Doubts

Brooks came home from school, and told his mom that a friend had tipped him off about a Web site Eric had created, in which in addition to hate language and angry threats such as “I am the law, if you don’t like it, you die. If I don’t like you or I don’t like what you want me to do, you die. God I can’t wait till I can kill you people”, he also threatened to kill Brooks. 

But Klebold cared enough about Brown to alert him to death threats on Harris’ Web site.  

It was Dylan, the loyal friend, who had tipped Brooks off about Eric’s Website. Dylan was afraid of Eric finding this out, so asked for Brooks to not tell anyone who had tipped him off.

“He was really looking out for me,” Brown said. “That’s the way he was. An extremely good kid.”

Although the Browns reported this to the police and they were aware of his Web site, no action was taken to look into it. No one, even Brooks, believed that Eric would follow through on his threats–they just thought he was blowing off steam. [Source and Source]  – 

May 2, 1999

Doubts

A month after Columbine, Brooks reasoned that Dylan told him about Eric’s malicious website threats because he was looking out for him.  Two plus years later, he questions why Dylan would do such a thing: “maybe he thought it was funny” “maybe he was in on it with Eric”.  Years go by and Brooks complicates Dylan’s intent to do what he did, rationalizing it until he’s one big permanent ball of confusion. And yet, it seems pretty simple to me:  Brooks was Dylan’s friend from childhood but Eric was also Dylan’s present good friend. Dylan liked both and was obviously caught in a moral dilemma. He cared for the potential safety or lack thereof of his old friend yet was nervous to broach the subject with Eric and tell him to back off Brooks because in his defense of Brooks it would ruin his relationship with Eric. After Dylan lost Zack to Devon, he couldn’t stand to lose Eric as well over political shit about Brooks.  So, Dylan opted to take a risk, to secretly warn Brooks and tip him off about the website, purely out of respect for their history together.  He asked Brooks for his confidence and he pretty much solidly trusted that Brooks, his long-term friend, would not mention anything so he wouldn’t risk losing his friendship with Eric.  Dylan went behind Eric’s back to keep Brooks safe. There was no way to avoid that in trying to protect Brooks.  He knew Eric would never see it that way thus the subterfuge.  So, it seems crystal clear what Dylan’s intent truly was.  Brooks merely let the fact that Dylan made a terrible mistake in the last 49 minutes of his life color everything about his character long before he ever made that choice.  Long before Dylan was fully committed with NBK, he cared for all his friends and  never wanted to lose a single relationship with any of them. Dylan couldn’t stand the thought of abandonment, to either lose a friendship or by putting a friend’s life in jeopardy which in a sense, amounted to him abandoning them. He’d begun to worry when Eric, who had kept upping the ante with the Brooks website death threats, was going to finally simmer down and forget about it. It just kept getting worse, and eventually, Eric started broadcasting Brooks’ phone number up on the website. So, Dylan intervened and it was quite a risky thing to do for him but he was starting to get a bit worried. He knew the Brown family well from his childhood friendship with Brooks. He wasn’t super close with Brooks these days but they had a lot of good past times together; they were still friends, if a bit more distant. Dylan simply cared too much.  But, eventually it got to the point where he let go of the caring because the need to end the pain and leave the earth seemed to hold more sway.   If Dylan was the one that came across Brooks on the morning of 4/20, there is no question, imo, that he would’ve let him live.   Granted, it would have been a very awkward bumping in to one another but…it’s unquestionable that he would’ve spared Brooks’ life without need for considerations. The loyalty towards a friendship would’ve been clear even then on that terrible day when everyone was supposed to be fair game. Over the years, Brooks forgot this about Dylan and who he was in their personal friendship and doings together.

“He was really looking out for me. That’s the way he was. An extremely good kid.”

What Brooks said in May ‘99 about Dylan in the article above, is the uncomplicated truth which he’s chosen to forget and rationalize away. 
And Dylan was just that. End of story.  The act on that fateful day shouldn’t have negated any of the ‘good’ or ‘right choices’ that Dylan had made over the year/s before. A couple years after Columbine, Brooks begun to direly need for Dylan’s motivations to be questionable in that moment, shady even, because he simply could not manage to reconcile that Dylan was a good friend that made a decent choice in that moment as he’d done the majority of the times in his life beforehand – yet made one colossal destructive mistake in the end. And yet, the irony…that Dylan could’ve unwittingly stopped Columbine by making that right and good choice, by warning Brooks, but that was not to be in the Hand of Fate.