“Both Sides”:  The Eric that Sarah Davis knew

Sarah Davis, had little firsthand experience with guns. But when Davis was a 6th grader, she met Eric Harris, one of the two boys who would later kill 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, before committing suicide. Davis tells author S. Beth Atkin about her history with Harris, her reaction to the shootings, and what she thinks schools need to do to keep other students from taking the same tragic turn.

People will read this with their own agenda and get out of it what they want. I hope people think that I see both sides of things, but it’s a possibility they won’t. I’ve tried to be clear that I think what happened at Columbine was a horrendous act. I don’t feel like I’m the best person to talk about what went on that day because I wasn’t there. But I do feel like I can give my perspective because I had some experience with somebody who committed a horrible crime. But he wasn’t a horrible person. The negative side has been put out there so much. I guess my goal is just to balance it out.

I don’t necessarily talk about Columbine and what happened after. I have a few friends that I talk to. I didn’t take the time to deal with it right then. To grieve for the loss of a friend was next to impossible because of everything else that was going on. So that’s something that I have not done completely. It’s now been five years, and just over the past year, I’m just starting to process this. But I mean it’s affected every part of my life. It’s affected every part.

The day of the shooting, I was outside playing street hockey with my friends. I was 18 then. My mom came to the door and said, “There was another school shooting.” And your heart kind of drops. I later came inside with my friends.We were watching TV, flipping through the channels, and saw the school shooting thing. On the bottom of the TV it says where they are, Littleton, Colorado. I just sat there and couldn’t move at first. Then I got up and I went in my room. I shut the door and I started bawling. It was awful. And then my mom came down and asked, “What’s wrong?” And I couldn’t even get the words out. I finally told her, “Littleton. Eric lives in Littleton. That’s where the school shooting was and I’m really worried about him.”

The next morning I went to my softball practice and I didn’t take my sunglasses off. My eyes were beet red from crying the whole night. When I got home, my dad came out and his eyes were all puffy. He said, “I have bad news. Your friend Eric was one of the shooters.” I pretty much broke down there in the driveway.

I didn’t talk to anyone about knowing Eric. But this girl who had been at my house when we saw the shooting on TV, I think she called the media. So this is how the whole fiasco with the media got started. I don’t want to say it was easy for the media to cover this story, ‘cause there was nothing easy about this situation. But they ended up focusing on that Eric was my boyfriend in 6th grade. I thought it was ridiculous that they concentrated on that, instead of the substance of what I had to say.

The problem I have with the media now is they label people negatively and it sticks. You’ll never hear me making excuses for what Eric did. He did commit a monstrous act. All I ask is that people take a second and look a little bit deeper, just a little bit. Maybe I’m not going to convince anyone that he wasn’t an evil entity or a monster. That’s what they made him out to be. I don’t even think the word human being was ever used in relation to him. I feel like, by the media not telling the whole story, it was easier for people just to say, “Oh well, those are evil little monsters.We can deal with them because we know who they are.” Then they label them as wearing a black trench coat and being angry all the time. The stereotyping led to this situation where the real issues weren’t addressed afterward. And if you’re looking for answers as to why it happened, or how somebody can go from being your boy next door to the point where they’re able to do this-well, maybe if the media had covered it differently, it would shed light on the idea that it was a process.

Eric and I were in 6th grade when we first met, and I was so awkward then. And he was really quiet. We have an Air Force base in Plattsburgh, [New York]. So he was an Air Force base kid. I wouldn’t say we were close friends right away. But we became friends and he was like a nice quiet kid. So he was one of my first boyfriends-well, it doesn’t really matter. I mean, it was like a 6th grade boyfriend.

It’s kind of funny to think back about things we did together. Like we went to the Clinton County Fair with two other kids. I don’t like certain rides very much. They were all about to go on one and he came running out so I didn’t have to be by myself. He was just a sweetheart. He was a nice kid. I mean, he had friends. It wasn’t like he was a loner then. Maybe he was out in Colorado-actually I guess he was, ’cause they wrote and talked about that in the media. But when he was in Plattsburgh, he wasn’t like that.

