Tag: Columbine

Oh, what a day!

“New” never-before-seen Dylan video footage (along with clearer video footage we’ve seen) in an obscure interview with Judy and Brooks Brown (eight months after the tragedy). Below is the edited montage of the Dylan snippets. The full interview is in the link below. Hopefully, with any luck, this reddit embed will play on WordPress. *crosses fingers* (Click the below video 2 times to play).

New unseen footage of Dylan Klebold taken from an interview from Columbine

Judy & Brooks Brown on Geraldo | Dan Abrams (Full Episode Interview.)
Credit: Bill Ockham on Reddit & Youtube

This is heartening.. that yes, we will continue to get released footage..with time and patiences. It will eventually come out of the woodwork with people deciding to come forward and post their VHS video collection footage. And who knows, maybe even the Basement Tapes, eventually? Yeah, I know. That might be pushing our luck. 😉 But wait!, that’s not all: there is another Brown family Oprah interview that was also posted late last evening. That will be up next – plus, the photo screenshots to follow in future posts.

Randy Brown released his book!

Finally. So, glad that Randy was able to accomplish publishing his insiders take on Columbine along with his words-of-wisdom on the reoccurring school shooting problem and how it should be address to truly begin to tackle it head-on. I understand that Randy was really ill there for a while so I was really crossing my fingers that he would find the strength to preserve and finish his book!

Released hot off the (paperback only) press on June14th, the book is entitled:

The Inside Story of Columbine: Lies. Coverups. Ballistics. Lessons.

Go check it out and write a review if you’re up for it. I just bought mine and am truly looking forward to seeing his angle on things as I agree with him that bullying was an instrumental component which laid the foundation for this tragic event.

The case for Brooks as the mystery Blackjack Interviewer

Brooks Brown interviewing Dylan Klebold “the little sound guy they used to have” at Columbine.

[audio credit: spishakwax]

The voice interviewing clearly is Brooks Brown and that is most definitely Dylan relaying an amusing theatre anecdote in his usual hesitantly-stilted, shy, soft-spoken manner…the slam dunk is his distinct “pfff” in response and “hehe” sneaky laugh.

Given that we can hear a airplane in the backdrop, it’s most likely that the interview took place outside (and so couldn’t logically be part of the Frankenstein Roast story-telling inside the theater that Dylan partook in along side Zack and Brooks though this interview was likely related to it like perhaps an introduction to it). This does, in fact, support the claim that Brooks may indeed had interviewed Dylan behind Blackjack. For many years now, we’ve only had snippets of Dylan being filmed – by a mystery cameraman in question – behind Blackjack sans the audio. Dylan is just gesturing and verbally articulating without a peep. I am much more convinced with this audio clip airing publicly that Brooks was the potential interviewer – now, we just need the full audio including this snippet, as part of the Blackjack video, to support the case for it (I’m about 75% on board) Then again? it could just as easily be Brooks interviewing Dylan anywhere outside. But, well, Brooks (or someone else?) will have to just release the entire shabang to make a true believer out of us all. 😉 Hehe.

Brooks introduces “This is Dylan Klebold the little sound guy we used to have. What is the stupidest thing Mrs. C has ever done?”

Dylan laughs. “Uh, pfff, I’d have to say that would be a combination of stupid and funny. During one of the performances, the musical, I think it was the Music Man, uh Zack was on lights, I was doing sound and we had little headsets and uh, we got her to successfully bitch out the entire cast in the, uh, dressing rooms cause we kept uh..(unintelligible)”

https://youtu.be/CHq2epxs8Es

More to come.. I have a feeling. 😉


AMERICAN TRAGEDY

is the feature length documentary film about our country’s crisis in mental health, mental illness, suicide, violence, and the scientific studies that may help society’s foundation: the family. From the producers of Going Sane, this film uniquely follows the story of various survivors of unthinkable tragedies, researchers, journalists, parents, advocates, and focuses on our nation’s efforts to solve the issues of mental health. In collaboration with Parents to Parents and BOLDRUSH!, this documentary film has been in production for nearly two years and will premiere this April, 2019 in Denver Colorado, followed by various other locations around the country. The film is in final stages of post-production, and the producers are excited to secure distribution and reach audiences around the world with this timely message. The production and post-production of film have been entirely self-funded by a non-profit organization dedicated to helping educate families. You are invited to join the cause and help this film reach a wider audience by donating here: https://goingsane.org/donate

