On April 20, Dylan Klebold’s familiar black BMW swung into a parking space in the Columbine High School lot just as Chad Laughlin pulled out on his way to lunch. The cars nearly collided….

 Laughlin playfully flipped Klebold the bird, then shrugged an apology.  
“He sort of nodded a bit,” says Laughlin, who now reads more into his friend’s expression.  ”He had the look on his face like he was glad to see I was getting out of there.”  Alone in the car, Klebold likely knew that the end was near. But those who thought they knew him saw Klebold preparing for a future that had nothing to do with bullets and bombs.  Klebold was making college plans. A week before the Columbine killings, he and his father toured the University of Arizona in Tucson, which Dylan planned to attend in the fall.  Tom Klebold put down a deposit on a dorm room for his son.

“Roger Clemens.” The words bounced off the walls of Chad Laughlin’s basement, launching Dylan Klebold on his usual semi-comic rant. For the second straight year, someone else had selected his favorite player in the Columbine Fantasy Baseball League, and he playfully protested the unfairness of it all.

It was Sunday, March 7, and more than a dozen people had gathered for the annual draft, in which team “owners” selected players whose statistics they would track religiously throughout the summer. Klebold picked near the end of the first round and took Los Angeles Dodgers’ ace Kevin Brown, then Dodgers’ reliever Jeff Shaw.  “He knew what he was doing,” says Laughlin, the league commissioner who used to trade baseball cards with Klebold in elementary school.

As draft-day hunger set in, Klebold suggested pizza. A part-time cook at the local Blackjack, he could swing an employee discount: five larges for $22. But he also insisted that for procuring a discount, he shouldn’t have to pony up any cash. As the pizza disappeared, the kids’ interest in the draft’s late rounds dissolved into boredom. Most of the others left, but Klebold stayed to the end, meticulously filling out each space on his team’s roster with a carefully calculated selection.

Like any fantasy league aficionado, Klebold coveted slugger Mark McGwire and regularly tried to convince rival owner Chris Hooker to trade him. It was a lost cause, but Klebold persisted. The discussions were part of the ongoing baseball dialogue that came to define their friendship. Klebold worked all the angles. He knew Laughlin was taking a correspondence math course, and offered to help him prepare for the final exam if Laughlin would waive his $30 fantasy league entry fee. It was a tempting offer, given Klebold’s whiz-kid reputation for math.

“He was kind of joking, but kind of serious,” says Laughlin. The week before the Columbine rampage, Klebold saw fit to make a fantasy roster move. He informed Laughlin that he was adding rookie pitcher Freddy Garcia of the Seattle Mariners to his lineup.  He discussed possible trades with other kids as recently as the day before he and Eric Harris stormed the school in a suicidal fusillade of bullets and bombs. Klebold was in first place when he died.

“I liked him,” says Tim Kastle, a Columbine student and fantasy league rival who, days earlier, had looked down the barrel of Klebold’s gun before the shooter chose to spare him.  “He was shy, more than anything. I had never seen him get in a fight or any real big arguments with anybody, ever. He really was a pretty normal and a pretty nice guy. We’re all thinking it was some kind of double life.”

Life and death of a follower – Denverpost – May 2, 1999

The last time Chad Laughlin saw his buddy Dylan Klebold, the two almost smashed into each other in the parking lot of Columbine High School. Laughlin was driving his Mistubishi Galant, headed off-campus with a friend for lunch. Klebold, wearing his black duster, was barreling into the lot in his Beemer. Laughlin flipped him off, by way of a good-natured greeting, then tore out of there.

Yet Laughlin is wary of the search for simple, overriding causes for the killers’ pathology. He’s skeptical of self-appointed authorities on Columbine; the way the media appropriated the tragedy and spun its own elaborate myths about the school and its subcultures; and the recent books that claim to explain what really happened. “I’m not a fan of the stuff coming out that’s considered definitive when they’re not even talking to the people who knew these guys,” he says.

Certain speculations in Columbine, Salon writer Dave Cullen’s widely praised account, are particularly irksome to Laughlin. He disputes Cullen’s portrayal of the killers as not athletic (“Eric was a good soccer player and Dylan was a great pitcher”) and scoffs at the notion that Harris was some kind of chick magnet, an assertion based largely on the account of one reputed girlfriend who investigators found to have credibility problems. Laughlin introduced Harris to one girl he dated for a year but never got serious with; he suspects both killers died as virgins.

“A lot of the tension in the school came from the class above us,” Laughlin insists. “There were people fearful of walking by a table where you knew you didn’t belong, stuff like that. Certain groups certainly got preferential treatment across the board. I caught the tail end of one really horrible incident, and I know Dylan told his mother that it was the worst day of his life.”

That incident, according to Laughlin, involved seniors pelting Klebold with “ketchup-covered tampons” in the commons. 

He has come to see his friend Klebold as not a mere follower but a much more disturbed, angrier person than he ever suspected.  “They were both equally responsible,” he says. “But if there was one who wanted to back out at the end, it was Dylan.”

Forgiving my Columbine High School friend, Dylan Klebold – Denver Westword – April 2009

“They did feel isolated and they were definitely “bullied” – people don’t want to believe they were but we have mutual friends who have described many incidents to me that they witnessed first hand. Tampons dipped in ketchup being thrown at Dylan, for one. My friend (Chad Laughlin) found him in the bathroom and was consoling him from that incident. But they did have friends.”

Calence Emerson – DylanKlebold.com – December 2012

Chad Laughlin – JC-001-000957 – “Outside Witness”