been killed in a motorcycle accident. “I can remember being in the waiting room, looking at his blood,” he said. “So don’t tell me it can’t happen.” He described holding his teenage daughter in his arms after her friend died in a flaming wreck. The hardest had been gathering the Columbine baseball team to tell them one of their buddies had lost control of his car. He choked up again. “I do not want to attend another memorial service.”

“Look to your left,” he told them. “Look to your right.” He instructed them to study the smiling faces and then close their eyes and imagine one of them gone. He told them to repeat after him: “I am a valued member of Columbine High School. And I’m not in this alone.” That’s when he told them he loved them, as he always did.

“Open your eyes,” he said. “I want to see each and every one of your bright, smiling faces again Monday morning.”

He paused. “When you’re thinking about doing something that could get you in trouble, remember, I care about you,” he said. “I love you, but remember, I want us all together. We are one large family, we are—”

He left the phrase dangling. That was the students’ signal. They leapt to their feet and yelled: “COL-um-BINE!”

Ivory Moore, a dynamo of a teacher and a crowd rouser, ran out and yelled, “We are…”

“COL-um-BINE!”

It was louder now, and their fists were pumping in the air.

“We are…”

“COL-um-BINE!”

“We are…”

“COL-um-BINE!”

Louder, faster, harder, faster—he whipped them into a frenzy. Then he let them go.

They spilled into the hallways to wrap up one last day of classes. Just a few hours until the big weekend.

All two thousand students would return safely on Monday morning, after the prom. But the following afternoon, Tuesday, April 20, 1999, twenty-four of Mr. D’s kids and faculty members would be loaded into ambulances and rushed to hospitals. Thirteen bodies would remain in the building and two more on the grounds. It would be the worst school shooting in American history— a characterization that would have appalled the boys just then finalizing their plans.

2. “Rebels”

Eric Harris wanted a prom date. Eric was a senior, about to leave Columbine High School forever. He was not about to be left out of the prime social event of his life. He really wanted a date.

Dates were not generally a problem. Eric was a brain, but an uncommon subcategory: cool brain. He smoked, he drank, he dated. He got invited to parties. He got high. He worked his look hard: military chic hair— short and spiked with plenty of product—plus black T-shirts and baggy cargo pants. He blasted hard-core German industrial rock from his Honda. He enjoyed firing off bottle rockets and road-tripping to Wyoming to replenish the stash. He broke the rules, tagged himself with the nickname Reb, but did his homework and earned himself a slew of A’s. He shot cool videos and got them airplay on the closed-circuit system at school. And he got chicks. Lots and lots of chicks.

On the ultimate high school scorecard, Eric outscored much of the football team. He was a little charmer. He walked right up to hotties at the mall. He won them over with quick wit, dazzling dimples, and a disarming smile. His Blackjack Pizza job offered a nice angle: stop in later and he would slip them a free slice. Often they did. Blackjack was a crummy econo-chain, one step down from Domino’s. It had a tiny storefront in a strip mall just down the road from Eric’s house. It was mostly a take-out and delivery business, but there were a handful of cabaret tables and a row of stools lined up along the counter for the sad cases with nowhere better to go. Eric and Dylan were called insiders, meaning anything but delivery—mostly making the pizzas, working the counter, cleaning up the mess. It was hard, sweaty work in the hot kitchen, and boring as hell.

Eric looked striking head-on: prominent cheekbones, hollowed out underneath—all his features proportionate, clean-cut, and all-American. The profile presented a bit of a problem however; his long, pointy nose exaggerated a sloping forehead and a weak chin. The spiky hair worked against him aesthetically, elongating his angular profile—but it was edgy, and it played well with his swagger. The smile was his trump card, and he knew exactly how to play it: bashful and earnest, yet flirtatious. The chicks ate it up. He had made it to the homecoming dance as a freshman, and had scored with a twenty-three-year-old at seventeen. He was damn proud of that one.

But prom had become a problem. For some reason— bad luck or bad timing—he couldn’t make it happen. He had gone nuts scrounging for a date. He’d asked one girl, but she already had a boyfriend. That was embarrassing. He’d tried another, shot down again. He wasn’t ashamed to call his friends in. His buddies asked, the girls he hung with asked, he asked—nothing, nothing, nothing.

His best friend, Dylan, had a date. How crazy was that? Dylan Klebold was meek, self-conscious, and authentically shy. He could barely speak in front of a stranger, especially a girl. He’d follow quietly after Eric on the mall conquests, attempting to appear invisible. Eric slathered chicks with compliments; Dylan passed them Chips Ahoy cookies in class to let them know he liked them. Dylan’s friends said he had never been on a date; he may never have even asked a girl out—including the one he was taking to prom.

Dylan Klebold was a brain, too, but not quite so cool. Certainly not in his own estimation. He tried so hard to emulate Eric—on some of their videos, he puffed up and acted like a tough guy, then glanced over at Eric for approval. Dylan was taller and even smarter than Eric, but considerably less handsome. Dylan hated the oversized features on his slightly lopsided face. His nose especially—he saw it as a giant blob. Dylan saw the worst version of himself.

A shave would have helped. His beard was beginning to come in, but sporadically, in fuzzy little splotches along his chin. He seemed to take pride in his starter patches, oblivious to the actual effect.

Dylan cut a more convincing figure as a rebel, though. Long, ratty curls dangled toward his shoulders. He towered over his peers. With a ways to go in puberty, he was up to six foot three already, 143 stretched pounds. He could have worn the stature proudly, casting aspersions down at his adversaries, but it scared the crap out of him, all exposed up there. So he slouched off an inch or two. Most of his friends were over six foot—Eric was the exception, at five-nine. His eyes lined up with Dylan’s Adam’s apple.

Eric wasn’t thrilled with his looks either, but he rarely let it show. He had undergone surgery in junior high to correct a congenital birth defect: pectus excavatum, an abnormally sunken sternum. Early on, it had undermined his confidence, but he’d overcome it by acting tough.

Yet it was Dylan who’d scored the prom date. His tux was rented, the corsage purchased, and five other couples organized to share a limo. He was going with a sweet, brainy Christian girl who had helped acquire three of the four guns. She adored Dylan enough to believe Eric’s story about using them to hunt. Robyn Anderson was a pretty, diminutive blonde who hid behind her long straight hair, which often covered a good portion of her face. She was active in her church’s youth group. Right now she was in D.C. for a weeklong trip with them, due back barely in time for the prom. Robyn had gotten straight A’s at Columbine and was a month away from graduating as valedictorian. She saw Dylan every day in calculus, strolled through the hallways and hung out with him any time she could. Dylan liked her and loved the adulation, but wasn’t really into her as a girlfriend.

Dylan was heavy into school stuff. Eric, too. They attended the football games, the dances, and the variety shows and worked together on video production for the Rebel News Network. School plays were big for Dylan. He would never want to face an audience, but backstage at the soundboard, that was great. Earlier in the year, he’d rescued Rachel Scott, the senior class sweetheart, when her tape jammed during the talent show. In a few days, Eric would kill her.

Eric and Dylan were short on athletic ability but were big-time fans. They had both been Little Leaguers and soccer kids. Eric still played soccer, but for Dylan it was mostly spectator stuff now. Eric was a Rockies fan and found spring training exciting. Dylan rooted for the BoSox and wore their ball cap everywhere. He watched a whole lot of baseball, studied the box scores, and compiled his own stats. He was in first place in the fantasy league organized by a friend of his. Nobody could outanalyze Dylan Klebold, as he prepped for the March draft weeks in advance. His friends grew bored after the first major rounds, but Dylan was intent on securing a strong bench. In the final week, he notified the league commissioner that he was adding a rookie pitcher to his roster. And he would continue working a trade through the weekend, right up to Monday, his last night. “His life was baseball,” one of his friends said.

Eric fancied himself a nonconformist, but he craved approval and fumed over the slightest disrespect. His hand was always shooting up in class, and he always had the right answer. Eric wrote a poem for creative writing class that week about ending hate and loving the world. He enjoyed quoting Nietzsche and Shakespeare, but missed the irony of his own nickname, Reb: so rebellious he’d named himself after the school mascot.

Dylan went by VoDKa, sometimes capitalizing his initials in the name of his favorite liquor. He was a heavy drinker and damn proud of it; supposedly he’d earned the name after downing an entire bottle. Eric preferred Jack Daniel’s but scrupulously hid it from his parents. To adult eyes, Eric was the obedient one. Misbehavior had consequences, usually involving his father, usually curtailing his freedom. Eric was a little control freak. He gauged his moves and determined just how much he could get away with. He could suck up like crazy to make things go his way.

The Blackjack Pizza store owner during most of their tenure was acquainted with Eric’s wild side. After he closed the shop, Robert Kirgis would climb up to the roof sometimes, taking Eric and Dylan with him, and chugging brewskis while the boys shot bottle rockets over the strip mall. Kirgis was twenty-nine but enjoyed hanging with this pair. They were bright kids; they talked just like adults sometimes. Eric knew when to play, when to get serious. If a cop had ever showed up on that rooftop, everyone would have turned to Eric to do the talking. When customers stacked up at the counter and drivers rushed in for pickups, somebody needed to take control and Eric was your man. He was like a robot under pressure. Nothing could faze him, not when he cared about the outcome. Plus, he needed that job; he had an expensive hobby and he wasn’t about to jeopardize it for short-term gratification. Kirgis put Eric in charge when he left.

Nobody put Dylan in charge of anything. He was unreliable. He had been on and off the payroll in the past year. He’d applied for a better job at a computer store and presented a professional resume. The owner had been impressed, and Dylan had gotten the job. He’d never bothered to show.

But nothing separated the boys’ personalities like a run-in with authority. Dylan would be hyperventilating, Eric calmly calculating. Eric’s cool head steered them clear of most trouble, but they had their share of schoolyard fights. They liked to pick on younger kids. Dylan had been caught scratching obscenities into a freshman’s locker. When Dean Peter Horvath called him down, Dylan went ballistic. He cussed the dean out, bounced off the walls, acted like a nutcase. Eric could have talked his way out with apologies, evasions, or claims of innocence—whatever that subject was susceptible to. He read people quickly and tailored his responses. Eric was unflappable; Dylan erupted. He had no clue what Dean Horvath would respond to, nor did he care. He was pure emotion. When he learned his father was driving in to discuss the locker, Dylan dug himself in deeper. Logic was irrelevant.

The boys were both gifted analytically, math whizzes and technology hounds. Gadgets, computers, video games—any new technology and they were mesmerized. They created Web sites, adapted games with their own characters and adventures, and shot loads of videos—brief little short subjects they wrote, directed, and starred in. Surprisingly, gangly shyboy Dylan made for the more engaging actor. Eric was so calm and even-tempered, he couldn’t even fake intensity. In person, he came off charming, confident, and engaging; impersonating an emotional young man, he was dull and unconvincing, incapable of emoting. Dylan was a live wire. In life, he was timid and shy, but not always quiet: trip his anger and he erupted. On film, he unleashed the anger and he was that crazy man, disintegrating in front of the camera. His eyes bugged out and his cheeks pulled away from them, all the flesh bunched up at the extremities, deep crevices around the looming nose.

Outwardly, Eric and Dylan looked like normal young boys about to graduate. They were testing authority, testing their sexual prowess—a little frustrated with the dumbasses they had to deal with, a little full of themselves. Nothing unusual for high school.

Rebel Hill slopes gradually, rising just forty feet above Columbine, which sits at its base. That’s enough to dominate the immediate surroundings, but halfway up the hillside, the Rockies are suddenly spectacular. Each step forward lowers the mesa toward eye level, and the mountains leap up behind, a jagged brown wall rearing straight off the Great Plains. They stand two to three thousand feet above it—endless and apparently impenetrable, fading all the way over the northern horizon and just as far to the south. Locals call them the foothills. This Front Range towering over Columbine is taller than the highest peaks in all of Appalachia. Roads and regular habitation stop suddenly at the base of the foothills; even vegetation struggles to survive. Just three miles away, and it feels like the end of the world.

Nothing much grows on Rebel Hill’s mesa. It’s covered in cracked reddish clay, broken by the occasional scraggly weed failing to make much of a foothold. Up ahead, in the middle distance, humanity finally returns in the form of subdivisions. On fat winding lanes and cul-de-sacs, comfortably spaced two-story houses pop up among the pines. Strip malls and soccer fields and churches, churches, churches.

Columbine High School sits on a softly rolling meadow at the edge of a sprawling park, in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. It’s a large, modern facility—250,000 square feet of solid no-frills construction. With a beige concrete exterior and few windows, the school looks like a factory from most angles. It’s practical, like the people of south Jefferson County. Jeffco, as it’s known locally, scrimped on architectural affectations but invested generously in chem labs, computers, video production facilities, and a first-rate teaching force.

Friday morning, after the assembly, the corridors bustled with giddy teenage exuberance. Students poured out of the gym giggling, flirting, chasing, and jostling. Yet just outside the north entranceway, where the tips of the Rockies peeked around the edges of Rebel Hill, the clamor of two thousand boisterous teenagers faded to nothing. The two-story structure and the sports complex wrapped around it on two sides were the only indication of America’s twentieth-largest metropolis. Downtown Denver lay just ten miles to the northeast, but a dense thicket of trees obscured the skyline. On warmer days, the sliding doors of the woodshop would gape open. Boys set their cutting tools into the spinning blocks of wood, and the sudden buzz of the lathe machines competed with the exhaust system. But a cold front had swept onto the high plains Wednesday, and the air was hovering around freezing as Mr. D told the students that he loved them.

Cold didn’t deter the smokers. Any day of the year, you could find them wandering near, but rarely in, the official smoking pit, a ten-by-eight grass rectangle cordoned off by telephone-pole logs just past the parking lot, just beyond school grounds. It was peaceful there. No teachers, no rules, no commotion, no stress.

Eric and Dylan were fixtures in the smokers’ gulley. They both smoked the same brand, Camel filtered. Eric picked it; Dylan followed.

Lately, friends had noticed more cutting and missed assignments. Dylan kept getting in trouble for sleeping in class. Eric was frustrated and pissed, but also curiously unemotional. One day that year, a friend videotaped him hanging out at the lunch table with his buddies. They bantered about cams and valves, and a good price for a used Mazda. Eric appeared entranced with his cell phone, aimlessly spinning it in circles. He didn’t seem to be listening, but he was taking it all in.

A guy walked into the crowded cafeteria. “Fuck you!” one of Eric’s buddies spat, well out of hearing range. “I hate that putrid cock!” Another friend agreed. Eric turned slowly and gazed over his shoulder with his trademark detachment. He studied the guy and turned back with less interest than he had shown toward the phone. “I hate almost everyone,” he replied blankly. “Ah, yes. I wanna rip his head off and eat it.”

Eric’s voice was flat. No malice, no anger, barely interested. His eyebrows rose at the Ah, yes—a mild congratulation for the clever line about to come. He went vacant again delivering it.

No one found that reaction unusual. They were used to Eric.

They moved on to reminiscing about a freshman they’d picked on. Eric impersonated a special ed kid struggling to talk. A busty girl walked by. Eric waved her over and they hit on her.

3. Springtime

Spring had burst upon the Front Range. Trees were leafing, anthills rising, lawns growing vibrant in their brief transition from dormant winter brown to parched summer brown. Millions of mini-propeller maple seedpods twirled down toward the ground. Spring fever infected the classrooms. Teachers zipped through remaining chapters; kids started to stress about finals and daydream about the summer. Seniors looked ahead to fall. Columbine had one of the best academic reputations in the state; 80 percent of graduates headed on to degree programs. College dominated the conversation now: big fat acceptance packets and paper-thin rejection envelopes; last-minute campus visits to narrow down the finalists. It was time to commit to a university, write the deposit check, and start selecting first-semester classes. High school was essentially over.

Up in the Rockies, it was still winter. The slopes were open but the snow was receding. Kids begged their parents for a day off from school for one last boarding run. An Evangelical Christian junior talked her parents into letting her go the day before Mr. D’s assembly. Cassie Bernall drove up to Breckenridge with her brother, Chris. Neither one had met Eric or Dylan yet.

Lunchtime was still a big daily event. The Columbine cafeteria was a wideopen bubble of a space protruding from the spacious corridor between the student entrance at the south corner and the giant stone staircase that could fit more than a dozen students across. Kids referred to the area as “the commons.” It was wrapped with an open latticework facade of white steel girders and awnings and a decorative crisscross of steel cables. Inside, a hive of activity ignited at lunchtime. At the start of “A” lunch, more than six hundred students rushed in. Some came and went quickly, using it as a central meeting hub or grabbing a pack of Tater Tots for the road. It was packed solid for five minutes, then emptied out quickly. Three to four hundred kids eventually settled in for the duration, in plastic chairs around movable tables seating six to eight.

Two hours after the assembly, Mr. D was on lunch duty—his favorite part of the day. Most administrators delegated the task, but Principal DeAngelis could not get enough. “My friends laugh at me,” he said. “Lunch duty! Ugh! But I love it down there. That’s when you get to see the kids. That’s when you get to talk to them.”

Mr. D made his way around the commons, chatting up kids at each table, pausing as eager students ran up to catch his ear. He was down here for the start of “A” lunch nearly every day. His visits were lighthearted and conversational. He listened to his students’ stories and helped solve problems, but he avoided discipline at lunch. The one situation where he just couldn’t stop himself, though, was when he saw abandoned trays and food scraps. The Columbine Mr. D had inherited was short on frills, but he insisted it stay clean.

He was so irritated by entitlement and sloppiness that he’d had four surveillance cameras installed in the commons. A custodian loaded a fresh tape every morning around 11:05, and the rotating cameras continually swept the commons, recording fifteen-second bursts of action automatically cut from camera to camera. Day after day, they recorded the most banal footage imaginable. No one could have imagined what those cameras would capture just four months after installation.

A terrifying affliction had infested America’s small towns and suburbs: the school shooter. We knew it because we had seen it on TV. We had read about it in the newspapers. It had materialized inexplicably two years before. In February 1997, a sixteen-year-old in remote Bethel, Alaska, brought a shotgun to high school and opened fire. He killed the principal and a student and injured two others. In October, another boy shot up his school, this time in Pearl, Mississippi. Two dead students, seven wounded. Two more sprees erupted in December, in remote locales: West Paducah, Kentucky, and Stamps, Arkansas. Seven were dead by the end of the year, sixteen wounded.

The following year was worse: ten dead, thirty-five wounded, in five separate incidents. The violence intensified in the springtime, as the school year came to a close. Shooting season, they began to call it. The perpetrator was always a white boy, always a teenager, in a placid town few had ever heard of. Most of the shooters acted alone. Each attack erupted unexpectedly and ended quickly, so TV never caught the turmoil. The nation watched the aftermaths: endless scenes of schools surrounded by ambulances, overrun by cops, hemorrhaging terrified children.

By graduation day, 1998, it felt like a full-blown epidemic. With each escalation, small towns and suburbia grew a little more tense. City schools had been armed camps for ages, but the suburbs were supposed to be safe.

The public was riveted; the panic was real. But was it warranted? It could happen anyplace became the refrain. “But it doesn’t happen anyplace,” Justice Policy Institute director Vincent Schiraldi argued in the Washington Post. “And it rarely happens at all.” A New York Times editorial made the same point. CDC data pegged a child’s chances of dying at school at one in a million. And holding. The “trend” was actually steady to downward, depending on how far back you looked.

But it was new to middle-class white parents. Each fresh horror left millions shaking their heads, wondering when the next outcast would strike.

And then… nothing. During the entire 1998-99 school year, not a single shooter emerged. The threat faded, and a distant struggle took hold of the news. The slow disintegration of Yugoslavia erupted again. In March 1999, as Eric and Dylan finalized their plans, NATO drew the line on Serbian aggression in a place called Kosovo. The United States began its largest air campaign since Vietnam. Swarms of F-15 squadrons pounded Belgrade. Central Europe was in chaos; America was at war. The suburban menace of the school shooter had receded.

