Randy Brown on the cancellation of today’s Columbine-related Oprah broadcast

Westword
Michael Roberts
April 20, 2009

Kate Battan, Dave Cullen and Dwayne Fuselier on a Columbine-related episode of “Oprah” that will no longer air today. (for the 10 year anniversary)

As pointed out earlier today in a blog about the many media appearances of Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis, Colorado journalist Dave Cullen, author of the widely praised volume Columbine, was scheduled to appear on Oprah today, the tenth anniversary of the massacre at the high school. However, yesterday afternoon, Cullen sent out a note to folks on his e-mail list revealing that the program wouldn’t run due to “a production decision.” This choice was confirmed earlier today on the Oprah website. A note from host Oprah Winfrey reads: “I decided to pull the Columbine show today. After reviewing it, I thought it focused too much on the killers. Today, hold a thought for the Columbine community. This is a hard day for them.”

The Winfrey comment suggests that there’s more to the story – and there is. Randy Brown, father of Brooks Brown, a friend of Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who has worked indefatigably over the past ten years to make information about the killings public, says that he was among several members of the Columbine community, including relatives of victims he declines to name, who contacted producers to express concerns about the show, which was heavily promoted in recent days on Channel 4, Oprah’s broadcast home in Denver. Brown and company were especially distressed by the presence as guests of Kate Battan, Jefferson County’s chief Columbine investigator, whom Brown believes was part of an information cover-up, as well as Dwayne Fuselier, an FBI profiler whose son was a Columbine student who made a parody video depicting the destruction of the school two years before the assault.

Brown, who has appeared on Oprah in the past, doesn’t denigrate Winfrey for moving forward with this particular lineup. Instead, he praises her profusely for taking to heart complaints from families. “I think it’s an incredible sign of Oprah’s humanity and understanding that she would listen to these people and do something about it – not air the show out of respect for them,” he says. “That’s a really good thing.”

A spokesperson for Oprah doesn’t make the same cause-and-effect connection between the complaints and the change in the content of today’s show, which now features a segment about a mother released from prison. The spokesperson says family members voiced objections prior to the taping, and the decision not to air the Columbine program was Winfrey’s alone.

Whatever the case, Brown is clearly no fan of Cullen’s book. He posted a one-star review of the tome on the Amazon.com website in which he states, “This book is not the true story of Columbine.”

“The biggest problem I have with Cullen’s book is his conclusion that Eric is a psychopath,” Brown adds. “Whether that’s true or not, Dylan wasn’t a psychopath – and these children had motivation for what they did. As misguided and ridiculous as their response was, they had a motivation: bullying at the school, and the atmosphere there. You can’t bully and humiliate people without them having a response to it. Now, in this case, that response was ridiculous and violent and wrong. But to just say they’re psychopaths is so easy. People don’t have to think anymore. They don’t have to worry. They can say, ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’ But that’s not true. You can do something. You can stop bullying and harrassment in schools and in the workplace.”

That Cullen would be joined on Oprah by Battan, who some Columbine families despise, and Fuselier, a man with what Brown considers to be a major conflict of interest on the Columbine story, only raised more red flags, Brown says. And he has just as many negative remarks to offer about DeAngelis, who appeared on the taping of the show last Wednesday via Skype. “He’s making his attempt to rewrite his place in the Columbine tragedy,” Brown argues. “And he’s very good at it.”

Such thoughts were shared in e-mails sent to the Oprah production office, Brown notes, “and a senior producer responded to – well, it’s an understatement to say ‘misgivings.’ More like anger at having Battan and Fuselier and Cullen on that show. And the people at Oprah listened to them and responded accordingly out of respect for the families.”

The eleventh-hour plug-pulling is a huge blow to Cullen, who declined to comment for this item. After all, author appearances on Oprah have provided larger book-sale boosts than any other promotion or forum in recent years. But Brown isn’t shedding any tears on the author’s behalf. Instead, he lauds Winfrey. “Television shows are big productions, and there’s a lot of work that goes into that show,” he says. “It had to be a difficult decision for Oprah. And I certainly think she made the right one.”