When we first kept in touch, we wrote letters. I have some of them and it’s funny to look back and read them, because some of them are really silly. He said things like, “I don’t want to see other girls.” And we also talked on the phone. There was a time when we lost touch for a little bit, but not that long. Then we got into the Internet. So we would e-mail and didn’t talk as much on the phone. But once some of the serious stuff happened-like when he got caught robbing that van-we talked then because he was having some real issues. I think I was 16 or early 17. Then it was every couple of weeks we’d e-mail or talk, and it was always a good thing. I’m a very quiet and not a very emotional person and tend to listen. He tried to be open, and get me to talk about things that were going on in my life. I really liked that about him. He was compassionate.

I remember this one phone conversation, I was standing in my kitchen talking to him. I said, “Why would you do that-break into a van?” He said, “I don’t know. It was spur of the moment.We saw it there.” I’d like to believe what he said was true. I don’t know if it was or not. He told me, “Now I have to deal with this court stuff. My parents are real pissed off.” And I said, “OK, you made a mistake. Live with the consequences, learn from it. And move on from there.” He said, “I definitely am. I think I’m going to start a new job. I’m playing soccer here. And things are going better.”

Later on, I was thinking that Eric had lost a lot of hope for his future. I thought things were getting better with him. But he was having a problem with his after-school plans. He told me he’d gotten rejected from the armed forces. And his college prospects weren’t looking up all that much. I don’t feel like he thought that he had a lot going for him. After it all happened, I just remember thinking that these were important things. But I don’t have an answer to the big question: “How could this have happened?” I would never pretend to have an answer for that.

I guess it was a combination of things that told me something was wrong. I was concerned about the van break-in, and Eric didn’t seem to be responding well to his juvenile diversion program. He seemed angry and resentful. I remember sitting with a friend after one of the school shootings that happened before Columbine. I was telling her I was concerned about Eric and that the shooting had made me think of him and it seemed crazy, but I felt like it was something he was capable of. You know it’s funny, because he never mentioned guns. I know that one time he sent me this Web site. It was something very dark and creepy. I was surprised and even thought that he had sent me the wrong link to look at.

Sometimes I separate thinking about the Eric I knew from the person who did this shooting. But it really can’t be separated. When I found out that Eric was one of the shooters, obviously I was upset. But the reality is I would never say I was shocked. Did he ever say to me, “Sarah, I’m going to go on a shooting rampage at my school?” No. But I just knew it was him. People say he must have said something. But he didn’t, and there wasn’t any one thing that told me this would happen. I think I will always have to fight the feeling that I could have done something to stop this. But I also have come to see that I wasn’t right there with him and I really didn’t know it would happen.

What would I want people to know about Eric? My whole point is he was a good person to me and so I know at least part of him was good. I wish people could look at him, or at other young people who have committed horrible acts, as human and capable of doing something good. I understand why people define someone by what they’ve done, but that one action is not always the whole person.

Every school is going to make kids bring mesh backpacks and have metal detectors and guards. You’re just putting a Band-Aid on the problem, you’re not fixing it. One thing I recognize as being a positive change is that in certain schools, but not most of them, you see people making an effort and making it a community. They’re not letting kids go unnoticed by an adult in their life. I’m not saying that was the situation with Eric. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But I saw it at my own high school. There were kids who were allowed to slip through the cracks. And that’s not OK. When I’m finished with law school, I would like to help kids and their communities to find better options for juvenile offenders. Yeah, no doubt it has something to do with Eric. Like I said before, this incident affected every part of my life. So it affects my choice about where I want to go and what I want to do, definitely.

What would I say to Eric if he were here right now? My mind doesn’t work like that. I’ll never have that opportunity, so I don’t go there because that doesn’t do anything for me. What I do think is, it all comes back to the idea of, if we’re ever going to put a stop to things like this, then we need to come to terms with the fact that people who do this, they’re human. They’re not so different from you and me and you’re not going to be able to just pinpoint and figure out who’s evil. It doesn’t really work that way.