4. Rock’n’ Bowl

Eric and Dylan had “A” lunch, but they were rarely around for Mr. D’s visits anymore. Columbine was an open campus, so older kids with licenses and cars mostly took off for Subway, Wendy’s, or countless drive-thrus scattered about the subdivisions. Most of the Columbine parents were affluent enough to endow their kids with cars. Eric had a black Honda Prelude. Dylan drove a vintage BMW his dad had refurbished. The two cars sat side by side in their assigned spaces in the senior lot every day. At lunch the boys loaded into one with a handful of friends to grab a bite and a smoke.

Mr. D had one major objective on Friday; Eric Harris had at least two. Mr. D wanted to impress on his kids the importance of wise choices. He wanted everyone back alive on Monday. Eric wanted ammo and a date for prom night.

Eric and Dylan planned to be dead shortly after the weekend, but Friday night they had a little work to do: one last shift at Blackjack. The job had funded most of Eric’s bomb production, weapons acquisition, and napalm experiments. Blackjack paid a little better than minimum: $6.50 an hour for Dylan, $7.65 to Eric, who had seniority. Eric believed he could do better. “Once I graduate, I think I’m gonna quit, too,” Eric told a friend who’d quit the week before. “But not now. When I graduate I’m going to get a job that’s better for my future.” He was lying. He had no intention of graduating.

Eric had no plans, which seemed odd for a kid with so much potential. He was a gifted student taking a pass on college. No career plans, no discernible goals. It was driving his parents crazy.

Dylan had a bright future. He was heading to college, of course. He was going to be a computer engineer. Several schools had accepted him, and he and his dad had just driven down to Tucson on a four-day trip. He’d picked out a dorm room. He liked the desert. The decision was final; his mom was going to mail his deposit to the University of Arizona on Monday.

Eric had appeased his dad for the last few weeks by responding to a Marine recruiter. He had no interest, but it made a nice cover. Eric’s dad, Wayne, had been a decorated air force test pilot; he’d retired as a major after twenty-three years.

For the moment, Blackjack was a pretty good gig—decent money and lots of social opportunities. Chris and Nate and Zack and a mess of their other buddies had worked there. And Eric was alert for hotties. He had been working this one chick for months now. Susan worked as a part-time receptionist at the Great Clips in the same strip mall, so she was always having to pick up the pizza orders for the stylists. Eric saw her at school, too, usually when he was smoking. He addressed her by name there—she wasn’t sure how he’d gotten ahold of it—and came by the store now and then to chat her up. She seemed to like him. Eric could not abide embarrassment, so he had been checking with her friends to gauge his prospects. Yeah, she liked him. Business was slow Friday night because of a late spring snowstorm, so they had time to chat when she picked up her order. He asked her for her number. She gave it.

Susan was looking good and Eric’s new boss had an announcement, too. Kirgis had sold the store six weeks ago, and things were changing. The new owner fired some of the staff. Eric and Dylan were keepers, but the roof was closed: no more brewskis and bottle rockets. Eric, however, had made a great impression. Kirgis had trusted Eric enough to leave him in charge frequently, but on Friday, the new owner promoted him. Four days before his massacre, Eric made shift manager. He seemed pleased.

Both boys asked for advances that night. Eric wanted $200, Dylan $120, against hours they had already worked. The new owner paid them in cash.

After work, they headed to Belleview Lanes. Friday night was Rock’n’ Bowl, a big weekly social event. Sixteen kids usually showed up—some from the Blackjack circle, some from outside. They jammed into four adjacent lanes and tracked all the scores on the overhead monitors. Eric and Dylan played every Friday night. They weren’t great bowlers—Dylan averaged 115, Eric 108—but they sure had fun doing it. They took bowling as a gym class, too. Dylan hated mornings, but Monday through Wednesday he drove to Belleview in the dark. Class started at 6:00 A.M., and they were rarely late, almost never absent. And they still couldn’t wait for Friday night: same venue, but no adult supervision. They could get a little crazier. Eric was into all this German shit lately: Nietzsche, Freud, Hitler, German industrial bands like KMFDM and Rammstein, German-language T-shirts. Sometimes he’d punctuate his high fives with “Sieg Heil” or “Heil Hitler.” Reports conflict about whether or not Dylan followed his lead. Dylan’s friend Robyn Anderson, the girl who had asked him to the prom, usually picked them up at Blackjack and drove them to the alley. But this week, she was still in Washington with her church group.

They went home early that night—Eric had a phone engagement. He called Susan after nine, as promised, but got her mother. The mom thought Eric seemed very nice, until she told him Susan was sleeping at a friend’s house. Eric got mad. How odd, the mom thought, that Eric would get so angry so quickly, just because Susan was out. Rejection was Eric’s weak spot, especially by females. He wouldn’t quite pull a Klebold, but the veil came down, and his anger spilled out. It was just infuriating. He had a long list of betrayals, an actual “Shit List” on his computer of despicable young girls. Susan did not make the list. Her mom offered Eric her pager number, and he pounded out a message.

Susan called back, and Eric was suddenly nice again. They talked about school, computers, and kids who had knifed Eric in the back. Eric went on and on about one kid who had betrayed him. They chatted for half an hour, and Eric finally asked her about Saturday night. Was she busy? No. Great. He would call her early in the afternoon. Finally! Prom night. He had a date!

5. Two Columbines

On Friday nights, Coach Sanders could usually be found in the Columbine Lounge: an ass-kicking strip-mall honky-tonk with the feel of an Allman Brothers club gig in Macon in the 1970s. All ages piled in—mostly rednecks, but blacks and Latinos mixed easily, punkers and skate rats, too. Everybody got along. Biker dudes with gleaming scalps and ponytails chatted up elderly women in floral cardigans. Most nights included an open-mike period, where you could watch an aging drunk strum “Stairway to Heaven,” segue into the Gilligan’s Island theme, and forget the words. The bartenders covered the pool tables with plywood sheets when the band started, converting it all into banquet space. A stack of amplifiers and a mixing board marked off the virtual stage, spotlit by aluminum-clamp lights affixed to the ceiling tile frames. A narrow strip of carpet served as the dance floor. Mostly, it was filled with fortyish women in Dorothy Hamill wedge cuts. They tried to drag their men out there but seldom got many takers. Dave Sanders was the exception. He loved to glide across the carpet. He was partial to the Electric Slide. He was something to see. The grace that propelled him down the basketball court thirty years ago had stuck with him. He played point guard. He was good.

Coach Sanders outclassed most of the clientele, but he didn’t think in class terms. He cared about friendliness, honest effort, and sincerity. The Lounge had those in abundance. And Dave liked to kick back and have fun. He had a hearty laugh, and got a lot of use of it at the Lounge.

When Coach Sanders arrived in 1974, he personified the community. He’d grown up in Veedersburg, Indiana, a quiet rural community much like the Jefferson County he found right out of college. Twenty-five years later, it was not such a snug fit. The Lounge sat just a few blocks south of the high school, and in the early days it was brimming with faculty after school or practice. They mixed with former students and parents and siblings of the current ones. Half the town rolled through the Lounge in a given week. The newer teachers didn’t approve of that behavior, and they didn’t fit in at the Lounge anyway. Neither did the wave of upscale suburbanites who began flooding into Jeffco in the late 1970s, overwhelming Columbine’s student body. New Columbine went for fern bars and Bennigan’s, or private parties in their split-level “ranch homes” and cathedral-ceilinged McMansions. Cassie Bernall’s family was New Columbine, as were the Harrises and the Klebolds. Mr. D arrived as Old, but evolved with the majority to New. Old Columbine remained, outnumbered but unfazed by the new arrivals. Many older families lived in actual ranch houses built half a century earlier on the small horse ranches occupying most of the area when the high school was constructed.

Columbine High School was built in 1973 on a dirt road off a larger dirt road way out in horse country. It was named after the flower that blankets sections of the Rockies. Scraggy meadows surrounded the new building, fragrant with pine trees and horse manure. Hardly anybody lived there, but Jeffco was bracing for an influx. Court-ordered busing had spurred an avalanche of white flight out of Denver, and subdivisions were popping up all along the foothills.

Jeffco officials had debated where the arrivals would cluster. They erected three temporary structures in the wilderness to accommodate the stampede. The high schools were identical hollow shells, ready for conversion to industrial use if the population failed to materialize. Columbine resembled a factory by design. Inside, mobile accordion-wall separators were rolled out to create classrooms. Sound carried from room to room, but students could overcome such minor hardships.

Developers kept throwing up new subdivisions, each one pricier than the one before. Jeffco kept all three temporary schools. In 1995, just before Eric and Dylan arrived, Columbine High School underwent a major overhaul. Permanent interior walls were installed, and the old cafeteria on the east side was converted to classrooms. A huge west wing was added, doubling the size of the structure. It bore the signature new architectural feature: the curving green glass of the commons, with the new library above.

By April 1999, the plain was nearly filled, all the way to the foothills. But the fiercely independent residents refused to incorporate. A new town would only impose new rules and new taxes. The 100,000 new arrivals filled one continuous suburb with no town center: no main street, no town hall, town library, or town name. No one was sure what to call it. Littleton is a quiet suburb south of Denver where the massacre did not actually occur. Although the name would grow synonymous with the tragedy, Columbine lies several miles west, across the South Platte River, in a different county with separate schools and law enforcement. The postal system slapped “Littleton” onto a vast tract of seven hundred square miles, stretching way up into the foothills. The people on the plain gravitated toward the name of the nearest high school—the hub of suburban social life. For thirty thousand people clustered around the new high school, Columbine became the name of their home.

Dave Sanders taught typing, keyboarding, business, and economics. He didn’t find all the material particularly interesting, but it enabled him to coach. Dave coached seven different sports at Columbine. He started out with boys but found the girls needed him more. “He had this way of making everyone feel secure,” a friend said. He made the kids feel good about themselves.

Dave didn’t yell or berate the girls, but he was stern and insistent at practice. Again. Again. He watched quietly on the sidelines, and when he spoke, they could count on analysis or inspiration. He had taken over as head coach of girls’ basketball that semester—a team with twelve straight losing seasons. Before the first game, he bought them T-shirts with ONE IN A DOZEN printed on the back. They made it to the state championship tournament that spring.

When someone crossed Dave Sanders, he responded with “the look”: a cold, insistent stare. He used it one time on a couple of chatty girls in business class. They shut up momentarily, but went back to talking when he looked away. So he pulled up a chair right in front of them and conducted the rest of class from that spot, staring back and forth at each girl until the bell rang.

Dave spent almost every night in the gym or the field house, headed back for more on the weekends, and ran summer training camps at the University of Wyoming. Dave was a practical guy. He admired efficiency, tried to do double duty by bringing his daughter to work after school. The basketball girls knew Angela by the time she was a toddler. She hung out in the gym watching Daddy drill the girls: dribbling, tip contests, face-offs… Angela brought her toys with her in a tyke-sized suitcase. By the end of practice, they would be strewn all over the bleachers and the side of the court. The girls let out a big sigh when Dave called out for Angela to start packing up. He worked them hard, and that was the signal that they were nearly done.

Angela treasured those late afternoons. “I grew up at Columbine,” she said. Dave was widening out into a big bear of a man, and when he hugged Angela, she felt safe.

Her mom was less impressed. Kathy Sanders divorced Dave when Angela was three. Dave found a home a few blocks away, so they could stay close. Later, Angie moved in with him. It was such a happy divorce that Kathy became friends with his second wife, Linda Lou.

“Kathy’s such a sweetheart, and she and Dave got along so well,” Linda said. “I asked her one day, ‘Why did you two ever get a divorce?’ And she said, ‘He was never home. I was kind of like married to myself.’”

Linda thrived with the arrangement. Angie was seventeen when she married Dave, and her two girls were nearly raised as well. Linda had been a single working mom for many years and was used to alone time. She grew steadily more dependent on Dave, though. She had been strong when she needed to, but she liked it better with a man to lean on. Independence had been great, but that life was over now.

Linda Lou often met Dave at the Lounge after practice, and they spent the evening together there. She loved the place almost as much as Dave did. They’d met at the Lounge in 1991. They’d held their wedding reception there two years later. It felt like home. Dave felt like home to Linda.

Dave was exactly what Linda had been waiting for: caring, protective, and playfully romantic. He’d proposed on a trip to Vegas. As they’d strolled over a bridge into the Excalibur casino, he’d asked to see her “divorce ring”—which she still wore on her wedding finger. She presented her hand, and he threw the ring into the moat. He asked her to marry him. She gleefully accepted.

Linda and her two daughters moved in, and she and Dave finished raising the girls and Angela. Dave legally adopted Linda’s younger daughter, Coni. He considered all three girls his daughters, and they all called him Dad.

Dave’s lanky runner’s build filled out. His beard grew speckled, then streaked gray. His smile held constant. His blue eyes twinkled. He began to resemble a young Santa Claus. Otherwise, Dave remained remarkably consistent: coaching, laughing, and enjoying his grandkids, but not seeing them enough. He drove an aging Ford Escort, dressed in drab polyester slacks and plain button-down shirts. His hair dwindled, but he parted it neatly on the left. He wore great big oversized glasses with frames from another age. Each night ended with him in his easy chair, chuckling to Johnny Carson, with a tumbler of Diet Coke and Jack Daniel’s in hand. When Johnny retired, the Sanderses had a satellite dish and Dave could always find a game to settle down with. Linda waited for him upstairs.

Out of the blue, just a few weeks before the prom, he decided to update his image. He was forty-seven—time for a change. He surprised Linda in a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, the first big fashion statement of his life. He’d picked them out himself. “Woo-woo!” she howled. She had never seen a Dave like this before!

He was so proud of those glasses. “I finally made it to 1999,” he said.

The big debut came Easter Sunday. He showed up in the glasses at a boisterous family gathering with the grandkids. Nobody noticed.

Alone with Linda that evening, he confessed how badly it hurt.

Dave was planning more changes: No basketball camp this summer. Less coaching, more time with his own girls and his grandkids. There was still time to set it right.

He was trying a new bedtime drink, too: Diet Coke and rum.

The Sunday before the prom, the family threw a birthday party for Angela’s four-year-old, Austin. Dave liked making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the grandkids. He sliced off the edges, because they liked it fluffy all the way through. Dave would hide a gummi worm in the jelly, which surprised them every time.

Austin called to talk to Grandpa on prom weekend but missed him. Dave called back and left a message on the machine. Angela erased it. She would try again during the week.

Prom was scheduled for April 17, but for most kids, it was the culmination of a long, painful dance stretching back to midwinter. Night after night, Patrick Ireland had lain on his bed, phone in one hand, a ball in the other, tossing it up and snatching it out of the air, wishing his best friend, Laura, would take the hint. He kept prodding her about her prospects. Any ideas? Anybody ask yet? She tossed the questions back: Who you going to ask? When? What are you waiting for?

Indecision was unfamiliar ground for Patrick. He competed in basketball and baseball for Columbine and earned first place medals in waterskiing while earning a 4.0 average. He kept his eye on the ball. When his team was down five points in the final minutes of a basketball game, and he’d just miss an easy layup or dribbled off his foot and felt like a loser, the answer was simple: Brush it off! If you wanted to win, you focused on the next play. With Laura, he couldn’t focus on anything.

Patrick was modest but self-assured with regard to most things. This mattered too much. He couldn’t risk fourth grade again. Laura had been his first love, his first girlfriend, in third grade. It was a torrid romance, but it ended badly and she wouldn’t speak to him the next year. It took them until high school to become friends again. For a while, it was friendship, but then his pulse started racing. Had he been right about her the first time? Surely she felt it, too. Unless he was imagining it. No, she was flirting, totally. Flirting enough?

Laura grew impatient. It wasn’t just prom night at stake, it was weeks of planning, dress shopping, accessorizing, endless conversations to risk being excluded. The sad looks, the pity—a full season of awkwardness.

She got another offer. She stalled for time, then, finally, accepted. The guy was way into her.

So Patrick asked Cora, just as friends. His whole group was going as friends. No pressure, just a good time.

Prom night arrived. Most groups turned it into a twelve-hour affair: photos, fine dining, the dance, the afterprom. Patrick’s gang started at Gabriel’s, an old Victorian home in the country that had been converted into an elegant steak and seafood house. They pulled up in a limo and ate like kings. Then it was a long ride into Denver for the big event. The prom committee chose the Denver Design Center, a local landmark known as “that building with the weird yellow thing.” The “thing” was a monumental steel sculpture called The Articulated Wall, which looked like an eighty-five-foot DNA strand and towered over the shops and restaurants converted from old warehouses.

The trade-off with a famous city location was space. You could barely move on the dance floor. Patrick Ireland’s second-most-memorable moment was dancing to “Ice Ice Baby.” He had lip-synced to it in a third-grade talent show, so whenever they’d heard it for the next decade, he’d grabbed his buddies and performed the same goofy dance. That was nothing compared to holding Laura. He got one dance. A slow song. Heaven.

Cassie Bernall was not asked to prom. She was pretty but, in her estimation, a loser. The church boys from the youth group barely noticed her. At school she got attention, but strictly sexual. Friends were hard to come by. So she and her friend Amanda dressed up anyway, did their hair, and got all glamorous for a work banquet Amanda’s mom had going at the Marriott. Then they cruised to afterprom, where dates were optional, and partied till dawn.

6. His Future

Dylan’s prom group arranged for a limo, too. Robyn Anderson drove out to pick him up on Saturday afternoon. They shot pictures with his parents before meeting up with the five other couples to head into the city. Robyn wore midnight-blue satin with cap sleeves and matching opera-length gloves. She’d curled her hair in long blond ringlets, swept forward to bounce across her low-cut square neckline—a suburban variation on the classic Pre-Raphaelite style.

Dylan was giddy and beaming getting ready, all cleaned up for once, working to make everything look just right. He tugged his shirt cuffs down, straightened his tuxedo jacket. He’d gone with a traditional black tuxedo, bow tie slightly askew. A small splash of color lightened up his lapel: a pink-tipped rosebud with a tiny ribbon the color of Robyn’s dress. His hair was slicked back into a short ponytail that kept giving him grief. He had shaved. His dad followed him around with a camcorder, capturing every move. Dylan looked at him through the lens: Dad, we’re going to laugh about this in twenty years.

They rode downtown in a big honking stretch with tinted windows and a mirrored ceiling. Whoa! Dylan held Robyn’s hand and complimented her on her dress. The first stop was dinner at Bella Ristorante, a trendy spot in Lower Downtown. It was a fun time: jokes and horseplay with table knives and matches, pretending to light themselves on fire. Dylan devoured an oversized salad, a big seafood entree, and dessert. He gushed about the upcoming reunion for kids from the gifted program in elementary school. It would be fun hooking up again with the childhood smarties. Dylan had volunteered to use his Blackjack connection to get some pizzas.

They finished dinner early. Dylan stepped out for a cigarette. He asked his buddy Nate Dykeman to join him. It was cold out, but nice anyway—a little quiet time, away from all the commotion. Great food, great company, first time in a limo for both of them. “Everything is going perfect, as planned,” Nate said later.

Nate was even taller than Dylan, six-four, and considerably more attractive. He had classic features and dark, heavy eyebrows that accentuated his piercing eyes. They talked more about reunions. Everyone was scattering for college. They talked about Dylan heading down to Arizona and Nate across the country to Florida. Nate wanted to work for Microsoft. What would they accomplish before reunion time rolled around? They tossed around the possibilities. “No hints whatsoever that anything could possibly be wrong,” Nate recalled later. “We were just having a great time. It’s our senior prom. We’re enjoying it like we should.”

The short ride to the Design Center was a blast: hard rock jamming from the speakers, an adrenaline rush while they riffed on one another. They made fun of pedestrians, flipped them off at random. Nobody could see in; they could see out. What a riot.

Dylan was in a great mood. We’ve got to stay in touch, he insisted. This group was too fun to let go.

Eric pressed his luck. He was crazy for a prom-night date, but he waited till early evening to call Susan. He was confident. Girls liked him. He asked her to come over for a movie. She swung by around seven. His parents had just left, out to dinner to celebrate their anniversary. Eric wanted to show Susan Event Horizon, a low-budget gorefest about a spaceship transported back from hell. It was his all-time favorite. They watched it straight through, then sat around his basement bedroom talking.