[Source]

Author Jeff Kass on how his Columbine theories differ from Dave Cullen’s

Westword
By Michael Roberts
May 7, 2009

Local author Dave Cullen’s book Columbine has received an enormous amount of media attention – far more than another recently published tome, Columbine: A True Crime Story. And Jeff Kass, the ex-Rocky Mountain News reporter who penned the latter, has definitely noticed the discrepancy. He’s not surprised that the national press gravitated toward Cullen’s offering, which was issued by Twelve Books, a growing publishing powerhouse. (In contrast, Kass’ effort comes courtesy of Ghost Road Press, a modest, Denver-based outfit.) But he’s more bothered by inattention from local outlets. For instance, although Colorado Public Radio aired an enormous number of Columbine-related reports around April 20, the tenth anniversary of the attack on the high school, he notes that “they never interviewed me, and as far as I know, never mentioned by book.”

Adding to his frustration is the willingness of so many reviewers and observers to accept Cullen’s conclusions as definitive. In Kass’ view, “Columbine is a major social issues, and it deserves a lot of books to be written about it – a lot of serious books.” Moreover, he says, “I have issues with some of the things he says in his book. I just don’t find the attribution for a lot of it. There’s room for contradictory and conflicting opinions as long as they’re backed up by facts – and I feel I’m able to back up everything in my book.”

Of course, the authors agree on plenty of things, including the relative unimportance of bullying as a motivator for the killing spree launched by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold – a major bone onetime Columbine parent and activist Randy Brown has to pick with Cullen. Kass bases his beliefs in this area on diaries kept by the murderers. “They write about everything from losing their Zippo lighter to not being able to get a date,” he points out. “But they barely talk about bullying, period, and they never talk about being bullied themselves. And you’d think they would have if it had been such a factor for them.”

Likewise, Kass concurs with Cullen about Klebold’s depressive tendencies. But he’s not as willing to suggest that Klebold merely followed Harris’ orders. “Dylan’s writings show him to be pretty entranced by the plan. And their code word for the shootings – NBK, which stood for Natural Born Killers, one of their favorite movies – came from him. He was the first to mention doing an NBK, going NBK. That says to me that he wasn’t such a secondary participant.”

Kass and Cullen also have slightly different takes on Harris. Both argue that he was probably a psychopath – although Kass acknowledges some evidence to the contrary. “The trademark of a psychopath is that you have no emotion, no feelings. And in Eric’s diaries, he does have emotion. For one thing, he worries about what’s going to happen to his parents, and he feels bad about not being able to bond with his father more. And he feels devastated that he has no friends and that people ignore him and he can’t get dates.”

This last point is a key one from Kass’ perspective. “He says Eric Harris was this wildly popular student, especially with the girls – that he’s dating or having sex with all these girls at school. And I totally disagree with that. I don’t find any attribution in his book or in the end notes for that. I don’t know where it comes from. I’d like to know. And he says similar things about Dylan. He says Dylan had all these friends, and that he was well-connected at school and at least was more popular than we thought he was. And I don’t know where he comes up with that, either.”

"Now, maybe you can find a study showing that if you have five close friends, you’re a normal high school student in America,” he goes on. “But even if you could prove that Dylan had five close friends, that doesn’t mean he was a normal high school student, because Dylan didn’t believe that himself. Dylan was blinded to friends by his depression, and Eric was blinded to any friends he had by his rage. So I think you’re in this academic situation. You could say, ‘Gee, Eric and Dylan, you had a lot of friends, and you lived these great middle-class lives.’ But that didn’t get through to them. They thought their lives were miserable. So it’s a classic case of perception versus reality.”

As for Kass’ perceptions, he says, “I think both Eric and Dylan died virgins. And even though it’s sort of a weird topic to get into – their sex lives – I really think it’s illustrative of how well-connected, or not connected, they were to the school community. I feel they were outcasts. I feel they were among the most unpopular kids in the school – and my evidence is their diaries. Pick up almost any page and all they talk about is how much they are outcasts, how they don’t feel part of the school or any community.”

More distinctions between the books crop up in terms of the topics the authors tackle. Cullen focuses almost entirely on the crime itself, whereas Kass devotes his epilogue to what he describes as “the cover-up” conducted by Jefferson County law-enforcement officials. He also attempts to find links between Columbine and other school shootings around the country, and his research leads him to conclude that the vast majority take place in suburban communities in the southern and western parts of the United States. He’s also come up with a theory to explain the regional nature of the phenomenon.

“I found studies done before Columbine and with, from what I could tell, no notion of school shootings in mind that talked about the culture of honor,” he says. “It’s a well-known concept in the South, but also in the West, where, if you feel your honor has been violated, you feel the need to retaliate to defend it – and you feel that it’s okay to do that with violence. That’s seen as an acceptable means of avenging your lost honor.”