Wondering if that is a trail that Dylan used to walk with his mom and dad…

A recent podcast with a more mellow recently turned 38-year-old Brooks Brown (his birthday was last month, July 14th).  You can tell the therapy he’s been undergoing has been beneficial but he’s still very bitter about how people only see him as forever linked to the tragedy. Brooks even alludes to how fucked up, alone, and depressed he was a few years back when everything began to crash and burn including his first marriage when then made a sudden move from the SF Bay Area down to LA, met his second wife-to-be, and began some serious therapy.  I’m glad to see that he’s really beginning to address/work through everything that had damaged him since that day.  Thanks to the anon that gave me the heads up about this interview.  🙂   I spent the last couple of days typing up some highlights from the podcast. A lot of Stanhope’s interjections just grated on my nerves and quite frankly. I personally don’t understand what Brooks sees in the guy!  He’s not very funny at all. I found myself mentally telling him to shut it because I wanted to hear the rest of the thought Brooks was trying to finish saying. Grrr!  It was also rather annoying how unfussed and philosophically kind Brooks is about Cullen’s book even in his admission that the dude denied that his friends had been bullied and it played a part in the tragedy.  I know that Brooks’ dad Randy cannot stand Dave Cullen. 

“It’s High school bullshit basically. If you remove all the shootings and murders of children..it’s normal high school bullshit.  Again, it’s normal high school shit sort of brought to life with this other side that people didn’t think about at the time. Columbine wasn’t the thing that normally happened. School shootings were still weird. It wasn’t a thing that happened in America every week that we kind of went  “oh there was another twelve kids that died this week. Okay, cool. So, what’s playing in the movie theater?” It was a different world. “  “…They changed the world back then. I sit there and I go ‘you know Eric and Dylan talked about it openly, very openly, about how they wanted to set this trend. About how they wanted to create this and have all these people kill people and do this.”

“Dylan and I never really had a falling out. It was stress because Eric was this dude in the middle who hated me – friends with Dylan and all that.”

“He knew how the story was going for him. He was kind of like “that’s fine. The story is going to end with me murdering a lot of people. I’m perfectly fine with making friends with you for the time being..or something, I have no idea.  (Eric) He was cool, and Dylan was cool and they were relaxed about pretty much.. everything. It’s terrifying. Looking back and not seeing the faces of anger and rage. If I could see that shit, like I’d be like ‘okay, cool this comes from a place of pure anger, pure rage, pure hatred, like this shit that we see in movies, like Thanos level of hatred that you see in Avengers, like epic.  No. No, no. This comes from this place of ‘yeah, no, I’m ready to murder a lot of people and I’m kinda okay with that and this is the way it’s going to go and it’s a little methodical, a little cold, with a scary side but you know? Psychopath?”

“Until I got home – my family had already – we had a home with a lot of TVs like we were a tv family. In the late nineties didn’t mean Netflix but having a lot of TVs.  And we had a lot of TVs going with every channel, like in different rooms. And we were watching the live broadcast. Which was one of the most fucked up experiences of my life of the whole thing. And that’s when they displayed the names and faces of Eric and Dylan, we knew. My mom was already there. We knew. I was like “Eric did it, therefore, Dylan’s involved. This is the way it goes.” My mom was already with the Klebolds. And it became this downward “who are we going to be able to see that’s alive.” We watched the news.”