Eric’s parents came home and went down to meet her. It was lots of aimless chitchat, like Eric’s dad telling her he got his hair cut at Great Clips. They seemed friendly, Susan thought. They all got along well. After Eric’s parents left, he played her some of his favorite tunes. It was mostly banging and screaming to her ear, but then he would mix in some New Age stuff like Enya. He put his arm around her once but didn’t go for a kiss. He did lots of thoughtful things, like offering to warm up her car when she had to get home. She stayed until eleven—half an hour after she should have. Eric kissed her on the cheek and said good night.

Prom was the standard affair. They crowned a queen, they crowned a king, Mr. D breathed a sigh of relief that they had come through it alive. Dylan and Robyn had fun, but joy wasn’t really the objective. Prom was more about acting out some weird facsimile of adulthood: dress up like a tacky wedding party, hold hands and behave like a couple even if you’ve never dated, and observe the etiquette of Gilded Age debutantes thrust into modern celebrity: limos, red carpets, and a constant stream of paparazzi, played by parents, teachers, and hired photo hacks.

For enjoyment, someone invented afterprom. Peel off the cummerbund, step out of the two-inch pumps, forget the stupid posing, and indulge in actual fun. Like gambling. The Columbine gym was outfitted with row after row of blackjack, poker, and craps tables. Parents in Vegas costumes served as dealers. They had ball-toss contests, a jump castle, and a bungee cord plunge. It stayed active till dawn. Afterprom had its own theme: New York, New York. Some parents had built a life-sized maze you had to follow to get into the school, and the entranceway was festooned with cardboard mock-ups of the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. Some of the boys barely saw their dates at afterprom. Some didn’t have one. Eric joined Dylan and his limo group. They spent hours in the casino losing fake money. Patrick Ireland hung out nearby. They never met. Dylan kept talking about college, about his future. He kept saying he could hardly wait.

7. Church on Fire

This is a church on fire. This is the heart of Evangelical country. This is Trinity Christian Center, an ecstatic congregation crying out for Jesus in a converted Kmart half a mile from Columbine. As the casino shut down in the school gym, the faithful rose across the Front Range. They spilled out into the aisles of Trinity Christian, heaving and rumbling like an old-time tent revival. The frenzied throng thrust two hundred arms toward the heavens, belting out the spirit their souls just couldn’t contain. The choir drove them higher. It ripped through the chorus of Hillsong’s burning anthem and the crowd surged.

No one had the fever like a sunburned high school girl, radiating from the choir like the orchids splashed across her sundress. She threw her head back, squeezed her eyes shut, and kept singing, her lips charging straight through the instrumental jam.

Since pioneer days and the Second Great Awakening, Colorado had been a hotbed on the itinerant ministry circuit. By the 1990s, Colorado Springs was christened the Evangelical Vatican. The city of Denver seemed immune to the fervor, but its western suburbs were roiling. Nowhere did the spirit move more strongly than at Trinity Christian Center. They had a savior to reach out to and The Enemy to repel.

Satan was at work in Jefferson County, any Bible-church pastor would tell you so. Long before Eric and Dylan struck, tens of thousands of Columbine Evangelicals prepared for the dark prince. The Enemy, they called him. He was always on the prowl.

Columbine sits three miles east of the foothills. Closer to the peaks, property values rise steadily, in tandem with decorum. In comparison to Trinity Christian, upscale congregations like Foothills Bible Church mount Broadway productions. Foothills Pastor Bill Oudemolen took stage like the quintessential televangelist: blow-dried, swept-back helmet hair, crisp tie, and tailored Armani suit in muted earth tones. But the stereotype dissolved when he opened his mouth. He was sincere, sharp-witted, and intellectual. He rebuked ministry-for-money preachers and their get-saved-quick schemes.

West Bowles Community Church lay between other megachurches geographically, socioeconomically, and intellectually. Like Oudemolen, Pastor George Kirsten was a biblical literalist. He was contemptuous of peers obsessed with a loving Savior. His Christ had a vengeful side. Love was an easy sell—that missed half the story. “That’s offensive to me,” Kirsten said. He preached a strict, black-and-white moral code. “People want to paint the world in a lot of gray,” he said. “I don’t see that in the Scripture.”

Religion did not mean an hour a week on Sundays to this crowd. There was Bible study, youth group, fellowship, and retreats. The “thought for the day” started the morning; Scripture came before bed. West Bowles kids roamed the halls of Columbine sporting WWJD? bracelets—What Would Jesus Do?—and exchanging Christian rock CDs. Occasionally, they witnessed to the unbelievers or argued Scripture with the mainline Protestants. The Columbine Bible Study group met at the school once a week; its major challenges were resisting temptation, adhering to a higher standard, and acting as worthy servants of Christ. Its members kept a vigilant eye out for The Enemy.

Pastors Kirsten and Oudemolen spoke of Satan frequently. Reverend Oudemolen called him by name; Kirsten preferred The Enemy. Either way, Satan was more than a symbol of evil—he was an actual, physical entity, hungry for compliant souls.

He snatched the most unlikely targets. Who would have expected Cassie Bernall to fall? She was the angelic blond junior who’d dressed up for a function at the Marriott on Saturday instead of prom. She was scheduled to speak at her church’s youth group meeting on Tuesday. Cassie’s house sat right beside Columbine property, but it was only her second year at the school. She’d transferred in from Christian Fellowship School. She had begged her parents to make the move. The Lord had spoken to Cassie. He wanted her to witness to the unbelievers at Columbine.

Monday morning was uneventful. Lots of bleary eyes from Saturday’s all-nighter, lots of chatter about who did what. All Mr. D’s kids had made it back. A handful peeked through his doorway with big grins. “Just wanted you to see our bright, shining faces,” they said.

Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier was a little on edge Monday. He headed the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit in Denver, and April 19 was a dangerous day in the region. The worst disaster in FBI history had erupted six years earlier and retaliation followed exactly two years after. On April 19, 1993, the Bureau ended a fifty-one-day standoff with the Branch Davidian cult near Waco, Texas, by storming the compound. A massive fire had erupted and most of the eighty inhabitants burned to death—adults and children. Agent Fuselier was one of the nation’s foremost hostage negotiators. He spent six weeks trying to talk the Davidians out. Fuselier had opposed the attack on the compound, but lost. Just before storming in, the FBI gave Fuselier one final chance. He was the last person known to speak to Davidian leader David Koresh. He watched the compound burn.

Speculation raged about the FBI’s role in the blaze. The controversy nearly ended Attorney General Janet Reno’s career. Waco radicalized the anti-government militia movement, made April 19 into a symbol of perverse authority. Timothy McVeigh sought vengeance by bombing the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. His explosion killed 168 people, the largest terrorist attack in American history to that point.

8. Maximum Human Density

It’s a safe bet that Eric and Dylan watched the carnage of Waco and Oklahoma City on television, with the rest of the country. Those atrocities were particularly prominent in this region. McVeigh was tried in federal court in downtown Denver and sentenced to death while the boys attended Columbine in the suburbs. The scenes of devastation were played over and over. In his journal, Eric would brag about topping McVeigh. Oklahoma City was a one-note performance: McVeigh set his timer and walked away; he didn’t even see his spectacle unfold. Eric dreamed much bigger than that.

Judgment Day, they called it. Columbine would erupt with an explosion, too. Eric designed at least seven big bombs, working off The Anarchist Cookbook he found on the Web. He chose the barbecue design: standard propane tanks, the fat, round white ones, eighteen inches tall, a foot in diameter, packing some twenty pounds of highly explosive gas. Bomb #1 employed aerosol cans for detonators, each wired up to an old-fashioned alarm clock with round metal bells on top. Step one was planting them in a park near Eric’s house, three miles from the school. That bomb could kill hundreds of people but was intended for only stones and trees. The attack was to begin with a decoy: rock the neighborhood and divert police. Every free minute raised the potential body count. The boys were going to double or triple McVeigh’s record. They estimated the damage variously as “hundreds,” “several hundred,” and “at least four hundred”—oddly conservative for the arsenal they were preparing.

Eric may have had another reason for the decoy plan. He was uncannily perceptive about people, and Dylan had been wavering. If Dylan was reticent, the decoy would help ease him in. It was a harmless explosive, no one would be hurt by it, but once they drove off, Dylan would be committed.

The main event was scripted in three acts, just like a movie. It would kick off with a massive explosion in the commons. More than six hundred students swarmed in at the start of “A” lunch, and two minutes after the bell rang, most of them would be dead. Act I featured two bombs, using propane tanks like the decoy. Each was strung with nails and BBs for shrapnel, lashed to a full gasoline can and a smaller propane tank, and wired to similar bell clocks. Each bomb fit snugly into a duffel bag, which Eric and Dylan would lug in at the height of passing-period chaos. Again, Dylan was eased into killing. Clicking over the alarm hinge was bloodless and impersonal. It didn’t feel like killing—no blood, no screams. Most of Dylan’s murders would be over before he faced them.

The fireball would wipe out most of the lunch crowd and set the school ablaze. Eric drew detailed diagrams. He spaced the bombs out but located them centrally, for maximum killing radius. They would sit beside two thick columns supporting the second floor. Computer modeling and field tests would later demonstrate a high probability that the bombs would have collapsed some of the second floor. Eric apparently hoped to watch the library and its inhabitants crash down upon the flaming lunchers.

As the time bombs ticked down, the killers would exit briskly and flare out across the parking lot at a ninety-degree angle. Each boy was to head for his own car, strategically parked about a hundred yards apart. The cars provided mobile base camps, where they would gear up to unleash Act II. Pre-positioning ensured optimal fire lanes. They had drilled the gear-ups repeatedly and could execute them rapidly. The bombs would detonate at 11:17, and the densely packed wing would crumble. As the flames leapt up, Eric and Dylan would train their semiautomatics on the exits and await survivors.

Act II: firing time. This was going to be fun. Dylan would sport an Intratec TEC-DC9 (a 9mm semiautomatic handgun) and a shotgun. Eric had a Hi-Point 9mm carbine rifle and a shotgun. They’d sawed the barrels off the shotguns for concealment. Between them, they’d carry eighty portable explosives—pipe bombs and carbon dioxide bombs that Eric called “crickets”—plus a supply of Molotov cocktails and an assortment of freakish knives, in case it came down to hand-to-hand combat. They’d suit up in infantry-style web harnesses, allowing them to strap much of the ammo and explosives to their bodies. Each had a backpack and a duffel bag to hump more hardware into the attack zone. They would tape flint matchstriker strips to their forearms for rapid-fire pipe-bomb attacks. Their long black dusters would go on last—for concealment and for looking badass. (Later, the dusters were widely referred to as trench coats.)

They planned to advance on the building as soon as the bombs blew. They’d be set back far enough to see each other around the corner—and just barely avoid the blast. They had devised their own hand signals to communicate. Every detail was planned; battle positions were imperative. The 250,000-square-foot school had twenty-five exits, so some survivors would escape. The boys could remain in visual contact and still cover two sides of the building, including two of the three main exits. Their firing lines intersected on the most important point: the student entrance, adjacent to the commons and just a dozen yards from the big bombs.

Positioning yourself at a right angle to the objective is standard U.S. infantry practice, taught to every American foot soldier at the Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia. Interlocking fire lanes, the military calls it. The target is constantly under fire from two sides, yet the assault team’s weapons are never pointed at confederates. Even if a shooter turns sharply to peg an escaping enemy, his squad mates are safe. From their initial positions, Eric and Dylan could sweep their gun barrels across a ninety-degree firing radius without endangering each other. Even if one shooter advanced more quickly, he would never violate his partner’s fire lane. It is both the safest and the most effective assault pattern of modern small-arms warfare.

This was the phase Eric and Dylan were savoring. It was also when they expected to die. They had little hope of witnessing Act III. Forty-five minutes after the initial blast, when the cops declared it was over, paramedics started loading amputees into ambulances, and reporters broadcast the horror to a riveted nation, Eric’s Honda and Dylan’s BMW would rip right through the camera crews and the first responders. Each car was to be loaded with two more propane devices and twenty gallons of gasoline in an assortment of orange plastic jugs. Their positions had been chosen to maximize both the firepower in Act II and the carnage in Act III. The cars would be close to the building, near the main exits—ideal locations for police command, emergency medical staging, and news vans. They would be just far enough from the building and each other to wipe out most of the junior and senior parking lots. Maximum body count: nearly 2,000 students, plus 150 faculty and staff, plus who knows how many police, paramedics, and journalists.

Eric and Dylan had been considering a killing spree for at least a year and a half. They had settled on the approximate time and location a year out: April, in the commons. They finalized details as Judgment Day approached: Monday, April 19. The date appeared firm. The boys referred to it twice matter-of-factly in the recordings they made in the last ten days. They did not explain the choice, though Eric discussed topping Oklahoma City, so they may have been planning to echo that anniversary, as Tim McVeigh had done with Waco.

The moment of attack was critical. Students liked to eat early, so “A” lunch was the most popular. The maximum human density anywhere, anytime in the high school occurred in the commons at 11:17. Eric knew the exact minute because he had inventoried his targets. He’d counted just 60 to 80 kids scattered about the commons from 10:30 to 10:50. Between 10:56 and 10:58, “lunch ladies bring out shit,” he wrote. Then lunch door 2 opened, and a “steady trickle of people” appeared. He recorded the exact moment each door opened, and body counts in minute-by-minute increments. At 11:10, the bell rang, fourth period ended, students piled into the hallways. Moments later, they rushed the lunch lines, fifty more every minute: 300, 350, 400, 450, 500-plus by 11:15. Eric and Dylan’s various handwritten timelines show the bombs scheduled to explode between 11:16 and 11:18. The final times are followed by little quips: “Have fun!” and “HA HA HA.”

Eric and Dylan expected their attack to puzzle the public, so they left an extraordinary cache of material to explain themselves. They kept schedules, budgets, maps, drawings, and all sorts of logistical artifacts, along with commentary in notebooks, journals, and Web sites. A series of videos were specifically designed to explain their attack. They would come to be known as the Basement Tapes, because the bulk were shot in Eric’s basement. Even more illuminating was Eric’s twenty-page journal devoted to his thinking. Both chronicles are revealing, but also maddeningly contradictory. They were so disturbing that the sheriff’s department would choose to hide them from the public, concealing even the existence of the Basement Tapes for months. Eric and Dylan’s true intentions would remain a mystery for years.

The date was the first element of Eric’s plan to fail—-apparently because of ammo. On Monday, he had nearly seven hundred rounds for the four guns. He wanted more. He had just turned eighteen, so he could buy his own, but that fact somehow escaped him. He was used to relying on others, and he thought Mark Manes could help. Manes was a drug dealer who ran some guns and ammo on the side. He had come through with the TEC-9 in January, but he was dragging ass on the ammo. Thursday night, Eric began hounding him to come up with the stuff. Four days later, Eric remained empty-handed.

They could have gone ahead without the extra ammo, but their fire-power would have been impaired. Shotguns are not built for rapid-fire assault. The TEC-9 took twenty-and thirty-round magazines. Dylan could release one with the flick of a button and pop in a new mag with a single sweep of the hand. Real gun aficionados hate the thing. It’s too big and bulky for a professional and way too unreliable—a poor man’s Uzi. Dealers complain of slapdash design, frequent misfeeds, and a lousy sighting mechanism that is often misaligned and can’t be adjusted. “Cheap construction and marginal reliability,” says a major Russian gun dealer’s Web site. But it was available.

Eric and Dylan had a mostly uneventful Monday. They got up before sunrise to make bowling class by 6:00 A.M. They cut fourth hour for an extended lunch at Blackjack, and attended their other classes as usual. That evening, Manes suddenly came through with the ammo. He’d gotten it at Kmart: two boxes, with fifty rounds apiece. Together, they cost twenty-five bucks.

Eric drove to Manes’s house to pick up the ammo. He seemed eager to get it. Manes asked if Eric was going shooting that night.

Maybe tomorrow, Eric said.

9. Dads

Dave Sanders had never talked about regret before. Not to Frank DeAngelis. They talked every day, they had been close for twenty years, but they had never gone there.

It came up unexpectedly, on Monday afternoon. Frank strolled out to the baseball diamond to watch his boys take on archrival Chatfield. He had coached the team before he went into administration, alongside his old friend Dave Sanders. And there at the top of the bleachers was Dave watching right now. He had a couple hours to kill until his girls arrived for basketball practice. The season was over, but they were working fundamentals for next year. Dave could have spent the time grading papers, but it was hard to fight the lure of the field.

Mr. D said hi to the kids excited to see him there, then sat down next to Dave. They talked for two hours. They talked about everything. Their entire lives. Coaching, of course. The first time they met, when Frank arrived at Columbine in 1979. He was one of the shortest teachers on the faculty and the principal recruited him to coach basketball. “They needed a freshman coach, and I was on a one-year contract,” Frank said. “The principal said, ‘Frank, if you do me this one favor, I owe you one.’ And what am I gonna say? ‘I’ll do whatever you want, sir.’ So I coached basketball.”

The conversation was lighthearted for a long time, Dave cutting up as usual. Then he turned serious. “Do you miss coaching?” he asked.

“Not really.” Frank’s answer sort of surprised Dave. Coaching was his life, Frank explained, but he had never really left it. He’d just expanded his audience.

“You think so?” Dave wondered.

Oh, yeah, Frank said. You can’t really teach a kid anything: you can only show him the way and motivate him to learn it himself. Same thing applies to shortstops turning the double play and students grasping the separation of powers in the U.S. government. It’s all the same job. Now he had to coach teachers, too, to inspire their own kids to learn.

“What about you?” Frank asked. “Any regrets?”

“Yeah. Too much coaching.”

They shared a good laugh.

Seriously, though, Dave said. His family had come second to coaching. God. His family came second.

Frank suppressed another laugh. His own son, Brian, was nineteen. Frank was confident he had been a good dad, but never enough of one. It had rankled his wife since day one, and recently she had laid into him about it: “When are you going to stop raising everybody else’s kids and start raising your own?”

That stung. It was a little hard to share, but this seemed like the moment, and Dave seemed like the guy. Dave understood. It was bittersweet for both of them. They had reached middle age blissfully. They wouldn’t change a moment for their own sake—but had they shortchanged their kids? Frank’s son was grown now, and Dave’s daughters were, too. Too late. But they were still young women, and Dave had five grandkids and was hoping for more. Dave had not told the other coaches he was cutting back yet. He had not announced his decision to take off the first summer in memory. He confided it all to Frank now.

What an amazing guy, Frank thought. He thought about hugging Dave. He did not.

The game was still going, but Dave got up. “My girls are waiting for me,” he said. “I have open gym.”

Frank watched him walk slowly away.

Coach Sanders had something else on his mind. He had held his first team meeting last Friday, and his new team captain, Liz Carlston, had failed to show. He expected to see her tonight. It was going to be a tense conversation, and it wasn’t going to be just her.

Sanders sat all the girls down on the court. They talked a lot about dedication. How was it going to look to the freshmen if the team leaders mouthed the words, then failed to show up? He expected a one hundred percent commitment. Every practice, every meeting, or you’re out.

He told them to scrimmage. He let them keep at it the entire evening. He sat on a folding chair watching, analyzing, preparing.

At the end of the night, Liz tried to summon the courage to talk to him. She had just blanked on the meeting; she hadn’t meant anything by it. She felt guilt and fear and anger. He wouldn’t actually cut her, would he? Why hadn’t he given her a chance to explain?

She stopped at the baseline to change her shoes. Coach Sanders was right there. She should talk to him.

She walked out quietly. She didn’t even say good-bye.

Linda Lou was asleep when Dave got home that night. He kissed her softly. She woke up and smiled.

Dave was holding a wad of cash—a thick stash, seventy singles. He flung them toward her and they fluttered down onto the comforter. She got excited. She loved his little surprises, but she wasn’t sure what this was about. He went with it for a minute, got her hopes up, and then said she was silly: it was for her mom. Linda’s mom was turning seventy on April 20. She liked to gamble. She would like that.

Dave was all laughs that might with Linda. She was shocked when she learned later how tense his evening had been.

“That’s how the man could change,” she said. “Walk through our door and he was done with basketball. Now he was thinking of my mom.”

