Brooks just mistrusts himself. How could he have had a friendship with Dylan and not seen what was coming? How could he have prevented it?

At odd times, he remembers Dylan—the kid, not the killer. He remembers being in an economics class with him when the teacher put a bunch of fake money on the counter and told the students to split into teams and take $5,000 each, mock-invest it and see what kind of profit they could turn. The idea was that they would be rewarded with more fake money, depending on their gains. And while everyone sat there, obsessing over their gains and losses, Brooks and Dylan stole to the front of the room, scooped up a pile of money, and won the game. Not exactly the stuff that gets you into Harvard—though both of them had the IQ for it—but just funny shit.

When Brooks remembers this, he can’t stop laughing. He seems absolutely lost in that long-ago moment, almost talking to himself. Right now he’s 23 and has no college education, no regular job. He plays video games until the early hours, then sleeps late. The Insane Clown Posse sings out: Watch your step to hell…. It’s a long fall! And Brooks Brown is remembering.

“Dylan and I, man…with all the money…. It was…just so…so fucking funny.”

That he laughs, that he chooses to remember, that he was friends with a boy who morphed into a monster and doesn’t pretend otherwise — does this make him guilty or innocent?

[Source for this entire beautifully written 2004 article –Columbine Never Sleeps]

And what of this boy here, Brooks Brown, a senior so preternaturally smart and distractible he’s bored at school? He’s friends with different people, in different cliques—athletes, brains, computer nerds—and yet regards himself, with somewhat melancholy pride, as a geek loser. In the halls of Columbine, he feels isolated and alone. The difference between him and Reb and V, both of whom he knows well, is that he doesn’t feel violence toward his school or himself. But he will. Soon after his life is ruined by Reb and V, he will.

After that, they will hunt their avowed enemies, the ones whose names are compiled on a hit list headed by Brooks Brown. Finally, Reb and V have rigged their cars to explode, killing anyone lucky enough to make it out alive.

In the parking lot at Columbine, the boys keep waiting for the cafeteria explosion that never comes. And as they wait, Brooks Brown appears, cutting choir, heading out for a smoke. The timing of this meeting is full of cosmic irony and will be questioned long after the fact. Only last year, Eric Harris posted death threats against Brooks on the Internet, threats that the Browns then took to the police, who filed a report and forgot about it.

Brooks just assumed that Eric Harris was threatened by his friendship with Dylan Klebold, whom Brooks had known since they were in the same Cub Scout troop at the age of 7. So Brooks tried to make peace with Eric recently, as a matter of high school survival. And somewhere in his planning for this judgment, Reb checked his list, and, checking it twice, crossed out Brooks’s name. In the margin, he scrawled the words, Let live.

Now, Reb turns to Brooks. “I like you,” he says. “Get out of here.”

By the second week, the police arrive to question Brooks Brown, and a few days later the sheriff, John Stone, announces on national television that Brooks is a suspect, a potential collaborator despite having been the first name on Reb and V’s hit list. There are others whom Eric and Dylan knew—like Robyn Anderson or Phil Duran at Blackjack Pizza or Phil’s friend Mark Manes, who unwittingly aided Reb and V by either selling or brokering guns for them—but it’s Brooks who becomes public enemy number one.

He’s not permitted to attend the remainder of his classes at Chatfield High, where all of the Columbine students have been moved to finish the year on a staggered schedule. A member of the chorus, Brooks sings at a memorial and is threatened by someone in the choir standing behind him on the risers. People hiss and murmur and sometimes scream when they see him: Murderer! This hate becomes dangerous, and the Browns try to stanch it. They give interviews, fight back against the school and the police, whom they’re sure are trying to sacrifice their son. The sheriff’s office denies that the Browns ever contacted them about the Internet death threats from Eric Harris, and yet, in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, they used that very same police report as evidence when asking a judge for a search warrant for the Harrises’ house. Six months later, when Brooks moves out of his house to live with his girlfriend, the family converts his old bedroom into a Columbine war room: Black binders of evidence fill bookshelves; diagrams of the school hang on the wall, marked with color-coded dots for each of the 350 bullets fired that day, as many as a hundred of which can’t be explained.

When Judy sits at the kitchen table, wringing her hands over it all—and she does this nightly—she wonders where this is leading, reliving Zero Day from every angle, reviewing crime-scene photographs, listening to an enhanced 911 tape that broadcasts the killers’ voices and the thud of shots fired into human bodies. People in Littleton no longer want to talk about the shootings—and they marginalize those who still do. They want Zero Day to disappear, to become a story that becomes a rumor that time forgets.

So what is this about? Even as the Browns come to be seen by the community as pariahs, this is about saving Brooks. Brooks, who’s grown his hair out and dyed it purple. Brooks, who listens obsessively to the Insane Clown Posse and considers himself one of the band’s followers, known as Juggalos, whom he defines as “hurt and angry hippy-geeks.” Brooks, who molders in the unfinished basement of his house in a Denver-area subdivision, behind three plywood tables set with computers, with two of his buddies, one of whom delivers Domino’s Pizza, and plays video games until dawn on the big-screen. “Yeah, some of the games may seem violent,” says Brooks, “but it’s pretty tongue-in-cheek violence.”

So come in. He’s down here right now, stuck on Zero Day because what Zero Day did to Brooks was erase an essential part of the hard drive that stores human faith and trust. Even today, years later, a balloon pops and many Columbine kids still hit the deck. A siren sounds and they burst into tears. Others, rather than living with more tolerance, mistrust all misfits, freaks and loners. {Excerpt Above] Brooks just mistrusts himself. How could he have had a friendship with Dylan and not seen what was coming? How could he have prevented it?

Can you feel where this is taking us? Time keeps moving backward. The teenagers are becoming children again, as they’ve always been. A boy named Brooks poses in a picture with his friend Dylan, dressed in Cub Scout uniforms. 

Now they’re running backward out the doors of the elementary school, their feet in funny kicks, to their mothers in waiting station wagons. The children pull apples from their mouths, place them whole on the table and shed their clothes for warm pajamas. Even as their mothers wake them, they fall back to sleep. Long, unbroken hours of sleep during which their hands grow smaller. 

Only someone like God could tell us what they dream now, sleeping as they do. But sometime during this night, God temporarily goes missing. A primal force moves the stars. Snowflakes fall like locusts, banishing the earth. Somewhere, in this night, an errant seed lights down. A silver hook fastens. These are not supernatural acts. This is real.

Now let the terrible glare of time begin forward again. It’s dizzying, this speed. Can you feel it? The babies become teenagers. The guns are bought and hidden in the closet, waiting. The road is cold and silver, swerving all these years later to Columbine High School, where, in blinding sun on a seventy-in-April day, with laughter floating from the cafeteria, two boys cross the parking lot.

Two boys are crossing the parking lot now—crossing again…and again. And for the last time: These killers are crossing the parking lot again. No one stops them. No one even sees them. What comes next is irreversible: We are eating lunch on the lawn, going for a smoke, finishing our homework.

Listen: There’s innocent laughter—and then, in a second, there’s none at all.