[Source]

 Excerpted from her book Gunstories: Life-Changing Experiences With Guns (HarperCollins), writer-photographer S. Beth Atkin interviewed dozens of teenagers who’d experienced the effects, both positive and negative, of guns on their lives. Some speak of newfound confidence developed by learning to target shoot or hunt, while others recount how crime and violence wreaked havoc on friends and loved ones. HarperCollins Publishers (www.harpercollins.com).

—

More articles on Sarah Davis under the cut…..

From a Plattsburgh newspaper interview with Sarah Davis

How could it happen? How could two young gunmen enter a school and open fire on students and faculty, leaving a path of death and destruction behind them? But for Sarah, the tragedy soon struck much closer to home, when she learned one of the two suspected killers was her friend Eric Harris She had stayed in touch with him since he moved from Plattsburgh six years ago.

“He was my boyfriend when he left,” Sarah said, sitting on the patio of her Plattsburgh home Sunday afternoon. “But we were in the sixth-grade. He was a boy who was my friend.“  The last time they saw each other, Sarah, Eric Harris and some other friends went to the Clinton County Fair together. Sarah knew Eric was moving away, but the trip to the fair was not to say good-bye to friendship. It was just a group of kids having fun on the carnival rides. "He was a shy kid, but he was a good kid,” she recalled. “I never knew him to do anything wrong when he was here. We were in the same group of kids, and we always hung out together, both inside and out of school.”

When Harris moved away, the two kept in touch writing letters. But soon they realized they could stay closer by e-mailing and talking online through America On Line’s Instant Messaging. ”I don’t know if it was a conscious decision or what, but we just continued to stay in touch,” Sarah said. “Definitely, it has declined over the years, but, basically, I would tell him what was going on in my life, and he would talk to me about his.”

Sarah said she seldom saw the anger that was building up inside Harris, though he let her know that he wasn’t happy in Littleton. ”When he first moved there, he didn’t like it at all,” she said. “I don’t remember if it was because he didn’t have any friends or if he didn’t like the environment.” The Eric Harris she knew did not like violence, Sarah said.

She never knew that he had become interested in guns and bombs, or about his homepage that described an angry teenager filled with hate. ”Obviously, things changed,” she said. “If he had stayed here, I don’t think this ever would have happened.” Sarah said she only saw the angry Harris once in an e-mail he wrote a while ago. But she can’t recall what it was about. She didn’t respond to it at the time, but, she said, it “did scare me a little.” Harris did tell her about the time he and Dylan Klebold, the other suspected gunman, were arrested for vandalizing a vehicle about a year ago. ”We talked about it online, and we talked about it on the phone a little, but he said it was not a planned thing,” she said. “It was just a spur-of-the-moment decision. He was put on probation and grounded. I remember he couldn’t use his computer, so we didn’t talk for a while. I don’t think we discussed it again.”

E-mails and phone conversations between Sarah and Harris were not very regular anymore. Usually, the two would hook up on Instant Messaging, the AOL service that allows people to write notes to each other very quickly, almost as if they were in the same room talking. Still, the conversations did not reveal Harris’s dark side. Sarah talked about her future plans at college, and Harris said he was considering a local college but might go into the military. But that all changed Tuesday night. Sarah was sitting in the den with some friends, knowing that something had happened in a school in the Denver area. It wasn’t until she saw it was Harris’s school that she started to worry about him. ”I had a feeling something bad had happened,” she said.When her friends left, Sarah went on-line to see if Harris might be online as well. He was not. She tried calling his house several times, but there was no answer. It wasn’t until the next day when Sarah was about to leave for a trip to Brandeis University, where she’ll attend college in the fall, that she found out. ”My dad came out to the car and told me Eric was one of the shooters,” she said. “That’s how I found out.” At freshman open house that day, all Sarah could think of was her connection to the Colorado tragedy. ”I cried all day,” she said. “The second day I pretty much stopped crying, except when people mentioned it. But I’m kind of glad I was out of town. There was just too much going on here for me to deal with.” She said it’s still hard to connect Harris with the killings. ”I’ve been thinking and thinking about what I would say to him if he was alive,” she said. “I can’t even describe to you how I feel about this. I know it’s real, but I can’t believe it. ”I focus on Eric killing people, and I just can’t picture it. ”I can’t imagine what those people are going through. I can’t imagine what the parents of Eric and — Dylan, is it? — are going through. I extend my deepest sympathy to all of those people.” Sarah doesn’t recall the last time she talked to Harris. She can’t check her e-mail because, for some reason, all the Davis AOL accounts have been frozen. Sarah guesses it might be because she was on Harris’s e-mail list.

