Second Suspension

About one month after the van break-in (February ‘98), Dylan scratched something into another student’s locker. Peter Horvath, the dean, doesn’t know why Dylan chose the locker and doesn’t recall the student’s name, only that the student felt threatened when he saw Dylan scratching with a paper clip. Because Dylan didn’t finish, the design he was scratching was unclear, Horvath says.Dylan was detained and Horvath was with him for about forty minutes while they waited for Tom Klebold to arrive and deal with the incident. “Dylan became very agitated,” according to a summary of Horvath’s interview with police. Horvath tried to calm him down, and Dylan cussed at him, although it wasn’t personal. Dylan was “very upset with the school system and the way CHS handled people, to include the people that picked on him and others,” according to the police interview. Horvath thought Dylan was a “pretty angry kid” who also had anger issues with his dad and was upset with “stuff at home,” the police report continued.

Yet in an interview with me, Horvath doesn’t recall Dylan being upset with his father, but at “being suspended for what he felt was a pretty minor incident.” Dylan, Horvath adds, “understands the politics of how, like, a school system works. He was smart around that. And he was angry at the system; not angry at me, but angry at the system; that the system would be established that it would allow for what he did to be a suspendable offense if that makes any sense to you. He was mad at the world because he was being suspended, but he was mad at the system because the system that was designed was allowing him to be suspended.”

“Talking to Dylan was like talking to a very intellectual person. He wasn’t a stupid kid. He’s not a thug kid that’s getting suspended. He’s a smart, intelligent kid. I just remember the conversation being at a level; that would, you know, you’d sit there and you’d think, ‘Wow, this is a pretty high-level conversation for a kid like this.’ 

You could just tell his feelings around, I’m going to use the word politics again but again, he was too intelligent sometimes I felt for his age. You know, he knew too much about certain things and he spoke too eloquently about knowing the law and why he was being suspended and knowing, just, you know, speaking about how society is this way towards people.”

Tom Klebold, whom Horvath thought of as an “Einstein,” eventually arrived. With his glasses and salt and pepper hair, he was proper, eloquent, and astute. He also had serious problems with this second suspension and asked Dylan to leave the room—an unusual move in Horvath’s experience. “He [Tom] felt as though it was too severe for what had happened,” Horvath said of the standard, three-day suspension for essentially a vandalism charge.

–Peter Horovath, Dean of Columbine High
Columbine: A True Crime Story by Jeff Kass

Not long after the call from Judy, Tom got another call from the school. Four months after his suspension for hacking the locker combinations, Dylan had deliberately scratched the face of someone’s locker with a key. He was given an in-school suspension for a day and owed the school seventy dollars to pay for a new door. Tom went over to write the check. He asked the dean about the freshmen, certain that Dylan would not have lashed out without being provoked.

The dean acknowledged they had a particularly “rowdy” group of freshmen, acting as if they “owned the place,” but assured Tom that the administration was dealing with it. We talked with Dylan that night. Tom was irritated with him for destroying property and irritated with the school for charging so much money to repaint a locker door. Dylan gave Tom the cash he had on hand and promised to work off the rest of the debt by doing extra chores. I told Dylan he couldn’t allow the obnoxious behavior of others to upset him.

I don’t know whose locker Dylan scratched, or if it was simply the one in front of him when the destructive urge hit. I have read in the years since that the scratch read “Fags” —a slur I have also read was frequently leveled against Dylan and Eric in the hallways at Columbine—but we did not hear that from the school.

– Sue Klebold – ‘A Mother’s Reckoning’