He went down to fix himself a Diet Coke and rum. He found a game. Linda fell back asleep with a smile.

Morning was less pleasant. The alarm buzzed at 6:30. Linda and Dave were both in a rush. Linda had to pick up balloons for her mom’s birthday party, and Dave had to drop Linda’s poodle off for a haircut.

Dave had no time for breakfast. He snagged an energy bar and a banana for the car. It was trash day— his job, but he was going to be late. He asked Linda if she would do it.

She was too stressed. “I really don’t have time today.”

“I’m really going to be late,” he muttered.

They rushed out to separate cars and realized they had forgotten to kiss good-bye. They always kissed good-bye.

Dave blew her a kiss from the driveway.

10. Judgment

On Tuesday morning, the boys rose early, as usual. It was dark but warm already, set to soar into the eighties, with blue skies, perfect for their fires. It was going to be a beautiful day.

Dylan was out of the house by 5:30. His parents were still in bed. He called out “Bye,” and shut the door behind himself.

They skipped bowling class and went straight to work. Dylan scrawled the schedule into Eric’s day planner under the heading “make TODAY count.” Eric illustrated it with a blazing gun barrel.

First stop was the grocery store, where they met up to acquire the last of the propane tanks: two for the cafeteria, two for each car, and two for the decoy. The big bombs were the heart of the attack. Eric had designed them months before but had left acquisition to the final morning. The boys had stashed most of the arsenal in Eric’s bedroom closet, and he had faced a couple of close calls with his parents already. Hiding a cluster of twenty-pound tanks in there was out of the question.

They returned to Eric’s house at 7:00 and then split up: Eric filled the propane tanks, Dylan got the gasoline. They allotted half an hour to assemble the big bombs and set up the cars, and an hour for one last round of gear-up, practice, and “chill.” They got something to eat. Dylan apparently had potato skins.

Several friends noticed peculiarities. Robyn Anderson was surprised to see Dylan a no-show for calculus. He had sounded fine on the phone the previous night. Then a friend told her Eric had been missing from third hour. The boys cut an occasional class together, but never an entire morning. Robyn hoped Dylan wasn’t sick; she made a mental note to call once she got home.

Their friend Brooks Brown had a stronger reaction. Eric had missed a test in psychology class. What kind of stunt was that?

Chill time was over. It had gone on too long, perilously over schedule. Shortly before 11:00 A.M., Eric and Dylan set off with the arsenal. Dylan wore cargo pants, a black T-shirt printed with WRATH, and his Red Sox cap turned backward, as usual. His cargo pockets were deep enough to conceal most of the sawed-off shotgun before he pulled on the duster. Eric’s T-shirt said natural selection. They both wore black combat boots and shared a single pair of black gloves—the right on Eric, the left on Dylan. They left two pipe bombs behind at Eric’s house, six at Dylan’s. Eric laid a microcassette on the kitchen counter with some final thoughts. They also left the Basement Tapes, with a final good-bye recorded that morning.

They drove separate cars to a park near Eric’s house, dumped the decoy bomb in a field, and set the timers for 11:14. Combat operations were under way.

They hopped back in their cars and headed for the school. They had to hustle now. The last few minutes were critical. They couldn’t plant the big bombs until “A” lunch began. Fourth period ended at 11:10. Once the bell rang, they had seven minutes to carry the bombs in, navigate the turbulent lunch crowd, stash the bombs by the designated pillars, get back to their cars, gear up, take cover, and prepare to attack.

Eric pulled into the parking lot at 11:10, several minutes behind schedule. A couple of girls spotted his car as they headed out for lunch. They honked and waved. They liked him. Eric waved back and smiled. Dylan followed him in. No waves.

Dylan drove to his normal spot in the senior lot and parked his BMW directly in front of the cafeteria. When the attack began, this would afford him a clear sweep of the southwest side of the building: the long, wide arc of green-tinted windows that wrapped the commons on the first floor and the library above.

Eric continued on to the small junior lot, about a hundred yards to Dylan’s right. Eric had the choice spot, directly facing the student entrance, where the bulk of the survivors would presumably flee. He could also cover the full southeast side of the building and interlock his fire with Dylan’s to his left.

Brooks Brown walked out for a cigarette and spotted Eric parking in the wrong lot. Brooks charged up to confront him about the test; by the time he got there, Eric had stepped out and was pulling out a big hulking duffel bag.

“What’s the matter with you?” Brooks yelled. “We had a test in psychology!”

Eric was calm but insistent. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “Brooks, I like you now. Get out of here. Go home.”

Brooks thought that was strange. But he shook his head and walked on, away from the school.

Eric’s friend Nate Dykeman also caught sight of him arriving, and also found the circumstances strange.

Eric headed in with his duffel. By 11:12, they were scheduled to be back at their cars, arming up. A surveillance tape time-stamped 11:14 indicates they had still not entered the commons. They had less than three minutes—the timers were set for 11:17. There was only a modest chance that they could make it to safety in time. And they could hardly have hoped to be locked and loaded when the bombs blew.

They could have reset the timers and sacrificed a few casualties. That would have required coordination, as they had parked across the lot from each other and it would be risky to expose the bombs inside the cafeteria. They could have abandoned the plan, but the decoy bombs might already be exploding.

Shortly after 11:14, they entered the commons. They moved inconspicuously enough to go unnoticed. Not one of the five hundred witnesses noticed them or the big, bulky bags. One of the bags would be found inches from two tables strewn with food.

They made it out, and armed quickly. It was just like the drill, except this time each was alone—close enough for hand signals, too far to hear. They strapped on their arsenals, covered them with the dusters. Time was tight and they broke with their drill, leaving the shotguns in the duffel bags. Each boy had a semiautomatic against his body, a shotgun in his bag, and a backpack full of pipe bombs and crickets. This is probably the moment they set the timers on their car bombs. It would just be a matter of seconds now. Hundreds of kids dead. As far as they knew, they had instigated mass murder already. The timers were winding down. Nothing to do but wait.

Surveillance cameras should have caught the killers placing the bombs. They would have, if either the bombers or the custodian had been on time. Every morning, the custodian followed the same routine: a few minutes before “A” lunch, he pulled out the prelunch tape and set it aside for later viewing. He popped an old, used tape into the machine, rewound it, and hit Record. Rewinding took up to five minutes, meaning a brief pause in taping. Kids could leave all the garbage they wanted during that window, but hardly anyone was around to do so.

The custodian was running late on Tuesday. He hit the stop button at 11:14, and no bombs were visible; neither was Eric or Dylan. While waiting out the rewind, the custodian got a phone call. He talked, and the tape sat a little longer. He got the new tape in and hit Record at 11:22, leaving an eight-minute gap. The first frame shows the bombs visible and students near the windows beginning to react. Something peculiar outside has caught their attention.

Columbine ran on a bell schedule, and most of its inhabitants followed a strict routine. Several of them had broken it Tuesday morning. Patrick Ireland, the junior afraid to ask Laura to the prom, liked variety. Some days he spent “A” lunch in the library, others in the cafeteria. He had stayed up late talking to Laura on the phone again, and still had to finish his stats homework. So he headed to the library with four of his buddies as Eric and Dylan positioned the duffel bags. Patrick sat down at a table just above one of the bombs.

Cassie Bernall, the Evangelical junior who had transferred to Columbine to enlighten nonbelievers, pulled up a chair near the window. It was unusual to find her in the library at this hour. She was also behind on her homework, trying to complete an English assignment on Macbeth. But she was happy she had finished the presentation she would be making to her youth group that night.

Mr. D was oddly absent from the cafeteria. His secretary had booked an interview, delaying his rounds. He sat in his office at the opposite end of the main corridor, waiting for a young teacher to arrive. Mr. D. was about to offer him a permanent position.

Deputy Neil Gardner, the community resource officer, worked for the sheriff’s department but was assigned full-time to Columbine. He normally ate with the kids, and “A” lunch was his optimal chance for bonding, a key element of his job. He wore the same security uniform with the bright yellow shirt every day, so he was easy to spot. Tuesday, Gardner took a break from his normal routine. He didn’t care for the teriyaki on the menu, so he went for takeout from Subway with his campus boss— an unarmed civilian security guard. It was a beautiful day, lots of kids were outside, so they decided to check out the smokers. They ate their sandwiches in Gardner’s squad car, in the faculty lot beside the smokers’ pit on the opposite side of the school.

Robyn Anderson sat in her car nearby. She had driven out of the senior lot just about the time Eric and Dylan were hauling the bombs in, but had missed them. She’d swung around the building to pick up two friends. She got antsy—lunchtime was slipping away. Five minutes passed, maybe ten. Finally, the girls appeared. Robyn snarled at them, and they drove off. On the opposite end of the school, shots had already been fired.

A freshman named Danny Rohrbough went to the commons to meet up with two buddies. After a few minutes, they decided to head out for a smoke. If the bombs had worked, that choice might have saved him. He might have gotten out just in time. They headed out a side exit at the worst moment, directly alongside the senior parking lot.

The bombers spent a minute or two by their cars. They knew the diversionary bomb should have already blown three miles to the south. In fact, it had fizzled. A surveyor working in the area had moved it, and then the pipe bombs and one of the spray cans had detonated, producing a loud bang and a grass fire. But the propane tanks—the main explosive force—lay undisturbed in the burning field. The decoy was Eric’s only big bomb to ignite at all, but one of his dumber ideas. Officials learned of it just as the shooting started, four minutes before the first call from the school. The chief effect was to alert authorities that something was amiss in the area. Nothing of consequence was diverted.

Eric and Dylan had to proceed on faith.

As far as Eric and Dylan knew, cops were already speeding south. They would see the commons disintegrate, though. Each car was positioned for a perfect view. The cafeteria would explode in front of them; they would watch their classmates be torn apart and incinerated, and their high school burning to the ground.

11. Female Down

At 11:18, the school stood intact. Some kids had already made it through the lunch lines and were strolling outside, settling onto the lawn for a little picnic. No sign of disturbance. The timing devices were not precise. No digital readouts with seconds counting down in red numerals; they were old-fashioned clocks with a third little alarm hand positioned two-fifths of the way between the 3 and the 4. But they should have blown by now.

Hundreds of targets streamed out the student entrance. They hopped into their cars and zipped away. Time for Plan B. There was no Plan B. Eric had staggering confidence in himself. He left no indication that he planned for contingencies. Dylan left no indication that he planned much of anything.

They could just proceed to Act II: mow the departers down in a cross fire and advance on the exits as scripted. They still could have topped McVeigh. But they didn’t. The bomb failure appears to have rattled one of the boys.

No one observed what happened next. Either boy might have panicked, but Eric was unflappable, the reverse of his partner. The physical evidence also points to Dylan. Eric apparently acted swiftly to retrieve his emotional young partner.

We don’t know whether they employed their hand signals, or how they came together. We know that Eric was in the prime location yet abandoned it to come to Dylan’s. And Eric moved quickly. Within two minutes, Eric had figured out that the bombs had failed, grabbed his packs, crossed the lot to Dylan’s car, rushed with him to the building, and climbed the external stairs to the west exit. That’s the first place they were observed, at 11:19.

Their new position set them on the highest point on campus, where they could survey both lots and all the exits on that side of the building. But it took them away from their primary target: the student entrance, still disgorging students. They could no longer triangulate or advance aggressively without separating.

At 11:19 they opened the duffel bags at the top of the stairs, pulled out the shotguns, and strapped them to their bodies. They locked and loaded the semiautomatics. One of them yelled, “Go! Go!” Somebody, almost certainly Eric, opened fire.

Eric wheeled around and shot at anyone he could see. Dylan cheered him on. He rarely fired. They hit pedestrians among the trees, picnickers to the south, kids coming up the stairs to the east. They tossed pipe bombs down the stairs, into the grass, and onto the roof. And they shared a whole lot of hoots and howls and hearty laughs. What a freaking wild time.

Rachel Scott and her friend Richard Castaldo were the first down. They had been eating their lunch in the grass. Eric shot Richard in the arms and torso. He hit Rachel in the chest and head. Rachel died instantly. Richard played dead. Eric fell for it.

Danny and his smoking buddies Lance Kirklin and Sean Graves were headed up the dirt path toward the stairs. They saw the gunmen firing, but assumed it was a paintball game or a senior prank. It looked like fun. They rushed straight toward the shooters, to get closer to the action. Danny got out ahead, making it halfway up the stairs. Eric pivoted and fired his carbine rifle. A shot tore through Danny’s left knee: in the front and out the back. He stumbled and began to fall. Eric fired again and again. As Danny collapsed, he took a second bullet to the chest, and a third to the abdomen. The upper round went straight through him as well, causing severe trauma to his heart. It stopped pumping immediately. The third shot lacerated his liver and stomach, causing major organ damage and lodging inside.

Lance tried to catch Danny, but realized he had been hit, too, multiple times, in the chest, leg, knee, and foot.

Danny’s face hit the concrete sidewalk. Death was almost instantaneous.

Lance went down on the grass. He blacked out, but continued to breathe.

Sean burst out laughing. He was sure it was paintball. They were part of the game now.

Sean felt a shot zip by his neck. It left a cool breeze in its wake. He felt a couple of pricks, like an IV needle being pulled out. He did not realize he had been shot. He looked around. Both his friends were down. Pain signals reached Sean’s brain. It felt like someone had kicked him in the back. He ran back for the door they had come out. He nearly made it. But the pain overcame him, his legs gave out, and he collapsed. He couldn’t feel his legs anymore. He could not understand what had happened. He seemed to have been shot by a tranquilizer gun.

Eric turned again and spotted five kids under a clump of pines in the grass. He fired, and the kids took off running. One fell. He played dead, too. Another took a hit but kept on running. The last three got away clean.

The shooters kept moving. Lance regained consciousness. He felt someone hovering above him. He reached up toward the guy, tugged on his pant leg, and cried for help.

“Sure, I’ll help,” the gunman said.

The wait seemed like forever to Lance. He described the next event as a sonic blast that twisted his face apart. He watched chunks of it fly away. Breaths came rapidly: air in, blood out. He faded out again.

Dylan made his way down the hill, toward Sean. Several people in the cafeteria saw him coming. Someone ran out, grabbed Sean, and started dragging him in. An adult stopped him. She said it was dangerous to move a seriously injured person. Sean ended up propped in the entrance, with the door pressed against him. Someone tried to step over him on the way out, planted a foot into Sean’s back, and said, “Oh, sorry, dude.”

A janitor came by and reassured Sean. He held Sean’s hand, said he would stay with him, but he had to help kids escape first. He advised Sean to play dead. Sean did.

Dylan fell for it again, or pretended to. He stepped right over Sean’s crumpled body and walked inside.

A stampede was under way in there. The lunch crowd had panicked. Most took cover under tables; some ran for the stairs. Coach Sanders heard the commotion in the faculty lounge and ran toward the danger.

“I don’t think he even thought about it,” his daughter Angela said later. “His instinct was to save his kids.”

Dave burst into the commons and tried to take charge. Two custodians followed him to assist. Sanders directed students to get down. He rethought that pretty quickly and yelled, “Run!”

Sanders looked around. There were exits in three directions, but most of them looked bad. There was one plausible option: across the commons and up the wide concrete stairway to the second floor. No telling what was up there, but anything was better than this. Sanders led the way. He ran across the open room unprotected, waving his arms to get the kids’ attention and yelling for them to follow. The tables offered little true protection, but they felt a lot safer. It was scary out in the open. The kids trusted Coach Sanders, though.

A wave of students swelled behind Sanders. Most of the 488 people in the commons followed him toward the stairs. He bolted to the top and spun around to direct traffic. To the left! To the left! He sent them all down the corridor toward the east exit, away from the senior parking lot.

“The whole time he was just saving people,” a student said. “He took me and just pushed me into a room.”

Some students stopped to warn others; some just ran. Someone ran into the choir room and yelled, “There’s a gun!”

Half the kids took cover; the other half fled. A few doors down, in Science Room 3, students were immersed in a chemistry test. They heard something like rocks being thrown against the windows, but the teacher assumed it was a prank. Stay seated and concentrate on your test, he said.

Dave Sanders stayed behind until every kid had passed. The tail end of the mob was just pushing its way to the stairs as Dylan stepped inside the cafeteria.

There were twenty-four steps. About a hundred kids were caught on the staircase, racing for cover on the second floor. They were wedged between each other and the steel railings. Nowhere to take cover. They were arrayed at different heights for easy access. Crouching was not an option—anyone attempting to stop would get trampled. The cafeteria was roughly one hundred feet wide. Dylan was in easy firing range. One or two pipe bombs or one burst from his TEC-9 would have halted the entire advance. Dylan took a few steps in, lifted his weapon up to firing position.

This was the second time since setting the timers that Dylan separated from Eric. For the second time, Dylan appeared to lose his nerve. He swept his rifle in an arc across the room. He watched the students disappear up the stairs. He did not fire. He had only engaged his weapon a few times. Dylan looked around, then turned and stepped back over Sean in the doorway. The heavy door whacked Sean hard again in its grip. Dylan rejoined Eric at the top of the stairs.

It’s not clear why Dylan made his cafeteria excursion. Many have speculated that he came down to see what went wrong with the bombs. But he never went near them. He made no attempt at detonation. It’s more likely that Eric sent him in to check for opportunities and rev up the body count.

Dylan did nothing on his own, but Eric amused himself heartily at the top of the stairs, shooting, laughing, and hurling pipe bombs. He spotted a junior named Anne Marie Hochhalter getting up from the curb to make a run for it. Eric hit her with a 9mm round. She kept running, and he hit her again. This time she went down. A friend picked her up, dragged her to the building, and got her out of Eric’s sight. Then he let go of her and ran. He ducked behind a car in the senior lot, and a pipe bomb exploded where Anne Marie had first collapsed.

“This is awesome!” one of the killers yelled.

By the time Dylan rejoined Eric, they had used up all the easy targets. Everybody caught outside had run like crazy or hidden. One last pack was still in the open. These students had fled across the senior lot, climbed over the chain-link fence, and were racing across the soccer field near the base of Rebel Hill. Eric had a go at them. They were too far. Not out of range, just too hard to hit. Dylan fired at the distant targets, too, bringing his total shot count up to five. It was 11:23. The killers had enjoyed four heady minutes.

Deputy Gardner was the first officer alerted. The custodian radioed Gardner as soon as he started the new surveillance tape and caught sight of kids near the windows. The custodian sounded scared. The first 911 call came through to Jeffco at the same time. A girl was injured in the senior parking lot. “I think she’s paralyzed,” the caller said. The dispatch hit the police band at 11:23, just as Gardner drove around the building to the commons and Dylan rejoined Eric at the top of the stairs. “Female down,” the dispatcher said.

Gardner saw smoke rising and kids running. He heard gunshots and explosions and a flurry of dispatches on his radio. He couldn’t quite tell where the commotion was coming from.

Four minutes into the mayhem, much of the student body was oblivious. Hundreds were running for their lives, but more sat quietly in class. Many heard the commotion; few sensed any danger. Most found it annoying. The chaos and the solitude went on side by side, often only yards apart. As Dave Sanders ushered kids to the commons staircase, part-time art teacher Patti Nielson paced above him on hall-monitor duty. Sanders herded the lunch crowd up the stairwell toward her, but then down a parallel hallway. Nearly five hundred kids charged the length of the building. Nielson never saw or heard them. She heard the racket outside, though. Some kids ran up saying they heard gunfire. Nielson was annoyed. It was a prank, obviously, or a video shoot. It had gone on far too long. She looked down the corridor to the west exit. Through the large glass panes in the doors she could see a boy with his back to her. He had a gun. He was firing it into the senior lot. She assumed it was a prop, a loud one, and totally inappropriate. Nielson stormed down the hallway to tell him to knock it off. A junior named Brian tagged along to watch.

They approached the exit just as the shooters ran out of targets. There were two sets of doors there, separated by an air lock. Nielson and Brian passed the first set and reached for the second handles. Eric spotted them. He turned, raised the rifle to his shoulder, aimed at Nielson, and smiled. Then he fired. The glass shattered, but the bullet missed. Nielson still thought it was a BB gun. Then she saw the size of the hole.