“It was a few years later that I found a couple of friends who stuck with me through the whole thing. A woman who I ended up marrying – my first wife, who was wonderful – through the whole thing. School shootings was a thing I searched often.  Like I was just, because I was curious because it just started happening after Columbine. Eric and Dylan won – like, as far as people want to talk about 9/11 people won – the terrorists won, people won, they won. Eric and Dylan won. Shits happening all the time, and we are living in a fairly perpetual state of fear.  But the realty is, the shootings are done not against the kids, they’re not done against any particular person – much as I’d love to say cause they were based in bullying and hatred of the system at all that -they weren’t against any particular person. They were against the system. There’s a reason they went into the library. They shot the computers and the librarian’s desk and all these symbolic bullshit things.  There’s a great book by Mark Ames, fantastic. Ames writes an amazing book (“Going Postal”) on general rage shooters, and he calls them “rage shooters” for a reason. And it’s – there is ‘postal shooters’, “workplace shooters” and “school shooters” and they aren’t shooting up a person, they aren’t shooting up a thing. They’re shooting up existence.  And it’s a fantastic really smart read that I think gets closer to the reason Columbine happened more than anything else. Even my own book, which I was proud of when I wrote – and I’m still proud of it because it’s my own words and all that fun stuff called “No Easy Answers”. And my co-writer – I have to give him credit – Rob Merritt – a wonderful guy who helped me figure out what the fuck I was going to write because I could literally chat for hours about it.  I wrote the book 3 years after. You know Rob came out for a long time – I ended up going to Iowa where Rob lived to write it. It took a long time tp write because I didn’t know what I wanted to say. It took me 2-3 years to figure out what I even thought about things. The book was ultimately – not to talk shit about my own book you should buy it please cause I like .65 cents for every copy.  The reality is – it was the reality in the moment, at 22 years old – coming out with ‘here’s what I think happened, here’s how I felt about it’ and all this – but at 38 years old, I have a whole different fucking mentality about it.  I’m a dad now, I’m married to my second wife, I have a different job, I have a different world. Everything’s different; obviously, my place in the world is different.”

“But you know I look at these different books that have been written – such as Dave Cullens book which you mentioned – I have read it. Everyone has different opinions about what happened. It’s not a bad read. I don’t discourage people from reading it. It’s a different perspective on all the facts.  Jeff Kass – wonderful book as well on Columbine that’s much more factual, much more reportedly. Ralph Larkin wrote a book on it. There’s been a lot of books written about it. (He admits at one point that he’s read all of them) And they all come from different perspectives and I think the reality is to find the truth – you kind of read all of them?  But there are sides to it that people miss out cause the Dave Cullen one – that I think drives me nuts – is that bullying wasn’t a factor.  And he says that very explicitly: that Eric and Dylan were the bullies. And I don’t know if I were to ever believe that?  I can’t imagine how bullies would go out shooting people. Like, if you’re a bully, you live on the high, you’re at the top, you’re beating the shit out of people on an everyday basis – why would you fucking want to check out?  Like, your life is like that of treating other people as shit and being above them. You don’t need to shoot them up.  That’s not – if you read Eric’s writing and all that – Bullies enjoy the low-level celebrity that comes with being a bully.  If you go into the aftermath of Columbine and you read the articles, you read the quotes in Time Magazine or Newsweek where people talk about ‘they were faggots and we treated them like shit.’  Of course. But like Dave Cullen and Jeff Kass – who I may disagree on a number of things, the reality is that they aren’t like shitty reporters. It’s not like they went into it like an agenda (?!?!) ‘here’s what we’re gonna to’. They have their opinions; they use their facts. And I find it interesting because the reality is my life is just my perspective – I don’t know if it’s fucking reality.”

“There is a point in your life where – and I hit it a few years ago – really hard – where your life has been defined when you meet people.  Like I met you, I went on Napster and I searched “school shooting. Like I love The Onion, and The Onion had a great article after Columbine that said “Jocks Allowed to Safely Return to Bullying” and it had a literal photo of the front of our high school and the actual campus officer we were assigned, Neal (Gardner) and that was fucking brilliant. Too real for a lot of people. No, it’s real, but it’s a joke in that this is the reality. Like I stand outside of a funeral for one of the students who was killed and  the brother of one of the guys (Dusty Hoffschneider) who was absolutely one of the most brutal of fucking bullies (Rocky Hoffschneider) that we had says “I know what caused this; I’m sorry.” Like holy shit that’s like a whole level of real where it hits you at a core level – there’s no way to defend it. There’s no way you can have a symbology or a religion or a way of beliefs that allows you to defeat whatever that person said – that’s so fucking simply true.”