[Tumblr Source – original source not found]

–
After bill’s veto, Columbine victims on his mind

The FBI refused to show Sarah Davis the email Eric Harris composed but didn’t send to her on April 20, 1999, just before he and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, guns blazing.

Before the firing ceased with their suicides, the two friends had killed 12 students and a teacher while wounding 23 others.I had gotten to know Sarah when she worked on an anti-gang initiative for North Shore Community College where I served as president. She attended Northeastern Law School dedicating herself to understanding “how somebody can go from being your boy next door to the point where they’re able to do this.” (Sarah Davis, “Both Sides” published in Gun Stories: Life-Changing Experiences with Guns; S. Beth Aiken, Katherine Tegen Books; 2006.) Sarah and Eric had been childhood friends in Plattsburgh, NY, and were boyfriend/girlfriend in the sixth grade. He was not the monster the press made him out to be though committing a despicable act. Sarah dedicated her life after this incident to find out how good kids can do very bad things and ways to intervene in their lives to prevent atrocities such as happened at Columbine.

Sarah as she puts it, does not dislike guns. She believes people have their rights but thinks it has to be done within reason.But she does believe that “guns were a major part of Columbine.” In her essay she continues, “We are talking about an incident that occurred in a state that is notoriously ‘gun friendly’.” Eric grew up in a military family in which guns were more acceptable than elsewhere. “Then you add in that he played a lot of violent video games and watched violent media.”While Sarah doesn’t blame the media she does believe that “the combination of being in a gun-friendly environment and becoming numb to violence can be dangerous for a young person.” She continues, “The fact that guns are so easily accessible is a huge problem, and it makes it so much easier for tragic things like this to happen. If you can’t get a gun, you can’t use a gun.”

Towards the end of her essay she brings it together, “it all ties in – the guns, the violence, and the circumstances that push young people to want to kill each other and themselves.”I will be thinking of Sarah, Eric and the victims of the Columbine massacre as I vote to uphold Governor Hassan’s veto of SB 116 which would eliminate the requirement for securing a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Like Governor Hassan I believe that balancing the rights of gun owners with the rights of citizens to be safe in our communities means that in this instance the latter outweighs the former.And yes, I will vote to uphold her veto having voted against the bill in the first place, in the name of both the kids who became killers and those who lost their lives needlessly at Columbine High in 1999. Unless and until we can change the culture of gun violence one message at a time, such atrocities are more likely than less to occur. This bill fails to pass the “within reason” test Sarah Davis proposes in her compelling essay.Rep. Wayne B. Burton represents Strafford District 6 in the NH Legislature.

[Source]

–
Shattered Lives

Still, both boys were making plans: Sarah Davis, 18, a friend of Eric from Plattsburgh, said he was planning to visit her this summer on a cross-country road trip. And Devon Adams had a date to see the film “The Matrix” with Dylan and another friend on Wednesday evening, April 21…..

[Source]

–

Harris sixth grade girlfriend Sarah Davis was allegedly Jewish – she said “Eric was angry when his family moved from New York to Colorado”  

Killer Friendship
The Tattoo, By Amanda Lehmert and Jessica Majerus 

Colorado shooter Eric Harris’ old middle school classmates remember a normal kid, not an outcast.  In a town of 25,000 people, no one suspects the kid she sits next to in class may someday be a mass murderer.   At least Abi Tenebaum and Jessica Sapel never thought Eric Harris – now one of the infamous Columbine High shooters – would cause such terror and devastation. Harris, who with his friend Dylan Klebold gunned down a dozen fellow students and a teacher before killing themselves in an April 20 attack at their high school in Littleton, Colo., was a former middle school classmate of Tenebaum and Sapel’s in Plattsburgh, N.Y. Tenebaum, now a 17-year-old senior at Mayo High School in Rochester, Minn. and Sapel, an 18-year-old senior in Plattsburgh, each knew Harris when his family lived on the local Air Force base. Plattsburgh, on the western shore of Lake Champlain in the northernmost part of New York, is less than 25 miles from the Canadian border.