“Dear God!” she screamed. “Dear God! Dear God!”

She turned to run. He fired again. Another miss, but glass and metal shards and possibly a grazing bullet tore through the back of her shoulder. It burned. Brian had turned, too. Nielson heard him grunt, saw him lurch forward. His back arched, his arms flared, and he hit the floor hard. That looked bad, but he got right up onto his hands and knees to scurry back through the first doors. It was shrapnel, just like hers.

She got down, too, and they crawled the short distance back to the first doors. They got one partially open and squeezed through. Once they had that door behind them, they rose to their feet and ran.

Nielson was desperate for a phone. The library seemed like an obvious destination. It was just around the corner, spanning most of the south hallway, behind a glass wall. Nielson saw dozens of kids milling about inside, plainly visible to the shooters she pictured on her heels. She never looked back to see.

Nielson ran into the library to warn them. “There’s a kid with a gun!” she yelled.

There were no adults. That surprised Nielson. Teacher Rich Long had rushed in moments before, yelled at everyone to get out, and then fled to warn others. Patti Nielson had the opposite instinct. She ordered them down.

Then Nielson grabbed the phone behind the counter and punched in 9-911. She concentrated on details, like the extra 9 for an outside line. Don’t waste a second!

Nielson expected the shooter to arrive any moment now. But Eric was not following. He had been distracted. Deputy Gardner had pulled into the lot with lights flashing and siren blaring. Gardner had stepped out of his car, still confused about what he was walking into.

Eric opened fire. He got off ten rounds, all misses. Dylan did nothing.

Gardner took cover behind his police car. Eric didn’t even hit that. Then his rifle jammed. Eric fought to clear the chamber. Dylan fled into the school.

Gardner saw his opening. He laid his pistol across the roof and squeezed off four shots. Eric spun around like he’d been hit. Neutralized, Gardner thought. What a relief.

Seconds later, Eric was firing again. It was a short burst; then he retreated inside.

It was 11:24. The outside ordeal lasted five minutes. Eric did most of the shooting. He fired his 9mm rifle forty-seven times in that period and did not use his shotgun. Dylan got just three shots off with the TEC-9 handgun and two with his shotgun.

They headed down the hallway toward the library.

Dave Sanders heard the shots when Eric fired on Patti Nielson. Coach Sanders ran toward the gunfire. He passed the library entrance just moments after Nielson ran in. He spotted the killers at the other end of the hallway. He wheeled around and ran for the corner.

A boy peeked out of the choir room just in time to see him flee. Sanders wasn’t just running for it, he was trying to clear students out of the line of fire. “Get down!” he yelled.

12. The Perimeter

The story took twenty-eight minutes to hit local television. The networks quickly followed. Something awful was happening at a high school near Denver. Coverage began with confused reports about a shooting in the outlying suburbs: no confirmation on injuries, but multiple shots—as many as nine—and possible explosions. Automatic weapons might be involved, possibly even grenades. A fire had been reported. SWAT teams were mobilizing.

CNN was locked in on Kosovo. NATO had gone to war over the genocide there. Night had just fallen in Belgrade, and American warplanes were massing on the horizon, about to pulverize fresh targets across the Serb capital. At 11:54 A.M. Denver time, CNN cut to Jeffco and stayed there nonstop, all afternoon. The broadcast networks began interrupting the soaps. Columbine quickly overshadowed the war. No one seemed to know what had actually happened. Was it still happening? Apparently. As the networks went live with the story, gunfire and explosions were erupting somewhere inside that school. Outside, it was mayhem: choppers circled, and police, firefighters, parents, and journalists had descended on the campus. Nobody was going inside. Fresh waves of support troops were arriving by the minute, but they just crowded around the building. Occasionally, students would scurry out.

Local stations kept surveying the area hospitals. “There are no patients yet,” a journalist reported from one. “But they are expecting one victim with an ankle wound.”

Jeffco 911 operators were overwhelmed. Hundreds of students were still inside the building. Many had cell phones and were calling with conflicting reports. Thousands of parents from all around the area were dialing the same center, demanding information. Many students gave up on 911 and called the TV stations. Local anchors began interviewing them live on the air, and the cable networks picked up their feeds.

Witnesses confirmed injuries. A girl said she watched “like three people” get shot.

“Did it look like they were shooting at specific people?” a reporter asked.

“They were just shooting. They were—they didn’t care who they shot at; they were just shooting and then they threw a grenade or they threw something that blew up.”

There seemed to be no end of “witnesses,” though most had seen chaos but no one causing it. A senior described the first moments of awareness: “OK, I was sitting in math class, and all of a sudden we look out and there’s people that are sprinting down the math hall and we open the door, we hear a shot, a loud bang, and then we hear some guy go ‘holy crap, there’s a guy with a gun!’ So everybody starts freaking out, one of my friends goes up to the door and says there’s a guy standing there. We evacuate to the corner of our classroom and my teacher just doesn’t know what to do because she’s so freaked.”

There appeared to be several shooters—all boys, all white, all Columbine students. Some were shooting in the parking lot, some in the cafeteria, some upstairs while roaming the halls. Somebody was positioned on the roof. Some of the assault team wore T-shirts; others advanced in long black trench coats. One pair included one of each. Some had hats, and one or two were hiding behind ski masks.

Some of this mix-up was standard crime-scene confusion. Contrary to popular conception, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially when witnesses were under duress. Memories get jumbled and witnesses imagine missing details without realizing they’re doing it. But much of this misunderstanding was due to specific factors. Eric discarded his trench coat at the top of the stairs almost as soon as he began shooting. Dylan kept his on until he got to the library. Each costume change created another shooter. The school’s location on a hill, with nearby entrances on both floors, allowed Eric and Dylan to be seen upstairs and downstairs almost simultaneously. The long-range weapons scattered gunfire over a shooting radius hundreds of yards wide. Distant witnesses had no idea where the shooters were; they only knew they were under attack. Some witnesses listened carefully and correctly located the source of the turbulence——but the bomb blasts often led them astray, particularly when bombs landed on the roof. Several kids were sure something was coming from up there. They spotted a frightened air-conditioner repairman and instantly identified him as the rooftop gunman.

Word whipped through the Columbine community. Kids called home on their cell phones the minute they got to safety—or someplace they hoped would remain safe. About five hundred students were off campus, either for lunch or sick or cutting class. Their first sign of a problem came when they hit police barricades as they tried to return. Cops were everywhere. More cops than they had ever seen.

Nate Dykeman was one of the kids heading back in. He was stunned by the stories he heard. Nate had gone home for lunch, same as he did every day. But on the way out, he had seen something peculiar: Eric walking into the building from the wrong parking lot at the wrong time. He should have been walking out. Eric and Dylan had both been missing that morning. They were up to something, obviously. Odd that they hadn’t included him, or called, at least. Maybe not Eric, he wasn’t the most thoughtful friend, but Dylan was. Dylan would have called.

There had been some weird shit going on between those two lately. Pipe bombs and guns. When Nate heard about the shooting, he got nervous. When someone mentioned the trench coats, that sealed it.

This isn’t happening, Nate thought. This can’t be happening.

He ran into his girlfriend, who was stopped at an intersection. She was also a good friend of Eric’s. She followed Nate home. Then Nate did the same thing nearly everyone was doing: he started dialing friends, checking in to make sure they were all safe. He wanted to call Dylan’s house, but that was just way too scary. Soon. He would call soon. He checked on some other friends first.

While Deputy Gardner was firing at Eric, he knew help was on the way. “Female down” at a high school unleashed a frenzy of police radio traffic. Jeffco issued a metro-wide mutual-aid request, prompting police officers, firefighters, and paramedics from around the city to begin racing toward the foothills. The police band got so congested so quickly that Gardner couldn’t alert dispatch that he’d arrived. After engaging Eric, Gardner got back in his car and radioed for backup. This time he got through. Gardner followed protocol and did not pursue Eric inside.

Deputy Paul Smoker was a motorcycle cop, writing a speeding ticket on the edge of Clement Park when the first dispatch came in. He radioed that he was responding and gunned his motorcycle into the grass. He tore through soccer fields and baseball diamonds and arrived at the north side of the building just moments after Gardner’s gunplay. He parked behind an equipment shed, where a bleeding boy had taken shelter. Another patrol car pulled up right behind him, then another. They all wound around the corner from Gardner, just out of sight. The boy told them he had been shot by “Ned Harris.” Nobody had any paper, so a deputy wrote the name on the hood of his patrol car.

They ran forward to help another bleeding student lying in the grass. As they approached, they passed into Deputy Gardner’s sight line, around the corner. It had been two minutes since Gardner’s gun battle with Eric, and he was out of his car with his pistol drawn. Smoker and Gardner spotted each other as Eric reappeared inside the west exit doorway.

“There he is!” Gardner yelled. He opened fire again.

Eric ducked back behind the door frame. He poked his rifle through the shattered pane and returned fire. A couple of students were on the move again, and Eric tried to nail them, too. Smoker could see where Gardner was firing, but the doorway was blocked from view. He maneuvered down to where he could see Eric and got off three shots. Eric retreated. Smoker heard gunfire inside. More students ran out of the building. He did not pursue.

Deputies continued arriving. They attended to the scared and wounded and struggled to determine what they were up against. Witnesses came to them. Kids saw their police cars at the top of the hill and came running. Some were bleeding. All were desperate. They lined up behind the cars and crouched near the officers for protection.

They provided lots of accurate information. Reports on the police radio conflicted wildly, but any one group in one location tended to offer remarkably consistent accounts. These kids described two gunmen in black trench coats shooting Uzis or shotguns and throwing hand grenades. At least one appeared to be high school age, and some victims knew them. Kids kept arriving. The cars were feeble protection, and the crowd was likely to draw attention. The deputies decided it was paramount to evacuate them. They directed some of the boys to tear their shirts into strips and treat one another’s wounds while they devised an escape plan. They decided to line several patrol cars up as a defensive wall and shuttle the students to safer ground behind them.

Every cop had been trained for events like this. Protocol called for containment. The deputies broke into watch teams. They could cover a handful of the twenty-five exits and protect those students who were already out. “Setting up a perimeter,” they called it. They would repeat the “perimeter” phrase endlessly that afternoon. Paramedics were establishing triage areas away from the school, and the deputies worked on getting the kids there. Cops would lay down suppressive fire to protect evacuations and scare off opportunistic attacks. They had no idea whether the gunmen were still present, or interested. The officers did not observe or engage the gunmen for some time.

Newly arriving officers covered additional exits. Gunfire was audible to the first officers and continued through the arrival of hundreds more. Deafening explosions kept erupting inside the school. The exterior walls along the cafeteria and the library rumbled from some of the blasts. Deputy Smoker could see the green windows buckling. Half a dozen students ran out the cafeteria doors after one shock wave. They made it to another deputy, who was guarding the south exits.

“Are we going to die?” one of the girls asked him. No. She asked again. No. She kept asking.

The deputy thought the shooters might flee the building, cross the field, and hop a chain-link fence separating the school grounds from the first subdivision.

“We didn’t know who the bad guy was, but we soon realized the sophistication of their weapons,” Deputy Smoker said later. “These were big bombs. Big guns. We didn’t have a clue who ‘they’ were. But they were hurting kids.”

When the networks went live around noon, hundreds of uniformed responders were present. Thirty-five law enforcement agencies were soon represented. They had gathered an assortment of vehicles, including a Loomis Fargo armored truck whose driver had been working in the area. One student counted thirty-five police cars speeding past him on his one-mile ride home from school: “Ambulances and police cars barging over medians and motorcycle cops weaving through opposite traffic almost killing themselves,” he said.

Half a dozen cops arrived every minute. Nobody seemed to be in charge. Some cops wanted to assault the building, but that was not the plan. Whose plan was this? Where had it come from?

They reinforced the perimeter.

Eric had exchanged fire with two deputies, at 11:24 and 11:26 A.M.—lfive and seven minutes into the attack. Law enforcement would not fire on the killers again or advance on the building until shortly after noon.

13. “1 Bleeding to Death”

Ribbons of yellow police tape marked the perimeter. No one was getting out of there; the issue became getting in. Onlookers, journalists, and parents were appearing as fast as policemen. They presented little threat to the deputies but significant danger to themselves. Misty Bernall was one of the early arrivals. She did not know that her daughter was in the library, or what that might portend. She only knew Cassie was missing, along with her freshman son, Chris.

Misty’s yard backed right up to the soccer field where Eric had fired on students, but she had arrived by a much more circuitous route. Misty was a working mom, so she was not present to hear Eric fire toward her house. But her husband, Brad, was. He had come home sick, heard a couple of pops, but thought nothing of them. Firecrackers, maybe some pranksters. He lived beside a high school. He was used to commotion. He didn’t even put his shoes on to have a look.

Half an hour later, Misty sat down to lunch with a coworker and got a disturbing call. It was probably nothing, but she called Brad to check. He put on his shoes. Brad went out back and peered over the fence. Bedlam. The schoolyard was swarming with cops.

Misty Bernall was a tall, attractive woman in her mid-forties with a loud voice and a commanding presence. She had full features and the same curly blond hair as Cassie, worn in a similar style, though shorter, just past her shoulders. She could be mistaken for a much older sister. Brad was taller, with dark hair, and handsome—a big guy with a soft voice and a humble demeanor. They shared an intense faith in the Lord, and they began begging Him to save their kids.

They could cover more ground apart. Misty headed for the high school. Brad hung by the phone.

At the perimeter, officers struggled to hold back the parental onslaught. TV anchors broadcast their entreaties: “As difficult as it may be, please stay away.” But fresh waves of moms and dads kept swarming over the hill.

Misty gave up. Two rendezvous points had been set up. Misty chose the public library on the other side of Clement Park. She found very few students. Where were they?

When they poured out of the high school, students had seen two main options: a subdivision across Pierce Street, or the wide-open fields of Clement Park. Hardly anyone chose the park. They crouched behind houses, worked themselves under shrubbery, rolled under cars. Any semblance of protection. Some pounded frantically on front doors, but most of the houses were locked. Stay-at-home moms started waving strangers in off the street. “Kids were piling into houses,” one student said. “There must have been a hundred fifty or two hundred kids piled into this house.”

The second rendezvous point, Leawood Elementary, sat in the heart of that neighborhood, so most of the survivors gravitated there. Parents were sent to the auditorium, where kids were paraded across the stage. Moms shrieked, hugs abounded, unclaimed kids sobbed quietly backstage. Because the kids were hard to keep in one place, sign-in sheets were posted on the walls, so parents could see evidence in their child’s own hand.

There was no parade of survivors at the public library. Misty was conflicted. Leaving for Leawood was risky: the roads had been closed, so everything was by foot now. She could easily miss her kids in transit. A local minister got up on a chair and shouted: “Please stay here!” The fax would arrive any minute, he assured them. They would be much better off waiting. The fax was a copy of the sign-in sheets from Leawood. Misty waited impatiently for its arrival.

The mood stayed tense but restrained. Commotion erupted in little bursts. “Paul’s OK!” a woman screamed. She held up her cell phone. “He’s at Leawood!” Her husband rushed over. They hugged, they wept. Tears were rare. It was too scary to cry in fear; only reunion allowed release. A clump of students would appear now and then over the hill. If they weren’t claimed immediately, a pack of moms would descend to interrogate them. Always the same question: “How did you get out?!”

They needed reassurance there was a way out.

“I didn’t know what to do,” a young girl said. “We heard guns and I was standing there and the teacher was crying and pointing to the auditorium and everybody was running and screaming and we heard an explosion—I guess that was a bomb or something. I didn’t see this but we were trying to find out and I guess they shot again and everyone started running and I was like, What is going on! They started shooting again and there was complete panic. People were shoving, they were going into the elevators and people would like push people off and we were all just running…”

Most of the stories sputtered out like that: disjointed flurries of re-created mayhem. The words ran together until the witness ran out of breath. A winsome freshman was different. She was still in her Columbine gym uniform, and recounted her escape dispassionately. She had faced the gunmen in the hall. She was pretty sure one had run right past her, shooting. But there was so much smoke and confusion, she wasn’t sure what was happening or where or anything. Bullets ricocheted down the corridor. Glass shattered, metal clattered, chunks of plaster crashed down on the floor.

Moms gasped. Someone asked if she’d feared for her life. “Not really,” she said. “Because the principal was with us.” She said it matter-of-factly, with earnest conviction. It was just the tone a younger girl might have used to explain that she felt safe with her daddy.

The stories were harrowing, but they reassured the moms. Every escape was different, but they ended the same: the kids escaped. The accumulation was soothing.

Misty questioned every kid. “Cassie!” she shouted. “Chris!” She worked her way across the crowd and back again. Nothing.

Command had fallen to the newly elected Jeffco sheriff, John Stone. He had not yet faced a murder case in office. The metro cops were horrified to discover that the county was in charge. Many were open with their disgust. City and even suburban officers thought of sheriff’s deputies as security guards. These were the guys who shuttled defendants to court from the jail. They stood guard while the real cops testified about the crimes they had responded to and investigated.

The grousing increased when they learned who was heading the command. John Stone looked the part of an Old West sheriff: a big, burly guy with a large potbelly and a thick gray mustache, weathered skin, and craggy eyes. He wore the uniform, the badge, and the pistol, but he was a politician. He had been a county supervisor for twelve years. He’d run for sheriff last November and had taken the oath in January. He’d appointed John Dunaway as his undersheriff. Another bureaucrat.

The sheriff and his team defended the perimeter. Gun blasts came and went. The SWAT teams seethed. When was somebody going to allow them to advance?

Dunaway named Lieutenant David Walcher incident commander. Operations would now be directed by a man who did police work for a living, with oversight from Dunaway and Sheriff Stone. The three set up a command post in a trailer stationed in Clement Park, half a mile north of the school.

Just after noon, a SWAT team made its first approach on the school. The officers commandeered a fire truck for cover. One man drove the truck slowly toward the building, while a dozen more moved alongside. Near the entrance, they split in half: six and six. Lieutenant Terry Manwaring’s team held back to lay down suppressive fire and later work its way to another entrance. At approximately 12:06, the other six charged inside. Additional SWAT team members arrived moments later and followed them.

The team thought they were in striking distance of the cafeteria. They were on the opposite end of the building. Lieutenant Manwaring had been inside Columbine many times, but he was unaware it had been remodeled and the cafeteria moved. He was perplexed.

The fire alarm had not been silenced. The men used hand signals. Every cupboard or broom closet had to be treated as a hot zone. Many doors were locked, so they blasted them open with rifle fire. Kids trapped in classrooms heard gunfire steadily approaching. Death appeared imminent. Parents, reporters, and even cops outside heard the shots and came to similar conclusions. One room at a time, the team worked methodically toward the killers. It would take three hours to reach their bodies.

On the west side, where the killers were active, a fire department team staged a riskier operation. Half a dozen bodies remained on or near the lawn outside the cafeteria. Several showed signs of life. Anne Marie, Lance, and Sean had been bleeding for forty minutes. Deputies along the perimeter moved in closer to provide cover while three paramedics and an EMT rushed in.

Eric appeared in the second-floor library window and fired on them. Two deputies shot back. Others laid down suppressive fire. The paramedics got three students out. Danny was pronounced dead and left behind.

Eric disappeared.

Lieutenant Manwaring’s half of the SWAT team had inched around outside the building using the fire truck for cover. They arrived at the opposite side half an hour later. They rescued Richard Castaldo from the lawn around 12:35, an hour and a quarter after he was shot. They made another approach to retrieve Rachel Scott. They brought her back as far as the fire truck. Then they determined she was dead, and aborted. They laid her there on the ground. Finally, they went for Danny Rohrbough, unaware of the prior finding. They left him on the sidewalk.

At 1:15, a second SWAT team charged the building from the senior lot, smashed a window in the teachers’ lounge, and vaulted in. The officers quickly entered the adjacent cafeteria but found it nearly deserted. Food was left half-eaten on the tables. Books, backpacks, and assorted garbage floated about the room, which had been flooded by the sprinkler system. Water was three to four inches high and rising. A fire had blackened ceiling tiles and melted down some chairs. They did not notice the duffel bags, held down by the weight of the bombs. One bag had burned away. The propane tank sat exposed, mostly above water, but it blended into the debris. Signs of panic were everywhere, but no injuries, no bodies, no blood.