“It meant a lot that you reached me because I would put very few people in this campus of liked people who reached me because it went for years where I was a dark, self-hating, angry person who felt very alone – genuinely.  I had awful depression that I ended up having to get therapy with. I ended up going through a divorce – awful. Awful life.  This very much led on from the trauma and the sadness and the awfulness that still follows me a lifetime later. More of a life time than I had before the shootings still follows me to this day. I go to have conversations with people today – and I do this one piece for Tribeca film festival – and it’s not a small thing to win Tribeca – it’s an amazing thing in New York. We had people go through it and said it was the most power VR experience they’d been through in their lives. But that is not what I’m googled for.  That’s not how it works. That’s not how life works. No matter what I fucking do this is the thing. This is my life, this trauma, this awful shit is the life I’m going to lead. It’s the story I have no choice but to tell every day.  My advice for David Hogg is to keep fighting. It’s a different time. When I was going through it and trying there wasn’t social media, there wasn’t people behind it, there was nobody fighting for it. It just didn’t exist.  The truth of the matter is that guns caused this – whatever your stance on guns – guns are a factor. Mental Health is a factor. All of these things – there’s factors. We can rank them however you want to rank them – let’s start solving them. Keep fighting for them. Keep pushing because David Hogg – whoever comes next – he’s been pushed no he’s launched himself into the spotlight. But the reality is, your life 18-19 years – and I can say this – is going to be by your most google-able moments. As fucked up as the internet is. That’s the way the internet works. It’s not how I want it to work.; it’s not how anyone wants it to work. We want our proudest moments to be on display but that’s not how it goes.

“But if I was sitting across from David Hogg, I would look at him and I would go “Look, you do what you believe is right. You’ll be paying for it for the rest of your life. That’s it. Be ready for that, every moment of your life, you’re going to be paying for whatever you believe is right as a teenager, as a twentysomething, as an idealist, whatever you may be, you’re going to be paying for that forever. You’re that guy.” I did shit. I did it proudly I’m not ashamed of it and my life has become more than that but.. it’s not. It is whatever the world sees it as. We are only as powerful as the world sees us thanks to Google and wonderful social media as it is.”

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

And Kim Blair Woodruff was a 17-year-old student at Columbine HS in 1999. 

MK:You were at Columbine when the two shooters came in, you knew one of them. Did you see him the day of? Did you have a direct interaction with him?  

Um, I was outside where it began. So, I saw them take the duffle bag up to the top of the hill, pull out the guns, nod to each other, and begin shooting everybody.  I had my best friend shot up right next to me. Um, before she was shot, I, you know, made eye contact with the gunmen, he recognized me, he moved the gun and shot her. I have an identical twin as well, and she was a library kid. And in that moment for her, they looked under the table, and couldn’t tell if it was me or if it was her because we’re identical. Um, and I was always very nice to Dylan. And, uh, he moved to the next table.  

MK: You think that he spared you for that reason? It’s the only thing I can hope for otherwise it just seems like chaos. And I tend to think that we’re more kind in our nature than we are evil. And I’m hoping that in just that brief moment, he remembered that piece of his humanity and all that kindness I gave him.

MK: Any survivors guilt? Not anymore. I’ve actually been able to find peace, I was able to find peace about the 10th year anniversary. I’ve been able to live in my peace since then. 

 Columbine survivor uses tai chi to aid healing at Aurora Strong center

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Click here to read the full account plus the account of Kim’s identical twin sister Patti who was in the library.

 Oddly, the way Kim’s 11K account reads,  Suspect One and Two are backward and the opposite of what Kim relayed to Megan Kelly in being sure she made eye contact with Dylan who had spared her. But here, it sounds like she made eye contact with Eric as Suspect Two.  It’s entirely possible that the investigative officer interviewing her got confused between Suspect One and Two as Kim was relaying her story and mixed it up.  I would not at all be surprised since the investigators did an overall botch job of things. One amusing takeaway is that when Dylan first started shooting in an easterly direction he was apparently rapid fire shooting around at nothing in particular..”she could not be certain what the first suspect was shooting at” whereas Eric immediately started targeting kills, a group of boys, in particular. 

