Yoshi Carroll – In Dylan’s Shadow

While videoing the Basement Tapes on March 18, 1999, the boys “then go on to discuss “Yoshi” in a negative fashion”…… 

Nate Dykeman was asked by the authorities if he knew of an individual by the name of Yoshi.  Dykeman explained that Yoshi had to be Yoshi Carroll. Yoshi was a friend of Dykeman’s who came to Littleton from Romania at approximately the same time that Dykeman moved to Colorado in the 8^th grade.

Nate describes Yoshi as “a real nice guy who is involved in movies and the drama club.  He is also a real smart math wizard” but offers that he does not know of any association between Yoshi with Dylan and Eric.  He recalled that “Eric and Dylan would not say anything derogatory about Yoshi in front of himself because they both knew that Nate and Yoshi were friends.”  Incidentally, Andrew “Andy” Robinson, who participated heavily in coordinating school plays, who was Rachel Scott’s acting mentor, and who went on to write and direct the 2009 movie ”April Showers” about a look inside a tragedy through the eyes of a survivor, based on the actual events of picking up the pieces in the aftermath of school violence, was Yoshi’s best friend.

 

Yoshi Carroll

mentioned that Zack Heckler, a friend of Eric and Dylan’s, was in his first-period Psychology class at 7:30 a.m. (this would’ve been around the time that Dylan, Eric, and Nate were finishing up early morning bowling class). Yoshi mentioned that (during this time period of spring ‘99)

he works the sound board in the auditorium at the school for the drama department and that Heckler works the lights, so they work in conjunction with each other.     

He mentioned that they had finished work on the latest school play, ‘Smoke in the Room,’ in which Rachel Scott was in the starring role. (See below*)   
Zack Heckler stated to him, “Ya know, up until now I really didn’t like you, but now I think you are okay.”  After which point, he and Heckler get along very well now. He then advised that he did not notice anything strange about Heckler on April 20^th but he could not recall if he was in psychology class with him on that date.

Yoshi had second period free (during which time Dylan was in Calculus class and Eric, Advanced Video Productions) and that he probably wandered the school some, went to the Tech Lab to do some work. He also recalled visiting the library for about an hour studying, during his free period.

Yoshi Carroll had known Dylan Klebold since the 8^th grade when he’d newly moved to the area. He had been in Algebra class together with Dylan at Ken Caryl Junior High. He never saw much of Klebold in high school though, until their senior year.  Yoshi advised that Klebold was the sound man for the school plays and often worked the soundboard.  He said that Zack Heckler had told him that Dylan was no good at the job (though) but loved it. He believes that Zack Heckler told the teacher that Dylan was not very good as a soundboard man and suggested that Yoshi Carroll to take Klebold’s place.

During the previous school year, Klebold, Heckler and another student whom he believed to be Chris Tabaldo, maintained the school’s web server and web page. Yoshi advised that those three students had given themselves access to the web server and had sent e-mail bombs out to other locations and were hacking into the Jefferson County School District computers and that the three had lost their job administering the computers due to the hacking.  (Note, this actually would have to have been October ’97 when Zack, Dylan, and Eric had gotten busted for the locker hacking incident and not only had their computer admin jobs revoked but were suspended from school for 3-5 days. Yoshi does not appear to know exactly what happened and only that they lost their computer admin duties for hacking.)  At the beginning of the school year, Yoshi’s senior year (’98-99), he went to teacher Mr. Rich Long, who ran the computer programs and asked if you could maintain the system to learn more about computers. He was granted the job by Mr. Long. [Intriguing redacted paragraph…..!?!?!]

Yoshi advised that Zack Heckler has been over his house on numerous occasions since the incident at Columbine High School and that one of his friends, Devon Adams, had been coming to his house often since the incident occurred.  He advised that on one occasion she received a telephone call at his residence and began crying after she hung up the phone. [Intriguing redacted paragraph…..?!?!?!?]

Since the incident had occurred, numerous friends had been socializing at his (Yoshi’s) house each day and helping each other out.  A few noted socializing at his residence were: Zack Heckler, Devon Adams, Andrew Robinson, Eric Veik, Nick Baumgart and Sarah Bay. 

More under the cut

I found it very interesting that Yoshi Carroll paralleled Dylan with a few similar abilities and interests. Like Dylan, Yoshi was a extremely bright at math and Nate described him as ‘a real smart math wizard’. Yoshi my have even been gifted at least in that area.  The two had been in the same math class in 8^th grade junior high.  Also, like Dylan, Yoshi was into movies and participated in the drama club as a behind-the-scenes stage technician.  During Yoshi’s senior year of ’98-99, the last months of Dylan’s life, Yoshi mentions he’d cross paths with Dylan the most ever at Columbine since junior high school days. This is likely because they were collaborating on stage tech duties for theater productions.

 At some point, Zack declared to Yoshi that he decided he liked and accepted him. It’s possible too, that Eric and Dylan had previously talked smack about Yoshi behind his back to Zack, who was probably, initially biased against the guy. That is until he realized while working with him in theater that he wasn’t so bad after all. We also get the sense from how Yoshi words everything in his account  that Zack seemed to think Dylan dominated the soundboard, like he felt it was his domain sitting in the chair in the Sound Room and also that from Zack’s pov, Dylan wasn’t ‘all that’ at it as perhaps he thought he was.   Zack, as the long-standing lights production guy, seems to make the arbitrary decision that it’s time to phase Dylan out and to pass on sound production opportunity to his new friend Yoshi.