There were lots of healthy people. The team was shocked to discover dozens of terrified students and staff. They were crouched in storage closets, up above the ceiling tiles, or plainly visible under cafeteria tables. One teacher had climbed into the ceiling and tried to crawl clear through the ductwork out to safety to warn police, but had fallen through and required medical care. Two men were shivering in the freezer, so cold they could barely lift their arms.

The SWAT team searched them and shuttled them out the window they came in. At first that was easy, but the farther they moved, the more officers they had to leave behind to secure the route. They brought in more manpower to assist.

Overhead, circling steadily, chopper blades beat out a steady thuch-thuch-thuch thuch-thuch-thuch.

Robyn Anderson watched it all from the parking lot. She had headed to Dairy Queen with her friends, zipped through the drive-thru, and circled back to school. There were a whole lot of cops when they got back. Officers were assembling the perimeter, but the entrance to the senior lot was still open. Robyn pulled into her space. A cop strode up with his gun drawn. Stay where you are, he warned. It was already too late to back out. Robyn and her friends would wait in her car for two and a half hours. Robyn ducked when she saw Eric appear in the library window. She couldn’t tell it was him; she was too far back. All she could make out was a guy in a white T-shirt firing a rifle in her general direction.

Who would do something like this? Robyn asked her girlfriends. Who would be this retarded?

Robyn looked over to her friends’ spaces. Eric, Dylan, and Zack had assigned spots, three in a row. Zack’s car was there. Eric’s and Dylan’s were missing.

Nate Dykeman was terrified of who might be responsible. He had called most of his close friends but had held off on Eric and Dylan. He had been hoping to hear from them. Hoping, but not really expecting. Dylan would break his heart. They had been tight for years. Nate spent a lot of time at his house, and Tom and Sue Klebold had looked after him. Nate had a lot of trouble at home, and the Klebolds had been like a second mom and dad.

Dylan did not call. Around noon, Nate dialed his house. Tom Klebold would be home—he worked from there. Hopefully Dylan was with him.

Tom picked up. No, Dylan was not there. He’s in school, Tom said.

Actually, no, he isn’t, Nate said. Dylan had not been in class. And Nate didn’t want to worry Tom, but there had been a shooting. There had been descriptions. The gunmen were in trench coats. Nate knew several kids with trench coats—he was trying to account for all of them. He hated breaking the news, but he had to say it. He thought Dylan was involved.

Tom went up to Dylan’s room, checked his closet for the coat. “Oh my God,” he said. “It’s not here.”

Tom was shocked, Nate said later. “I thought he was going to, like, drop the phone. He just could not believe that this could possibly be happening, and his son was involved.”

“Please keep me informed,” Tom told him. “Whatever you hear.”

Tom got off the phone. He turned on the TV. It was everywhere.

He called Sue. She came home. Tom called their older son. He and Sue had kicked Byron out for using drugs—they would not tolerate that behavior—but this was too important.

Tom apparently withheld his fears about Dylan. Byron told coworkers he was terrified his brother was trapped. He was also worried about younger friends still in school. “I’ve got to see if everybody’s OK,” he said.

Lots of Byron’s workmates were connected to the school. They all headed home.

Tom Klebold called 911 to warn them his son might be involved. He also called a lawyer.

The televised version of the disaster was running thirty minutes to an hour behind the cops’ view. Anchors dutifully repeated the perimeter concept. The cops had “sealed off the perimeter.” But what were all those troops doing, exactly? There were hundreds out there; everyone seemed to be milling about. Anchors started wondering aloud. Luckily, no one seemed to be seriously injured.

Around 12:30, the story took its first grisly turn. Local TV reporters gained access to the triage areas. It was awful. So much blood, it was hard to identify the injuries. Lots of kids had been loaded into ambulances; area hospitals were all on alert.

Half a dozen news choppers circled, but they withheld most of their footage. For a few minutes, stations had broadcast live from the air, but the sheriff’s team had demanded they stop. Every room in Columbine was equipped with a television. The gunmen might well be watching. Cameras would home in on the very images most useful to the killers: SWAT maneuvers and wounded kids awaiting rescue. TV stations also held back news of fatalities. Their chopper crews had seen paramedics examine Danny and leave him behind. The public remained unaware.

The stations also caught glimpses of a disturbing scene playing out in a second-story classroom in another wing of the building, far from the library, in Science Room 3. It was hard to make out exactly what was going on in there, but there was a lot of activity, and one disturbing clue. Someone had dragged a large white marker board to the window, with a message in huge block letters. The first character looked a lot like a capital I but turned out to be a numeral: “1 BLEEDING TO DEATH.”

14. Hostage Standoff

Around one P.M., word filtered out to reporters that kids were trapped in the building. The situation had escalated into a hostage standoff. Publicly, the nature of the attack changed. No telling what the assailants might try. Where were they? The captives seemed to be held in the commons, but reports conflicted.

Word of the ambulance scenes and the hostage standoff traveled quickly to Leawood and the public library. Parents grew tenser, but they worked together, exchanging information and passing around cell phones. It was tough to get a signal. Cell phones were not ubiquitous in 1999, yet everyone in this affluent community seemed to have one. They pounded at them furiously, grilling neighbors, updating relatives, leaving messages for their children on every conceivable answering machine. Some would hit Redial absentmindedly as they swapped information face-to-face, buzzing their own homes, praying that the machine wouldn’t pick up this time. Misty kept calling Brad. Still no word on Chris or Cassie.

Then a fresh story zipped through the pack: twenty students—or thirty or forty—were still inside the school. They were not hostages; they were hiding, barricaded in the choir room with equipment piled high against the door. The parents gasped. Was that good news or bad? Dozens more students were in danger, but dozens more confirmed alive—if it was true. A lot of wild rumors had already come and gone.

At least two to three hundred students were hiding in the school, in classrooms and utility closets, under tables and desks. Some had rigged up protection; others were right out in the open. Everyone was afraid to move. A great number whispered cautiously into cell phones. Many clustered around classroom TVs. They heard banging and crashing and the deafening screech of the fire alarm. CNN carried a live call between a local anchor and a student alone under a desk. What was he hearing? The same thing as you, the student said. “I’ve got a little TV [and I’m] watching you guys right now.” For four hours rumors, confirmations, and embellishments bounced in and out.

The cops were livid. Reporters had no idea hundreds of kids were trapped inside and no concept of the echo chamber in full bloom. The cops knew. The detective force was assembling teams to interview every survivor, and they knew hundreds of their best witnesses were still inside, getting compromised by the minute. But the cops had no means to stop it. This was the first major hostage standoff of the cell phone age, and they had never seen anything like it. At the moment, they were more concerned with information passing to the shooters. Sometimes the kids’ revelations scared reporters. On live TV, a boy described sounds he took to be the gunmen: “I hear stuff being thrown around,” he said. “I am staying underneath this desk. I don’t know if they know I’m up here. I am just staying upstairs for right now, and I just hope they don’t know—”

The anchorwoman interrupted: “Don’t tell us where you are!”

The boy described more commotion. “There’s a little bunch of people crying outside. I can hear them downstairs.” Something crashed. “Whoa!”

The anchor gasped. “What was that?!”

“I don’t know.”

The anchors had enough. Her partner told him to hang up, keep quiet, and try to reach 911. “Keep trying to call them, OK?”

The cops pleaded with the TV stations to stop. Please ask the hostages to quit calling the media, they said. Tell them to turn off the televisions.

The stations aired the requests and continued broadcasting the calls. “If you’re watching, kids, turn the TV off,” one anchor implored. “Or down, at least.”

Much of the country was watching the standoff unfold. None of the earlier school shootings had been televised; few American tragedies had. The Columbine situation played out slowly, with the cameras rolling. Or at least it appeared that way: the cameras offered the illusion we were witnessing the event. But the cameras had arrived too late. Eric and Dylan had retreated inside after five minutes. The cameras missed the outside murders and could not follow Eric and Dylan inside. The fundamental experience for most of America was almost witnessing mass murder. It was the panic and frustration of not knowing, the mounting terror of horror withheld, just out of view. We would learn the truth about Columbine, but we would not learn it today.

We saw fragments. What the cameras showed us was misleading. An army of police held at bay suggested an equivalent force inside. Hysterical witnesses corroborated that image, describing wildly different assaults. Killers seemed to be everywhere. Cell phone callers confirmed the killers remained active. They provided unimpeachable evidence of gunfire from inside the attack zone. The data was correct; the conclusions were wrong. SWAT teams were on the move.

The narrative unfolding on television looked nothing like the killers’ plan. It looked only moderately like what was actually occurring. It would take months for investigators to piece together what had gone on inside. Motive would take longer to unravel. It would be years before the detective team would explain why.

The public couldn’t wait that long. The media was not about to. They speculated.

15. First Assumption

An investigative team had assembled before noon. Kate Battan (rhymes with Latin) was named lead investigator. Battan already knew who her primary suspects were. Most of the students were perplexed about who was attacking them, but quite a few had recognized the gunmen. Two names had been repeated over and over. Battan quickly compiled dossiers on Eric and Dylan in the command post trailer in Clement Park. She dispatched teams to secure their homes. Detectives arrived at the Harris place at 1:15, just as the third SWAT team burst into the Columbine teachers’ lounge. Eric’s parents had gotten word and were already home. The cops found them uncooperative. They tried to refuse entrance. The cops insisted. Kathy Harris got scared when they headed for the basement. “I don’t want you going down there!” she said. They said they were securing the residence and removing everyone. Wayne said he doubted Eric was involved, but would help if there was an active situation. Kathy’s twin sister was with her. Wayne and Kathy were concerned about the repercussions, she explained; parents of the victims might retaliate.

The cops smelled gas; they had the utility company shut off power, then resumed the search. In Eric’s room they found a sawed-off shotgun barrel on a bookshelf, unspent ammunition on the bed, fingertips cut off gloves on the floor, and fireworks and bomb materials on the desk, the dresser, the windowsill, and the wall, among other places. Elsewhere they discovered a page from The Anarchist Cookbook, packaging for a new gas can, and scattered glass shards on a slab in the backyard. An evidence specialist arrived that night and spent four hours, shooting seven rolls of film. He left at 1:00 A.M.

The Klebolds were much more forthcoming. A police report described Tom as “very communicative.” He gave a full account of Dylan’s past and laid out all his friendships. Dylan had been in good spirits, Tom said. Sue described him as extremely happy. Tom was anti-gun and Dylan agreed with him on that—they wouldn’t find any guns or explosives in the house, that was for sure, Tom said. The cops did find pipe bombs. Tom was shocked. Dylan was fine, he insisted. He and Dylan were close. He would have known it if anything was up.

The first FBI agent on the scene at Columbine was Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier. He had shaken the Cajun accent, on everything but his name. FUSE-uh-lay, he said. Everyone got it wrong. He was a veteran agent, a clinical psychologist, a terrorism expert, and one of the leading hostage negotiators in the country. None of that led Dr. Fuselier to Columbine High. His wife had called. Their son was in the school.

Fuselier got the call in the cafeteria of Denver’s Rogers Federal Building, a downtown high-rise thirty minutes away. He was sipping a bowl of bland soup—-lowsalt, for his hypertension. The bowl stayed on the table. When he got to his Dodge Intrepid, Fuselier swiped his arm under the seat, groping for the portable police light. He hadn’t pulled it out in years.

Fuselier headed toward the foothills. He would offer his services as a hostage negotiator, or anything else they might need. He wasn’t sure how his offer would be received.

Cops in crisis tend to be thrilled to have a trained negotiator but wary of the Feds. Hardly anyone likes the FBI. Fuselier didn’t blame them. Federal agents generally have a high opinion of themselves. Few try to conceal it. Fuselier didn’t look like a Fed, or sound the part. He was a shrink turned hostage negotiator turned detective, with an abridged version of the complete works of Shakespeare in the back seat of his car. He didn’t talk past the local cops, roll his eyes, or humor them. There was no swagger in his shoulders or his speech. He could be a little stoic. Hugging his sons felt awkward but he would reach out to embrace survivors when they needed it. Smiling came easy. His jokes were frequently at his own expense. He genuinely liked local cops and appreciated what they had to offer. They liked him.

A stint on the domestic terrorism task force for the region proved fortuitous. It was a joint operation between local agencies and the FBI. Fuselier led the unit, and a senior Jeffco detective worked on his team. The detective was one of Fuselier’s first calls. He was relieved to hear that Dwayne was on his way and offered to introduce him to the commanders on arrival.

The detective brought Fuselier up to speed before he arrived at the school. There were reports of six or eight gunmen in black masks and military gear shooting everyone. He assumed it was a terrorist attack.

It took a certain voice to talk down a gunman. Agent Fuselier was always gentle and reassuring. No matter how erratic the subject’s behavior, Fuselier always responded calmly. He exuded tranquillity, offered a way out. He trained negotiators to read a subject quickly, to size up his primary motivations. Was the gunman driven by anger, fear, or resentment? Was he on a power trip? Was the assault meant to feed his ego, or was he caught up in events beyond his control? Getting the gun down was primarily a matter of listening. The first thing Fuselier taught negotiators was to classify the situation as hostage or nonhostage. To laymen, humans at gunpoint equaled hostages. Not so.

An FBI field manual citing Fuselier’s research spelled out the crucial distinction: hostages are a means to fulfill demands. “The primary goal is not to harm the hostages,” the manual said. “In fact, hostage takers realize that only through keeping the hostages alive can they hope to achieve their goals.” They act rationally. Nonhostage gunmen do not. The humans mean nothing to them. “[These] individuals act in an emotional, senseless, and often-self-destructive way.” They typically issue no demands. “What they want is what they already have, the victim. The potential for homicide followed by suicide in many of these cases is very high.”

Jeffco officials had labeled Columbine a hostage standoff. Every media outlet was reporting it that way. Dr. Fuselier considered the chances of that remote. What he was driving toward was much worse.

To the FBI, the nonhostage distinction is critical. The Bureau recommends radically different strategies in those cases—essentially, the opposite approach. With hostages, negotiators remain highly visible, make the gunmen work for everything, and firmly establish that the police are in control. In nonhostage situations, they keep a low profile, “give a little without getting in return” (for example, offering cigarettes to build rapport), and avoid even a slight implication that anyone but the gunman is in control. The goal with hostages is to gradually lower expectations; in nonhostage crises, it’s to lower emotions.

One of the first things Fuselier did when he arrived was organize a negotiation team. He found local officers he had trained, and fellow FBI negotiators responded as well. A neighboring county loaned them a section of its mobile command post, already on scene. The 911 operators were instructed to put through to the team all calls from kids inside the building. Anything they could learn about the gunmen might be useful. They passed on logistical information they gathered to the tactical teams. The team was confident they could talk the gunmen down. All they needed was someone to speak to.

Fuselier shuttled between the negotiation center and the Jeffco command post, coordinating the federal response. When things calmed down momentarily, Fuselier pitched in questioning students who had just escaped the school. He walked over to the triage unit and flipped through the logs. They had evaluated hundreds of kids. He scanned for kids he knew from the neighborhood or the boys’ soccer teams. Everyone he recognized said “evaluated and released.” He called their parents as soon as he got a break.

His son’s name never came up. Agent Fuselier was grateful to have his hands full. “I had work to do,” he said later. “I compartmentalized. Focusing on that kept me from wondering about Brian.” Mimi checked in regularly, so Dwayne didn’t have to. She had gotten to Leawood, and she had seen a lot of kids. No one had spotted Brian; no one had heard a word.

An attack of this magnitude suggested a large conspiracy. Everyone, including detectives, assumed a substantial number were involved. The first break in the presumed conspiracy seemed to come early. The killers’ good friend Chris Morris reported himself to 911. He had seen the news on TV while he was home playing Nintendo with another friend. At first he was worried about his girlfriend. And his Nintendo buddy’s dad was a science teacher in the building.

The two boys hopped in the car and raced around, trying to find Chris’s girlfriend. They kept running into police barricades and collecting scraps of information along the way. When he heard about the trench coats, Chris got scared. He knew Eric and Dylan had guns. He knew they had been messing with pipe bombs. For this?

Chris called 911. He got disconnected. It took a few tries, but he told his story and the dispatcher sent a patrol car by the house. The cops questioned him briefly, then decided to drive him out to the main team in Clement Park. There was a lot of confusion. Who was this kid? “Chris Harris?” a detective asked. Pretty soon he was surrounded by detectives. Cameramen noticed. TV crews came running.

Chris looked the part: squishy features, nerdy, and overwhelmed. He had rosy cheeks, wire-rimmed glasses, and mussy light brown hair just past his ears. The cops cuffed him fast and got him into the back of a patrol car.

By now, many of the killers’ buddies suspected them. It was a scary time to be Eric’s or Dylan’s friend.

From the outset, before they even had names or identities for the gunmen, TV reporters depicted the boys as a single entity. “Were they loners?” reporters kept asking witnesses. “Were they outcasts?” Always they. And always the attributes fitting the school shooter profile—itself a myth. The witnesses nearly always concurred. Few knew the killers, but they did not volunteer that information, and they were not asked. Yeah, outcasts, I heard they were.

Fuselier arrived at Columbine with one assumption: multiple gunmen demanded multiple tactics. Fuselier couldn’t afford to think of his adversaries as a unit. Strategies likely to disarm one shooter could infuriate the other. Mass murderers tended to work alone, but when they did pair up, they rarely chose their mirror image. Fuselier knew he was much more likely to find a pair of opposites holed up in that building. It was entirely possible that there was no single why—and much more likely that he would unravel one motive for Eric, another for Dylan.

Reporters quickly keyed on the darker force behind the attack: this spooky Trench Coat Mafia. It grew more bizarre by the minute. In the first two hours, witnesses on CNN described the TCM as Goths, gays, outcasts, and a street gang. “A lot of the time they’ll, like, wear makeup and paint their nails and stuff,” a Columbine senior said. “They’re kind of—I don’t know, like Goth, sort of, like, and they’re, like, associated with death and violence a lot.”

None of that would prove to be true. That student did not, in fact, know the people he was describing. But the story grew.

16. The Boy in the Window

Danny Rohrbough had been second to die. As Eric was taking aim at him on the sidewalk, Danny’s stepsister was in the building, headed toward him. Nicole Petrone had changed into her gym uniform while the bombs were being laid. It was a beautiful day, and her class was going outside to play softball. Just as Eric finished shooting at Deputy Gardner, the lead girls in Nicole’s class turned the corner toward them.

Mr. D arrived in the hallway at the same moment—at the opposite end from the killers. He had just been alerted to the shooting, and had come running to investigate. The girls had not been warned. Mr. D spotted Dylan and Eric coming in the west doors, and the girls blundering into their path.

“They were laughing and giggling and getting ready to walk right into it,” he said.

The killers fired. Bullets soared past the girls. The trophy case just behind Mr. D shattered.

“I assumed I was a dead man,” he said.

He ran straight into the gunfire, screaming at the girls to turn back. He herded them down a side hallway that dead-ended at the gym. It was locked.

Mr. D had the key, on a chain in his pocket, latched to dozens just like it. He had no idea what it looked like. “I’m thinking, He’s coming around the corner and we’re trapped,” DeAngelis said. “If I don’t get these doors open, we are trapped.” A movie image zipped through his mind: a Nazi concentration camp, with a guard shooting escapees in the back. We’re just going to get mowed down as he comes around the corner, he thought. He reached in and grabbed a random key. It fit.

He ushered the girls into the gym and scouted around for a hiding place. They could hear bombs and gunfire and he could only imagine the hell going on outside. He spotted an inconspicuous door on the far wall. There was a storage room behind it, with cages piled with gym equipment. He unlocked the door and led them in.

“You’re going to be fine,” he told them. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you. But I need to get us out of here. I’m going to shut the door behind me. You don’t open that door for anyone!” Then he had an idea. Why didn’t they come up with a code word? Orange, someone suggested; no, Rebels, another girl said; no… A few started quarreling about it. Mr. D. couldn’t believe it. He burst out laughing. Girls started giggling. That broke the tension, for a moment.