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Kim’s twin Patty crouched under a library table…

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Written on Reddit in 2010 

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

The bouquet that I brought to the Memorial in the summer of 2016 could not have been a more perfect selection of flowers: 13 white-ish-delicate pink roses with but 2 that were marked with a slightly greenish tinge. It was the only bouquet like this at the market and with the perfect number of flowers.  So, on this day, I represent all connected and encircled of this tragedy starting and ending with both lost boys who in their own suffering begot the end of thirteen others. Their roses lay on the ground at both entrances and exits of this circle and represent the Fallen.   All are connected in this tragedy, linked of and within this Circle of Tragedy, in which all precious and promising lives have been forevermore lost. All deserve to be remembered.

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In order of this video….

🌹Eric Harris

🌹Dave Sanders

🌹Daniel Mauser

🌹Kelly Fleming

🌹Isaiah Shoels

🌹Lauren Townsend

🌹Corey Depooter

🌹Steven Curnow

🌹Matthew Kechter

🌹Kyle Velasquez

🌹Rachel Joy Scott

🌹Cassie Bernall

🌹John Tomlin

🌹Daniel Rohrbough

🌹Dylan Klebold

The Opposite of Suicide By Kyle Mustain

These are places where we spend a lot of our lives. Although these institutions tell us they are “Helping Students Achieve Their Dreams,” they tend to garner hostile, cold associations. People dread being in these places, either from the terrible things they have heard of taking place within the walls, or from the terrible things that have happened to us while we were there. Facing our horrors every day and learning to coexist with people we hate and fear is part of growing up. But it does take its toll. While they may form some of us to be strong, they render many of us weak. These environments unwittingly cultivate anomalies like Eric and Dylan.

People who lack empathy. People who spend their days telling other people what they cannot do. Don’t wear that shirt. Don’t wear so much makeup. Don’t say those words. Don’t think those things. Don’t be that way. People who live their lives upon a foundation of doublespeak. People who say they have “A Commitment to Excellence,” while they perform the exact opposite every day, as if it’s their job.

Excellent and rather long article. I like that he’s skeptical in regards to Cullen and Fuselier and doesn’t buy into their rhetoric. Click the link above for more! 

The Opposite of Suicide By Kyle Mustain

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 8th 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 20th 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 8th 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 8th 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. 

—-

*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. 

9/11 and Mr. 9/11/81

In light of this being the entire week,19 years ago, that Hitmen for Hire was filmed by the boys, and seeing this animated gif of a mirthful Dylan yet again, I’m reminded of this…

Every time I’ve ever watched Hitmen for Hire and the camera abruptly pans down to the CHS entranceway floor grates, I’m immediately reminded of this. The patterned lines of those grates always call to mind the architectural design of the World Trade Center and of course, 9/11 which ironically, as you know, is Dylan’s birthday.  A skosh bit of a prophetic harbinger of an event to come nearly 2 ½ years later? Or just a silly coincidence?  I’ll let you decide.  lol   At any rate, I find it rather eerie.

CBS Evening News reports the first look at the Basement Tapes release via the transcripts supplied to Time magazine and the controversy surrounding it.

December 13, 1999

“Harris and Klebold talk a lot about their parents.
They apologized to their parents for the hell they said they’d be putting them through but they said they really had no choice on this matter, it was something they had decided to do and would go ahead and carry it out.“

The Time Magazine article.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

“My takeaway is that Harris was very Type A, in your face, very plan-oriented, very structured. Klebold was more
Type B. ‘Just tell me where to go; I’ll show up, I’m good.’ So, to me, their personalities were just very, very different. Was Harris more of the man with the plan? Yeah, but I don’t think Klebold just followed along like a little puppy dog.
He was in. He was all in.“

– Kate Battan, Active Shooter: America Under Fire