Tenebaum said Harris was a “normal sixth grader,” and “not one of the outcasts.” Sapel called Harris  a “good kid” and “sweet.” He “never struck me as someone who would do this,” said Sapel. Although there have been reports that Harris and Klebold chose the date because it was Hitler’s birthday and singled out a black student and athletes as victims for their savage attack, both teenagers said when Harris lived in Plattsburgh he never showed signs of any hatred toward those groups.

According to Tenebaum, Harris dated a Jewish girl, Sarah Davis. Davis and Harris apparently remained friends after Harris left town, exchanging messages via e-mail. Contacted recently in Plattsburgh, Davis didn’t want to talk about Harris. “It’s been difficult,” she said. Sapel said she didn’t believe the news that Harris had targeted a black student. She said Harris’ two best friends in Plattsburgh were an Asian student and a black student.

Harris was also an active athlete who played Little League in the town. Tenebaum said that Harris associated with “preps,” but said he wasn’t  "an annoying prick.“

Sapel can’t imagine how this gentle middle schooler turned into a trench coat toting criminal, but she thinks Harris began having problems after his family moved from New York to Colorado, during their seventh-grade year. "It didn’t happen to him here (in Plattsburgh),” Sapel said. “None of us can imagine what happened.” In Plattsburgh, Harris was a “nice, normal kid” who wore “jeans, t-shirts, and sweatshirts,” Sapel said. If any group of students in the country has stopped to think twice about the massacre in Columbine, it’s the students of Plattsburgh. When she heard from a local newspaper reporter about Harris’  role in the killings, Sapel said, her mouth just dropped. She said she was amazed that “something like this could happen to someone I know.”

At first, Sapel said, getting attention from the national media who came to the town to talk about the incident, “was kinda exciting.” But the attention soon became too much. Sapel said she felt like telling the media to “go away.” “We don’t want to talk about this. It isn’t a news story, it’s a tragedy,” she said. Now Sapel said teenagers in her town are wondering what might have happened “if [Harris] had stayed here” instead of moving to Colorado just five years ago. “We’re glad it didn’t happen to us,” said Sapel. “It could have been us.”  

[Source]

—
Pair Bragged of Slay Plan

S. Air Force major retired from the military. During the early 1990s, the family lived in upstate Plattsburgh, a small community where Harris attended Stafford Middle School and had many friends. Although he and Klebold allegedly singled out Columbine student jocks for execution, Harris was once an avid athlete. He played right field for the Sun Foods team in the Plattsburgh Little League and constantly talked baseball in school. “When he found out he was moving to Colorado, he became a big fan of the Colorado Rockies. He wore their baseball cap all the time,” said Kyle Ross, a former Plattsburgh classmate. Harris kept in touch with Sarah Davis, another Plattsburgh friend, and planned a trip back East to see her this summer. When she heard about the slaughter, Davis anxiously called Colorado trying to reach Harris hardly anticipating he was one of the gunmen. “She was really shocked when she found out,” said Nora Bordeau, a Plattsburgh friend of Harris and Davis. If Harris stood out for anything beyond membership in the rebel clique, it was for his skill at Doom, the shoot-’em-up computer game he played for hours in the four-bedroom, three-bath house on Reed St. his father and mother, Katherine, bought in 1996 for $180,000. Klebold, 17, often came by to join the computer play, tooling over in a BMW.

[Source]

Eric Harris in the sixth grade – the year his family moved states for a third time to Plattsburgh New York, where he attended Stafford Middle School up until the seventh grade.

“He was a really nice kid. He was really sweet, got good grades. He loved sports,” a former classmate, Nora Bordeau, said in an interview a week after the shootings. “He was a shy kid, but he was a good kid,” another classmate and old friend of Eric, Sarah Davis, recalled. “We just wanted people to know he wasn’t always like that. It’s scary that people can change so much in five years.”

 [Original source unknown]