He locked them in the storeroom, crossed the gym, creaked open the outside door, and poked his head out. “I saw other kids coming out and teachers,” he said. “Then a Jeffco sheriff—his car came over that embankment, flying, and I told some of the teachers, ‘I have to go back in there! There are kids in there.’ So I told the police officer after he got out and I explained. He said, ‘You go in.’”

Mr. D brought Nicole’s class back out to the same spot with the same cop, but by now he’d realized there were hundreds more still inside.

“I’m going—” he began, but a deputy cut him off.

“No one’s going back in.”

So Mr. D led the class across a field, over a series of minor obstacles. He stopped at a chain-link fence to boost them over. Other girls assisted from the far side. “Let’s go, girls,” he said. “Over the fence.”

When the last girl was over, they ran across the field until they felt safe. Mr. D found the command post and drew diagrams of the hallways for the SWAT teams. He also described what he had seen. He remembered a guy with a baseball cap turned backward. “They kept saying these guys were in trench coats,” Mr. D recalled later, “and I kept saying, ‘These guys were not in trench coats! He had a baseball cap turned backwards.’”

Eventually, Mr. D headed to Leawood to be with the kids. He met his wife there, his brother, and a close friend. Tears streamed down everyone’s cheeks, except Frank’s. That was odd. Frank had always been the emotional one. But the first symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was already taking hold. He felt nothing.

“I was like a zombie,” he said later.

John and Kathy Ireland knew Patrick had “A” lunch. But he always ate out. John went looking for Patrick’s car. He knew Patrick’s spot. If the car was gone, his boy was safe. A deputy stopped him at the perimeter. “Please!” John begged. He promised not to walk as far as the school. “If I can just get to the parking lot…” Pleading was useless. John knew the neighborhood, so he tried another approach. That one was blocked, too. He headed back to Leawood.

Kids kept pouring in there. Mostly the auditorium was filled with parents seeking kids, but there were also kids without parents. John saw several in tears. He chatted with them, and they perked up.

John and Kathy were happy to see kids find their parents. But every reunion raised the odds their boy was in trouble. Somebody’s kids were in those ambulances. John and Kathy refused to indulge in negative thoughts. “I couldn’t go to the place that Pat would have been hurt,” Kathy said later. “I absolutely felt confident that he was going to be OK. At least I wasn’t going to speculate or waste energy on that. I just needed to find him.”

John found lots of Patrick’s friends, but nobody had seen him. Who was he with? Why hadn’t they called?

Patrick had gone to the library to finish his stats homework. Four friends had joined him. None of them had called the Irelands because every one of them had been shot.

Agent Dwayne Fuselier was also having no luck locating his son. Mimi had given up on the public library and had run over to Leawood. There were many more kids there, but none had seen Brian.

Dwayne had access to a growing army of law enforcement, but it didn’t do him a lick of good. Cops kept an ear out for word of Brian, but none came. Fuselier also had the advantage of knowing a great number of kids were alive and well in the building. He had spoken to many personally, and continued picking their brains about the killers. He was one of the few parents aware of the full danger. Two bodies had been lying outside the cafeteria for hours. He didn’t know they were Danny Rohrbough and Rachel Scott, but he knew they had not been moving, and then he heard the dispatch announcements indicating they were dead. Others described the 1 BLEEDING TO DEATH sign in Science Room 3.

Mimi monitored the stage at Leawood, where talk of death and murder were verboten. She scoured the sign-in sheets and worked the crowd. Dwayne checked in every fifteen minutes by cell, but did not mention the murders. She did not inquire.

For ninety minutes of chaos, the gunmen seemed to be all over the school simultaneously. Then it quieted down. The killers still appeared to be roaming, firing at will, but the gunfire was sporadic now, and no one was staggering out wounded. The injured had reached the hospitals. It had taken an hour to get most of them out of the building, through the triage center, and into ambulances. Between 1:00 and 2:30 P.M., the injury count fluctuated between eight and eighteen, depending upon which station you were watching. The numbers varied but kept rising. A sheriff’s spokesman announced that SWAT teams had spotted more students trapped in the building, lying on the floor, apparently injured.

Suddenly, at 1:44 P.M., the cops finally nabbed someone. “We’ve got three [students], with their hands up with two police cars around them,” a reporter told CNN. “Their hands are up.” The cops detained them at gunpoint.

Word spread quickly to the library. “They surrendered!” a woman screamed. “It’s over!”

They celebrated there briefly. The truth trickled back slowly.

Just before 2:30, an officer riding along in a news chopper spotted somebody moving inside the library. He was just inside the blown-out windows, covered in blood and behaving curiously: sagging against the frame, clearing away shards of glass. He was going to jump!

The officer radioed a SWAT team. They revved the Loomis armored truck and raced toward the building.

“Hang on, kid!” one of them called. “We’re coming to get you.”

Patrick Ireland was confused. He heard someone yell, but couldn’t see anyone or figure out where the voices were coming from. He felt dizzy. His vision was blurry and one big section was blank. He was unaware that blood was streaming down into his eyes. The shouting inside his head was more important: Get out! Get out!

But the muddled outside yelling had caught his attention. Why were they talking so slowly? Everything was deep and mumbly, like his head was underwater. Where was he? Not sure. Something had happened, something horrible. Shot? Get out! Get out!

Hours earlier, Patrick Ireland had taken refuge under the table with his friends. Makai and Dan were down there, and a girl he didn’t know. Corey and Austin had gone to investigate and ended up somewhere unknown. Patrick put his head down and closed his eyes. The shooting was barely under way in the library when he heard Makai moan. Patrick opened his eyes. Makai’s knee was bleeding. Patrick leaned over to administer pressure. The top of his head poked over the edge of the tabletop. Dylan saw him, and fired the shotgun again. Patrick went blank.

Patrick’s skull had stopped several buckshot fragments. Other debris lodged in his scalp as well—probably wood splinters torn from the tabletop in the blast. One pellet got through. It burrowed six inches through spongy brain matter, entering through the scalp just above his hairline on the left, and lodging near the middle rear. Bits of his optical center were missing; most of his language capacity was wiped out. He regained consciousness, but words were hard to form and difficult to interpret as well. Pathways for all sorts of functions had been severed. Perception was impeded, so he couldn’t tell when he was speaking gibberish or jumbling incoming sounds. The left brain controls the right side of the body, and the pellet cut through that connection. Patrick was paralyzed on the right side. He had been shot in the right foot; it was broken and bleeding—he didn’t even know. He felt nothing on that side.

Patrick drifted in and out. He was semiconscious when the killers left the room. All the kids were running for the back exit. Makai and Dan tried to get his attention. He returned a blank stare.

“Come on, man,” one of them said. “Let’s go!”

It didn’t register. They tried to drag him, but both had been shot in the legs and Patrick was limp. They got nowhere. The killers could return any moment. Eventually, they gave up and fled.

Sometime later, Patrick woke up on the floor again. Get out! He tried to get out. Half his body refused. He couldn’t stand; he couldn’t even crawl right. He reached with his left hand, gripped something, and dragged himself forward. His useless side trailed behind. He made a little progress, and his brain gave out.

He came to repeatedly and began again. No one knows how many times. A bloody trail revealed his convoluted path. He started less than two table lengths from the windows, but he headed off in the wrong direction. Then he hit obstacles: bodies, table legs, and chairs. Some he pushed away, others had to be maneuvered around. He kept heading for the light. If he could just make it to the windows maybe someone would see him. If he had to, maybe he would jump.

It took three hours to get there. He found an easy chair beside the opening. It was sturdy enough not to tip, and might provide cover if the killers returned. He wedged his back against the short wall and worked himself upward, then grabbed hold of the chair for a final push. He propped himself against the girder between two large panes and rested awhile to recover his strength. Then he flipped around. He had one more task before he took the plunge.

The problem was that Patrick couldn’t jump. There was a waist-high window ledge to get over. The best he could do was lean forward and tumble over it headfirst onto the sidewalk. His gut would bear down on the sill as he rolled over it. It was a jagged mess. The gun blasts had blown out most of the glass, but left shards clinging around the frame. Patrick stood on one leg, braced his shoulder against the girder, and picked away the chunks with the same hand. He was meticulous. He didn’t want to get hurt.

That’s when he heard the murky voices.

“Stay there! We’re gonna get you!”

The armored truck pulled up beneath the window. A squadron of SWAT officers leapt out. Nearby teams provided cover from either side. One group took aim from behind a fire truck; snipers sprawled on rooftops trained their scopes from farther back. If this rescue mission was fired upon, they’d be ready.

Patrick wasn’t waiting. He thought he was. He remembers them calling “OK, it’s safe! Go ahead and jump. We’ll catch you.” The rescue team recalls it differently, and the video shows them still scrambling into place.

Patrick collapsed forward. The ledge caught him at the waist, and he folded in half, head dangling toward the ground. The SWAT team wasn’t ready, but Patrick was frantic and didn’t understand. He wiggled forward, but couldn’t get much traction from the inside, because his feet were already up off the floor.

A SWAT officer clambered up the side of the truck and threw his weapon to the ground. Another followed close behind him. As the first man hit the truck roof, Patrick kicked his good leg up toward the ceiling, and reached down for the sidewalk with his arms. That nearly did it. One more thrust and he would be free.

The officers lunged toward him and each man caught one of his hands. Patrick kicked again, completely vertical, and his hips pulled away from the frame. The officers clenched and his hands barely moved. The rest of his body spun around like a gymnast gripping the high bar, until he whacked into the side of the truck. The officers kept hold and eased him down onto the hood. He tried to break away, still desperate to flee. They lowered him down to other officers, but he kicked hard and his legs slammed against the ground.

They pulled him upright, and he tried to climb into the front seat. The SWAT team was confused. What was he trying to do? They assumed he understood he was the patient. He did not. He had to get out of there. Here was a truck; he was ready to go.

They got him to a triage site, and then straight into an ambulance. On the drive to St. Anthony Central Hospital, paramedics cut off Patrick’s bloody clothes—everything but his undershorts. They removed his gold necklace with the water-ski pendant. He had six dollars in his wallet. He was not wearing shoes. They confirmed gunshot wounds to his left forehead and his right foot, as well as a number of superficial wounds about his head. His elbow was lacerated. As they worked, they tested Patrick’s mental acuity and tried to keep him conscious. Do you know where you are? Your name? Your birthday? Patrick could answer those questions—slowly, laboriously. The answers were easy, but he struggled to form them into words. Most of his brain tissue was intact. Sections could function in isolation, but the connecting circuitry was confused. Patrick’s brain was less successful forming new memories. He knew he had been shot, by a man in black with a long gun. That was true. The masks he described on the killers’ faces were not. He insisted he had been shot at a hospital, in the emergency room.

Speech was a problem. Only one side of his mouth moved, and his brain was inconsistent in retrieving information. Sometimes it got stuck. He gave them all ten digits of his phone number, but his first name was nearly impossible. Paaaaaaaaaaaaaah… Paaaaaaaaaah… He could not form that second syllable. It sounded like a droning stream of nonsense and then the second syllable spat out suddenly, clear and distinctive: rick. Great. Rick Ireland. That caused considerable confusion later.

Just before Patrick’s rescue, President Clinton addressed the nation. He asked all Americans to pray for students and teachers in that school. As CNN cut back from the White House, an anchor spotted Patrick: “Look, there’s a bloody student right there in the window!” she gasped.

It played out live on television. Patrick’s eighth-grade sister Maggie watched. He was so bloody, she didn’t recognize him.

Viewers were stunned, but it didn’t make much of an impression at the rendezvous points. News of a kid falling out the window never reached most parents, including John and Kathy. They might have gone on searching for hours if Kathy hadn’t asked a neighbor to run by the house to check the answering machine. The neighbor found endless messages from Kathy checking for Patrick, plus a recent one from St. Anthony’s: We have your son. Please call.

Kathy was conflicted: My son’s alive! My son is hurt! “It was scary,” Kathy said later. “But I was relieved to have something to deal with.”

She felt much better once she got a nurse on the phone. It was a head wound, but Patrick was awake and alert; he had provided his name and phone number. Oh, good, it was just a graze, Kathy thought. “I just went straight to the assumption that it was just the scalp,” she said later. “If he was able to talk, then it was just the scalp.”

John felt grave danger, no relief. “I just figured anybody shot in the head, it can’t be good,” he said.

John drove the couple to the hospital. He was a computer programmer, who prided himself on his navigational skill. He was too upset to find the hospital. He knew exactly how to get to St. Anthony’s, he said. “And I’m driving down Wadsworth and I can’t remember where the hell it is!”

They sat side by side, presuming they shared the same basic assumptions. It was seven years before they discovered that they arrived at St. Anthony’s in completely different mind-sets.

John was racked with guilt. “There should have been something I was able to do to protect him,” he said. John knew it was irrational, but years later, it still haunted him.

Kathy focused on the present: How could she help Patrick now? But no one even knew exactly what was wrong. Staff kept coming in to check on them, filling them in on the surgery, what to expect in Patrick and themselves. Dead brain cells do not regenerate, but the brain can sometimes work around them, they were told. No one really understands how the brain reroutes its neural pathways, so there’s no procedure to assist it.

A projectile to the brain tends to cause two sets of damage. First, it rips away tissue that can never be restored. One path might cause blindness, another logical impairment. But the secondary impact can be just as bad or worse. The brain is saturated with blood, so gunshots tend to unleash a flood. As fluid builds, oxygen is depleted and the pool cuts off fresh supplies. Brain tissue is choked off by the very cells designed to nourish it. Patrick’s doctors feared that as he’d lain on the library floor, his brain had been drowning in its own blood.

Patrick Ireland had brain damage; that was a fact. His symptoms indicated severe impairment. The only question was whether those functions could return.

The surgery was scheduled to take about an hour, but lasted more than three. It was after 7:00 P.M. when the surgeon came out to advise John and Kathy of the results. He had cleared out buckshot fragments and debris from the surface. One pellet had penetrated Patrick’s skull. It was far too perilous to dig out. That lead would be in him for life. It was hard to tell how much damage the pellet had wreaked. Swelling was the main indicator. It looked bad.

As one SWAT team rescued Patrick Ireland, another squad reached the choir room. The rumor was true: sixty students were barricaded inside. A few minutes later, sixty more were discovered in the science area. SWAT teams led them through the hallways, down the stairs, and across the commons.

At 2:47, three and a half hours into the siege, the first of those kids burst out the cafeteria doors. News choppers homed in on them instantly. The anchors and the TV audience were perplexed. Where were these kids coming from?

More followed, single file in quick succession, running down the hillside as fast as they could with their hands on the backs of their heads, elbows splayed. They kept coming and coming, dozens of them, tracing the same winding path, first away from the school, then back toward a windowless corner surrounded by squad cars and ambulances. They huddled there for several minutes, sobbing, waiting, clinging to one another. Police officers patted them down and then hugged them. Eventually, cops packed groups of three to five kids into squad cars and shuttled them to the triage area a few blocks south. The kids had to run right past two bodies on the way out, so at some point, an officer moved Rachel farther away.

The SWAT team reached the 1 BLEEDING TO DEATH sign on the same sweep through the science area that freed all those kids. The sign was still against the window. The carpet in Science Room 3 was soaked in blood. The teacher was alive, barely.

17. The Sheriff

The Columbine crisis was never a hostage standoff. Eric and Dylan had no intentions of making demands. SWAT teams searched the building for over three hours, but the killers were lying dead the entire time. They had committed suicide in the library at 12:08, forty-nine minutes after beginning the attack. The killing and the terror had been real. The standoff had not.

The SWAT teams discovered the truth around 3:15. They peered into the library and saw bodies scattered around the floor. No sign of movement. They cleared the entrance and prepared to enter. They took paramedic Troy Laman in with them. The SWAT team warned Laman to be cautious. Touch as little as possible, they said; anything could be booby-trapped. Be especially suspicious of backpacks.

It was horrible. The room was a shambles; blood spattered the furniture, and enormous pools soaked into the carpet. The tabletops were oddly undisturbed: books open, calculus problems under way, a college application half-completed. A lifeless boy still held a pencil. Another had collapsed beside a PC, which was still running, undisturbed.

Laman was tasked with determining whether anyone was alive. It didn’t look like it. Most of the kids had been dead for nearly four hours, and it was obvious by sight. “If I couldn’t get a look at somebody, at their face, to see if they were still alive, I tried to kind of touch them,” Laman said. Twelve were cold. One was not. Laman touched a girl, felt the warmth, and rolled her over to get a look at her face. Her eyes were open, tears trickling out.

Lisa Kreutz was carried down the stairs and rushed to Denver Health Medical Center. A gun blast had shattered her left shoulder. One hand and both arms were also injured. She had lost a lot of blood. She survived.

Most of the bodies lay under tables. The victims had been attempting to hide. Two bodies were different. They lay out in the open, weapons by their sides. Suicides, clearly. The SWAT team had descriptions of Eric and Dylan. These two looked like a match. It was over.

The team discovered four women hiding in back rooms attached to the library. Patti Nielson, the art teacher from the 911 call, had crept into a cupboard in the break room. She had squatted in the cupboard for three more hours, knees aching, unaware the danger had passed. Three other faculty hid farther back. An officer instructed one to put her hand on his shoulder and follow him out, staring directly at his helmet, to minimize exposure to the horror.

It had been over how long? No one knew. With the fire alarm blaring, none of the staff had been close enough to hear.

Detectives would piece it together eventually—how long the attack had lasted, and how long Eric and Dylan had killed. Those would turn out to be very different answers. Something peculiar had transpired seventeen minutes into the attack.

The investigation outpaced the SWAT teams. Detectives were combing the park, the library, Leawood Elementary, and the surrounding community. They interviewed hundreds of students and staff—everyone they could find. When waves of fresh survivors outnumbered police officers, they conducted thirty-to sixty-second triage interviews: Who are you? Where were you? What did you see? Friends of the killers and witnesses to bloodshed were identified quickly, and detectives were waved over for lengthier interviews.

Lead investigator Kate Battan performed some interviews personally; she was briefed on the rest. Battan was intent on getting every detail right—and avoiding costly errors that might come back to haunt them later. “Everyone learned a lot from hearing about the O. J. Simpson case and JonBenet Ramsey,” she said later. “We didn’t need another situation like those.”

Her team also ran a simple search on Jeffco computer files and found something stunning. The shooters were already in the system. Eric and Dylan had been arrested junior year. They got caught breaking into a van to steal electronic equipment. They had entered a twelve-month juvenile Diversion program, performing community service and attending counseling. They’d completed the program with glowing reviews exactly ten weeks before the massacre.

More disturbing was a complaint filed thirteen months earlier by Randy and Judy Brown, the parents of the shooters’ friend Brooks. Eric had made death threats toward Brooks. Ten pages of murderous rants printed from his Web site had been compiled. Someone in Battan’s department had known about this kid.

Battan organized the information and composed a single-spaced six-page search warrant for Eric’s home and a duplicate for Dylan’s. She dictated them over the phone. The warrants were typed up in Golden, the county seat, delivered to a judge, signed, driven out to the killers’ homes, and exercised within four hours of the first shots—before the SWAT team reached the library and discovered the attack was over.

The warrants cited seven witnesses who’d identified Harris and/or Klebold as the gunmen.

Agent Fuselier heard about the bodies on the police radio at 3:20. He had just gotten word that his son Brian was OK. Mass murder meant a massive investigation. “How can I help?” Fuselier asked the Jeffco commanders. “Do you want federal agents?” Definitely, they said. Jeffco had a small detective team—there was no way it could handle the task. An hour later, eighteen evidence specialists began arriving. A dozen special agents would follow, along with half a dozen support staff.

At 4:00 P.M., Jeffco went public about the fatalities. Chief spokesman Steve Davis called a press conference in Clement Park, with Sheriff Stone by his side. The pair had been briefing reporters all afternoon. Most of the press had never heard of either man, but consensus about them emerged quickly. Sheriff Stone was a straight shooter; he had a deep, gruff voice and classic western mentality: no hedging, no bluster, no bullshit. What a contrast to the blow-dried spokesman affixed to his side. Steve Davis began the conference by reiterating warnings about rumors. Above all, he stressed caution on two subjects: the number of fatalities and the status of the suspects.