Zack even went so far as to appeal to a theater teacher, “Mrs C”,  in favor of Yoshi assuming what had been Dylan’s responsibilities for a few years.   I wonder how well that whole political thing went down and whether it soured things for Dylan participating in theater production as he was being given the messge to phase out of it. I suspect that Dylan did not participate in the theater production in his second semester of senior year which would have been January until his death in April ’99. It’s unclear whether he still assisted or not especially as to whether he assisted on the last production that took place weeks before the massacre ‘Smoke in the Room’. (See below)* 

If Dylan (along with Eric) didn’t like Yoshi to begin with, for whatever their reasoning, Yoshi’s eclipsing Dylan in taking over the soundboard role must have made Dylan personally feel resentful of him.  It is unclear if Dylan knew that Zack had, behind-the-scenes, personally had been proactive in phasing him out in favor of Yoshi.  And this begs the question as to why Zack was being two-faced with Dylan. Why would he do such a thing if Dylan was his close friend? Unless, he didn’t really didn’t feel the same way about Dylan as Dylan did about him. But it is certainly puzzling when you consider that Zack made a point ot initiating late night phone calls with Dylan every night as they played computer games over the internet and chatted.   But this wouldn’t be the first time that Zack dissed Dylan behind his back.  The other time he dissed Dylan was in his own Jeffco 11K eyewitness account in which he advised the investigator that “Dylan had wanted to go to college and study computer science, but he (Zack) did not think he was smart enough.” See [here] and [here].

It certainly would be interesting to know exactly how Zack felt about Dylan the last few months leading up to the massacre.  Perhaps even though he stayed in touch with Dylan, Zack had lost faith in his (former best?) friend because of some of the things he’d observed about him and judged him for: such as Dylan inability to focus and maintain decent grades as he himself was doing, or his propensity for drinking, his cutting classes but also for the fact that Dylan was still associating pretty tightly with Eric ( even after Devon had felt threatened and turned off by Eric).  Perhaps the racism and superiority thing rubbed off on Dylan while working theater with Zack as Yoshi was nearby. Of course, after Eric gave Zack the cold shoulder on the heels of the locker hacking incident, Zack had distanced himself from Eric and by extension, Dylan too – so, perhaps more than we know about.   Maybe Zack just thought Dylan was a lazy slacker that he felt seemed overly entitled to lording over the soundboard, and so he’d lost faith in Dylan and his honing his abilities and motivation to excel at anything in life.  It’s difficult to say. One thing is for sure, it certainly would be the holy grail for the opportunity to interview Zack Heckler!  It is just so puzzling how there are two incidents where Zack has thrown Dylan under the bus.  And yet, Dylan, according to his writings, he still saw Zack as his best friend ever who had abandoned him…perhaps, all the while, never knowing Zack had very little faith in him, for whatever reasoning.

What’s worse is that Yoshi also saw a opportunity of moving in on that vacant computer administration role at CHS to learn more about computers.The very same position that teacher Rich Long had taken away from Dylan due to computer hacking with Zack and Chris Tabaldo in his junior year.  Sue had mentioned in her book that Dylan was utterly sad and despondent about losing this job.  Sue had hoped that they would’ve allowed him to keep it while giving him a second chance as he made amends.   

There were very few things that Columbine offered Dylan that he found a spark of enjoyment to do.  Two of those things that he had been participating in had, with time, been usurped by an eager Yoshi Carroll.  Yoshi, the dude that had similar talents to Dylan – hell, they might have been friends if circumstances were different.  But instead, Yoshi eclipsed and surpassed Dylan at computer administration and as the sound man so that by the second semester of senior year, there wasn’t any participatory role left for Dylan to do that sparked any sort of personal interest or passion that he would’ve personally wanted to excel at because he got some sort of enjoyment from it.  The few things he’d dug were transitioned to Yoshi, his replacement.  And incentally, even the screenplays that he, Brooks and Zack were writing and trying to appeal to a local theater to allow them to host, were turned down. It’s as if there was nothing left for him to enjoy and feel accomplished about.  This all dovetails with the time period of January ’99 in which Sue mentions in her book that Dylan seemed very low energy and had seemed, in retrospect, to have spiraled deeper into his depression as she noted he was oversleeping a great deal or she discovered him sitting with that 1000 mile stare.

Given all of that, it is not at all surprising that Dylan and Eric bashed Yoshi on their Basement Tapes rants. Although, it’s rather surprising that Yoshi does not appear to be on either boys’ hit list – least not as unredacted (at least not that I have seen anyway)  I’m sure the two must have said a lot of nasty, derogative, things about the dude. Dylan, in particular, would’ve had adequate reasoning to blow off quite a bit of steam about that opportunistic Yoshi, the foreigner who probably had a fairly substantial Romanian accent. This weird guy they probably felt didn’t deserve to be in their country just kinda moves in on Dylan’s roles at school.  

You can well imagine that he must have had a chip on his shoulder about Yoshi.  He and Eric knew that Nate was friends with him, and Dylan surely must have sensed that tipping point when Zack began to warm up/cozy up to Yoshi too (?)  Eventually, Dylan wasn’t working sound to Zack’s light anymore as a friendship duo.   And after the massacre, Yoshi appeared to have a few key friends of Dylan’s over his house.  

Yoshi and Dylan: these two could have easily had been friends with similar interests and abilities yet instead, Yoshi crept up into Dylan’s shadow, eventually eclipsing his only passions at school and the guy probably had no inkling whatsoever that he was infringing on Dylan. 

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*Regarding the Smoke in the Room play that Rachel Scott started in just weeks before the massacre on April 2-3, ‘99, it’s unclear as to whether Dylan participated in the light or sound for it.   According to Sarah Bay in this post here, Dylan assisted with lights, which was usually always Zack’s job as Dylan’s was sound.  However, Yoshi claims that worked sound and Zack his usual lights for this play.  Whether Dylan was even involved with this play at all in some manner is unclear now because of this eyewitness discrepancy.