Davis opened the floor to questions. The first was directed to him by name. Sheriff Stone stepped forward, brushing Davis and his cautions aside. He held custody of the microphone through most of the press conference. The sheriff answered nearly every question directly, despite later evidence that he had little or no information on many of them. He winged it. The death count nearly doubled. “I’ve heard numbers as high as twenty-five,” he said. He pronounced the killers unequivocally dead. He fed the myth of a third shooter. “Three—two dead [suspects] in the library,” he said.

“Well, where is the third?”

“We’re not sure if there is a third yet or not, or how many. The SWAT operation is still going on in there.”

Stone repeated the erroneous death count several times. It led newscasts around the world. Newspaper headlines proclaimed it the next morning: TWENTYFIVE DEAD IN COLORADO.

Stone said the three kids detained in the park appeared to be “associates of these gentlemen or good friends.” He was wrong; they had never met the killers, and were soon cleared.

Stone made the first of an infamous string of accusations. “What are these parents doing that are letting their kids have automatic weapons?” he asked.

Reporters were surprised to hear the rumors about automatic weapons confirmed. They rushed in with follow-ups. “I don’t know anything about the weapons,” Stone admitted. “I assume there were probably automatic weapons just because of the mass casualties.”

A reporter asked about motive. “Craziness,” Stone said. Wrong again.

By now dozens of kids had fled the school with their friends. School officials herded them across Clement Park to meet school buses that would drive past police barricades to Leawood. The buses parked directly beside the site of the press conferences.

The kids trudged meekly toward the media throng. Many sobbed quietly. Others helped distraught students along, holding their hands or slinging an arm over their shoulders. Most of the kids stared at the ground. The crowd of reporters parted. These were not the faces of interview subjects.

But the students were eager to speak. Teachers hurried the kids, chiding them to keep quiet. They were having none of that. The bus windows started coming down, heads popped out, and kids recounted their ordeals. Kids piled off the buses.

The teachers tried to coax them back on. Not a chance. A tough-looking senior described his terror in the choir room with a sense of bravado and chivalry. But his voice cracked when a reporter asked how he felt. “Horrible,” he said. “There were two kids lying on the pavement. I just—I started crying. I haven’t cried for years, I just—I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Attention focused on the students. Endless reunions with their parents played out on TV. A different group weathered the crisis in seclusion. More than a hundred teachers worked at Columbine, along with dozens of support staff. A hundred and fifty families feared for their husbands, wives, and parents. There was no rendezvous point where they could gather. Most drove home and waited by their phones. That’s where Linda Lou Sanders kept vigil.

She had celebrated her mom’s seventieth birthday with the family; then they’d headed up into the mountains for a pleasure drive. On the way, Linda’s brother-in-law called her sister, Melody, on her cell.

“Where does Dave teach?”

“Columbine.”

“You better head back down here.”

Everyone gathered at Linda’s house. Most of the news was good. Only one adult was reported injured, and it was a science teacher, which ruled out Dave. So why hadn’t he called?

Those reports were nearly accurate. Only one adult had been hit, and Dave was still bleeding at that moment. The sense that afternoon was that gunfire had erupted all over the place. In fact, it had mostly been limited to the library and the west steps outside. Teachers had not been studying for tests or strolling outside to enjoy their lunch in the sunshine. If the bombs had gone off as planned, it would have wiped out a quarter of the faculty in the teachers’ longue. But they had been spared by dumb luck. All but one.

Dave held on for hours in Science Room 3. Then the kids and teachers were evacuated, and none knew whether he’d made it. It would be a few days before the family would fully understand what had transpired in that room. It would take years to resolve why he’d lain there for over three hours, and who was to blame.

All Dave’s family knew was that he had failed to call. He must be trapped inside the building, they thought. That wasn’t good. Linda hoped he wasn’t a hostage. She assumed he was hiding. He would be safe; he was not a risk taker.

The family monitored the TV and took turns answering calls. The phone rang incessantly, but it was never Dave. Linda called his business line repeatedly. Nobody picked up.

Linda was an athletic woman in her late forties, but she had a fragile psyche. Her smile was warm but tentative, as if she could shatter from a harsh word or gesture. Dave had found great satisfaction in protecting her. In his absence, her daughters and sister stepped in. Every call was fraught, so her family made sure to screen. In midafternoon, she got the urge to answer a call herself. “It was a woman,” she said later. “And she said she was from the Denver Post and my husband had been shot—Do I have a comment? I screamed, I threw the phone. I have no idea what happened from then on.”

Robyn Anderson was scared. Her prom date was a mass murderer. She had apparently armed him.

To her knowledge, only three people had known about the gun deal, and the other two were dead. Had they told anyone? Were guns traceable? She had not signed anything. Would the cops know? Should she keep her mouth shut?

The cops did not know. Robyn had been debriefed in Clement Park and had played it totally cool. She told the detective where she had been and what she had seen. She told the truth, but not the whole truth. She didn’t know for sure who had been shooting, so she didn’t mention that she knew them. She certainly didn’t mention the guns. Should she? The guilt began eating her up.

Robyn talked to Zack Heckler on the phone that afternoon. She kept her mouth shut about the weapons. He didn’t. He was clueless about the guns, thank God, but he knew the guys had been making pipe bombs. Bombs? Really? That astounded Robyn. Yes, really, Zack said. And he wasn’t surprised at all. Zack didn’t have quite the innocent picture of Dylan that Robyn did. It sounded just like those guys to run down the halls laughing while they killed people, he said.

Zack did not tell Robyn that he had helped Eric and Dylan make any pipe bombs. She wondered. Did he? Was he mixed up in this? More than her?

Zack was scared, too. They all were—anybody close to the killers. Zack wasn’t volunteering information to the cops. He’d omitted mentioning the pipe bombs during his debriefing.

Chris Morris went the opposite route. He’d called the cops in the first hour, as soon as he suspected that his friends were involved. He was handcuffed in Clement Park and spirited away on national television. He kept talking at the police station. He described Eric’s interest in Nazis, a crack about jocks, and some scary recent suggestions: cutting power to the school and setting PVC bombs at the exits with screws for shrapnel.

If Chris’s story was legit, it suggested the killers had been leaking information about their plans—a classic characteristic of young assailants. If Eric and Dylan had leaked to Chris, chances were they had tipped off others as well.

Chris’s dad was called. He contacted a lawyer. At 7:43 P.M., the three sat down with detectives for a formal interview. Chris and his father signed a form waiving their rights. The cops found Chris highly cooperative. He described the killers’ obsessions with explosives and volunteered all sorts of details. Dylan had brought a pipe bomb to work once, but Chris ordered him to get it out of there. Chris knew the guys had gotten their hands on guns. It had been an open secret around Blackjack several months ago that Eric and Dylan were looking for hardware. They’d never told Chris directly, but he had heard it from several people.

Chris had a hunch who had come through for them: a kid named Phil Duran. Duran used to work at Blackjack, then moved to Chicago for a high-tech job. Before he’d left, Duran told Chris he had gone shooting with Eric and Dylan. Something about bowling pins and maybe an AK-47. Duran never said he had bought the guns, but Chris figured it was him.

It sounded staggering, how much Chris had known. He swore he had not taken it seriously. He agreed to turn over the clothes he was wearing and allow detectives to search his room. Everyone agreed to rendezvous at his house. Chris’s mom met the cops at the front door, handed them his PC, and showed them upstairs. Then his brother arrived with Chris’s clothes in a paper bag. He said Chris was afraid to come home. Mobs of media were already staking out the street.

The cops found nothing of obvious value, but gathered up piles of material. They left at 11:15.

Robyn needed company. She couldn’t handle the stress alone. Her best friend, Kelli, came over around 7:30 on Tuesday evening. They went to Robyn’s room. Kelli knew the boys well, too, especially Dylan. She had been part of the prom group. There was something Kelli didn’t know, Robyn told her. Remember that favor she had done Eric and Dylan last November? Kelli remembered. It had been a big secret. Robyn had told Kelli repeatedly about this big favor she had done the guys, but she never would divulge what it was. Now she had to tell someone. It had been a gun show. The Tanner Gun Show in Denver. Eric and Dylan had called her on a Sunday, if she remembered right. They had checked the show out on Saturday, seen these sweet-looking shotguns. But they’d gotten carded; they were both underage then. They needed an eighteen-year-old with them. Robyn was eighteen. She really liked Dylan. So she went.

It was their money. Robyn made sure not to sign any papers. But she was the one who bought the three guns. The boys each got a shotgun. One had some kind of pump thing on it. Eric went for a rifle, too—a semi-automatic that looked like a giant paintball gun. Robyn felt so guilty, Kelli said later. How could she have imagined this?

Robyn didn’t tell Kelli everything. She came clean with the main secret, but held back on a detail. She told Kelli she didn’t know it was Eric and Dylan killing people until she heard it announced on TV that night. Kelli didn’t buy it. Robyn had never received a B in high school—she could have put that mystery together. When she heard about the trench coats, she had to have known.

The Klebolds spent the afternoon and evening on their porch. Waiting. They were no longer allowed inside. At 8:10 P.M., a deputy arrived with instructions. Their home was now a crime scene. They had to go. Tom and Sue Klebold told friends they felt hit by a hurricane. Hurricanes don’t hit the Rockies. They’d never seen it coming.

“We ran for our lives,” Sue said later. “We didn’t know what had happened. We couldn’t grieve for our child.”

Officers escorted Tom in to gather clothes for the next couple of days. Then Sue went in to take care of the pets. She fetched two cats, two birds, and their food bowls and litter boxes. At 9:00 P.M., they drove away.

They talked to a lawyer that night. He related a sobering thought. “Dylan isn’t here anymore for people to hate,” he said. “So people are going to hate you.”

18. Last Bus

The buses kept arriving at Leawood Elementary, delivering discouragement as well as joy. It was great if your kid got off, but the odds kept dropping as the remaining parents dwindled. “I was getting envious of parents who were finding their kids and screaming out their names,” Doreen Tomlin recalled. She found it harder and harder to get up. Her husband kept the faith, but hers played out. Buses arrived, and she stayed in her seat, silently chastising herself. “I thought, Why aren’t you getting up and looking? All these other parents are pinned to the stage, and you’re just sitting here.”

Brian Rohrbough had given up even earlier. By 2:00 P.M., while Leawood was packed with hopeful parents, Brian had accepted Danny’s fate. “I knew he was gone,” he said. “I assume it was God telling me, preparing me. I hoped I was wrong. We waited for busloads of kids, but I knew he wasn’t going to be on it. I told Sue, ‘You know he’s gone.’”

But his ex-wife was hopeful. In the public library, Misty Bernall was, too. Her son, Chris, had turned up, but Cassie was still missing. She is alive! Misty told herself fiercely. Nothing could dampen Misty’s resolve, or her perseverance.

“Her mom came up to me every two minutes and asked if I’d seen Cassie,” a friend of her daughter said. “I told her, ‘I’m sure there are a lot of people unaccounted for.’” Not what Misty wanted to hear.

Prayer helped. “Please, God, just give me my baby back,” she prayed. “Please, God, where is she?”

Misty gave up on the public library. She made her way through Clement Park and discovered the buses being loaded. She scurried from one to the next. A friend of Cassie’s reached out to grab her hand.

“Have you seen Cass?” Misty cried.

“No.”

Misty returned to the library. Brad and Chris met her there. Then everyone was sent to Leawood. That was a huge relief for the parents waiting there: more families, better odds.

The buses kept coming, every ten to twenty minutes for a while. Then arrivals slowed. Around four o’clock, they stopped. One more bus was promised. Parents looked around. Whose kids would it be?

The wait went on endlessly. At five o’clock, it still wasn’t there. Siblings wandered out to watch for it, hoping to run inside with the news. Doreen Tomlin had not gotten up in a long time, but she was still praying her boy would be on it. “We were clinging to that hope,” she said.

At dinnertime, President Clinton held a press conference in the West Wing to discuss the attack. “Hillary and I are profoundly shocked and saddened by the tragedy today in Littleton,” he said. He passed on the hope of a Jeffco official, who had just told him: “Perhaps now America would wake up to the dimensions of this challenge, if it could happen in a place like Littleton.”

Clinton sent a federal crisis response team and urged reporters to resist jumping to conclusions. “What I would like to do is take a couple of days because we don’t know what the facts are here,” he said. “And keeping in mind, the community is an open wound right now.”

At Leawood, even the resilient families were faltering. Nothing had changed: no buses, no word, for hours on end. District attorney Dave Thomas tried to comfort the families. He knew which ones would need it. He had thirteen names in his breast pocket. Ten students had been identified in the library, and two more outside, based on their clothing and appearance. One teacher lay in Science Room 3. All deceased. It was a solid list, but not definitive. Thomas kept it to himself. He told the parents not to worry.

At eight o’clock, they were moved to another room. Sheriff Stone introduced the coroner. She handed out forms asking for descriptions of their kids’ clothing and other physical details. That’s when John Tomlin realized the truth. The coroner asked them to retrieve their kids’ dental records. That went over unevenly. Many took it gravely; others perked up. They had a task, finally, and hope for resolution.

A woman leapt up. “Where is that other bus!” she demanded.

There was no bus. “There was never another bus,” Doreen Tomlin said later. “It was like a false hope they gave you.” Many parents felt betrayed. Brian Rohrbough later accused the school officials of lying; Misty Bernall also felt deceived. “Not intentionally, perhaps, but deceived nonetheless,” she wrote. “And so bitterly that it almost choked me.”

Sheriff Stone told them that most of the dead kids had been in the library. “John always went to the library,” Doreen said. “I felt like I was going to pass out. I felt sick.”

She felt sadness but not surprise. Doreen was an Evangelical Christian, and believed the Lord had been preparing her for the news all afternoon. Most of the Evangelicals reacted differently than the other parents. The press had been cleared from the area, but Lynn Duff was assisting the families as a Red Cross volunteer. A liberal Jew from San Francisco, she was taken aback by what she saw.

“The way that those families reacted was markedly different,” she said. “It was like a hundred and eighty degrees from where everybody else was. They were singing; they were praying; they were comforting the other parents, especially the parents of Isaiah Shoels [the only African American killed]. They were thinking a lot about the other parents, the other families, and responding a lot to other people’s needs. They were definitely in pain, and you could see the pain in their eyes, but they were very confident of where their kids were. They were at peace with it. It was like they were a living example of their faith.”

But not all the Evangelicals reacted the same way. Misty Bernall was defiant. She was sure Cassie was alive.

Mr. D stayed with the families. He was doing his best to console them, and waiting for word on a close friend. He had known Dave Sanders for twenty years. They had coached three sports together, shared hundreds of beers, and Frank had attended Dave’s wedding. Frank had been hearing rumors about Dave all afternoon.

Sometime after the coroner’s announcements, a teacher and a friend of both men, Rich Long, showed up at Leawood. He saw Frank and rushed up to hug him. “All I can remember was seeing blood on his pants and his shirt,” Frank said later. “And I said, ‘Rich, tell me. Is it true? Is Dave dead?’ And he couldn’t give me an answer.”

Frank assured Rich he was strong enough to take the news. “Tell me!” he pleaded. “I need to know.”

Rich couldn’t help him. He was struggling with the same question.

Agent Fuselier had talked gunmen down and seen a few open fire right in front of him. He had struggled for weeks to release eighty-two people at Waco, then watched the gas tanks erupt and the buildings burn down. He’d known they were all dying inside Waco. Watching had been unbearable. This was worse.

Fuselier went home and gave Brian a hug. It had been a long time between hugs, and it was hard to let go. Then he sat down to watch the news reports with Mimi. He held her hand and choked back tears. “How could you go home and get dental records?” he asked. “Then what? You know your kid is lying there dead. How do you go to sleep?”

19. Vacuuming

Dave Sanders was one of the few teachers unaccounted for. He was still in Science Room 3. The SWAT team had reached him still alive, but hopeless. Several minutes later, before he was evacuated, Dave Sanders bled to death.

His family was not notified. Late in the afternoon, they got word he was injured and taken to Swedish Medical Center.

“I don’t know who drove me,” Linda Lou said. “I don’t know how I got there. I don’t remember the ride, I don’t remember walking in there. I remember when we got there. They took us in a room. There was food, there was coffee, there were the sisters—the nuns.” It was like a greeting committee, awaiting their arrival but, curiously, waiting for Dave, too. Linda found the head nurse reassuring. “She said, ‘As soon as he gets here, you get to see him.’ And he never got there. He never got there.”

Eventually, they gave up and went to Leawood. They waited there awhile and then headed back home. Relief agencies dispatched victim’s advocates. Several showed up at the house—a helpful but ominous sign. The phones rang constantly—five separate cells, laid out on the coffee table—but never with the call they wanted.

Linda retreated to her room. Every time someone used the bathroom downstairs, the exhaust fan clicked on, and Linda jumped up, believing it was the garage door opening.

“Finally, about ten-thirty, Mom and I got sick of waiting,” Angie said. “We knew there had been a couple teachers with him, teachers who’ve known him for—since before I was born. And so we called them to find out what happened. And they informed us.” Dave had been the teacher bleeding to death.

But had he bled out? Dave was alive when the SWAT team evacuated all the civilians. After that, no one seemed to know. Only the cops had seen it end, and they weren’t ready to say.

“We still didn’t know whether he was taken out of the school or not,” Angie said. “But at least we knew a little more about what happened inside.”

Linda tried to sleep. That was useless. She curled up with a pair of Dave’s socks.

Linda spent the evening trying to blank out her mind. Odd thoughts slipped through. “All those people in my living room,” she thought, “and I didn’t have time to vacuum.”

It was a common response. Survivors focused on mundane tasks—tiny victories they could still accomplish. Many were horrified by their thoughts.

Marjorie Lindholm had spent much of the afternoon with Dave Sanders. He kept getting whiter. Explosions kept erupting. When the SWAT team finally freed her, Marjorie ran past two bodies on the way out. She worried about how she had dressed. Her parents would find her in a tank top that suddenly felt sleazy. She borrowed a friend’s shirt to cover herself up. A cop drove her to safety in Clement Park, and a paramedic stepped up to examine her. God, he was hot, she thought. “I felt ashamed,” she wrote later. “I was thinking how this paramedic looked and people died.”

A sophomore reproached herself for her survival instincts. She saw the killers and she took off running. Another girl was right by her side. The other girl went down. “Blood was everywhere,” the sophomore said. “It was just terrible.” She kept running. Later that day, she confessed her story to a Rocky Mountain News reporter. “Why didn’t I stop to help that girl?” she asked. Her voice grew very soft. “I’m so mad,” she said. “I was so selfish.”

Brad and Misty Bernall got home around ten P.M. Brad climbed on top of the garden shed with a pair of binoculars to peer across the field. The library windows were blown out, and he could see men milling about inside. They were in blue jackets with big yellow letters: ATF. They had their heads down, but Brad couldn’t quite make out what they were up to. “I guess they were stepping over bodies, looking for explosives,” he said.

They were searching for live explosives and live gunmen. SWAT teams searched every broom closet. If third, fourth, or fifth shooters were still hiding out, they would be flushed out by morning.

Brad came back into the house. At 10:30, an explosion shook the neighborhood. Brad and Misty ran upstairs. They looked out Cassie’s window, but nothing moved. Whatever it was, it had passed. Cassie’s bed was empty. Misty feared she was still in the school. Had she been injured by the blast?

It was the bomb squad’s one major mistake. They were moving bombs out of the area for controlled explosions. As they loaded one into a trailer, the strike-anywhere match Eric used for a detonator brushed the trailer wall and it blew. Bomb technicians fell backward as trained, and the blast shot straight up. No one was hurt, but it threw a big scare into the team. Everyone was exhausted. This was getting dangerous. They called it a night. Commanders instructed them to return at 6:30 A.M.

Brad and Misty kept watching. “I knew Cassie was in there somewhere,” Brad said. “It was terrible to know that she was on the other side of the fence, and there was nothing we could do.”