For Kass, getting this information out to the broader public remains important – and even though Columbine’s tenth anniversary has passed (with Cullen grabbing the vast majority of spotlight time), he hasn’t given up on reaching readers. He’s hoping to arrange a book tour to other places that have suffered through mass shootings at schools, such as Jonesboro, Arkansas, Blacksburg, Virginia and West Paducah, Kentucky.

“I think there’s still a window of opportunity to promote the book, and really, it’s always going to have relevance,” he says. “Even if all of this was to stop tomorrow, people would still want to know about what happened and why.”

[Source]

[Jeff Kass]

Meet Dylan Klebold’s (S)hit List

#405 Dylan Klebold (S)hit List – (Control Number) CN 2173:
Redacted revealed to be…. Brett O’Neill Grade 12 Senior

Interviewed [Redacted (Brett)] on 5/11/99. Didn’t know why he was on Klebold’s List. He has known both for about 5 years but had no association with either. He said that years ago Klebold was made fun of because he didn’t fit in and was very odd. [Redacted (Brett)] did not recognize any nicknames on the list.

Klebold was quiet. […a very long redacted sentence that we all wish we knew what it said…..] “He was sort of the brunt of jokes”. They would never make fun openly but O’Neil said that it was a possibility that Klebold may have been aware of it.

Described Dylan as: [6,974] quiet, follower

klebohld:

Reblog with your MBTI and if you relate more to Eric or Dylan!

I relate more to Dylan and I’m an INFP.

Take the MBTI free tests here or here to find out what your personality type is. 🙂

A Deeper Understanding: Meg Hains

MEG HAINS, 17, junior, a biracial student at Columbine,
claims that she knew both the gunmen and that the two were her friends at school through friends in the trench coat mafia and had always been nice to her. [Source] She ran outside the school thinking there was a fire drill and found her way blocked by a fence she could not climb.

“Jock is a kind of slang down term, like some people will call other people freaks because their hair is different. They’d call them freaks, weirdos, faggots. It was just stupid name calling, acting like little children. It’s like my cousins come home, they’re only 2 and 3, and they come home and start calling me names, calling each other names like butt-head and all these other things. They probably couldn’t handle it.”

“I have a friend, he doesn’t dress like everybody else. He wears heavy metal band T-shirts, black shorts no matter what the weather, and a black hat, and he has long hair. And friends who normally just come up to me and talk to me and are so nice to me – when I’m around him, they give me looks. And people come up to me after I talk to him, they’re like, “How can you talk to him? How can you even acknowledge his presence?’ I’m like, "It’s simple, he’s nice."That was the same with Eric and Dylan. I knew both of them. I went bowling with them occasionally. And they were extremely nice. They never showed any signs that they’d like to go off and hurt people.”

“I’ve played the game Doom that they’re saying Dylan and Eric constantly played. And I don’t think it was that game. I’d go to school and there were people that would so royally piss me off, and I’d just go home and I’d sit on that game for hours, just taking out my stress on it. And the next day I’d be perfectly fine.That’s the way I get rid of my stress, instead of going out and really killing people. It saves a lot of time. I know this sounds weird, but some violent games are a therapy for kids. “I am utterly afraid of guns. When I heard somebody had a gun, I was fine, but then I had to jump over the pit fence and I couldn’t make it. My arms just went totally wobbly. And then I found out he was shooting people. I broke down into tears, a mass of tears. I couldn’t find my best friend. And this was all over guns.”

I was in a drawing class. I saw my friend Lance. He was shot. My teacher would constantly tell him to sit down, sit down, Lance. He was always standing up, walking around talking to everybody.On Tuesday night I got maybe an hour of sleep, but I had a dream. I was walking into my drawing class and there was Lance. It was just me, Lance and the teacher. And the teacher tells him, "Go sit down, Lance.” And he goes over to his desk, sits down, and blows up. And then I see Dylan and Eric laughing. I have never had a worse dream. It’s been recurring for the past week. And I just can’t get rid of it. Because I’ve known Lance since middle school. And I’ve also known Dylan and Eric all year. I’m literally torn between them.”

[Source]

“There are cliques all over the place,” said Meg Hains, a 16-year-old sophomore. “You can’t go to high school without cliques."Hains and her friends Jessica Jones, 15, and Erin Brinkley, 15, who gathered outside the high school on Wednesday with hundreds of other students, classified themselves as their own tiny group, "the individuals.”“We’re the outsiders,” she said.The “individuals” shun clothes bought at the Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch, the labels favored by the jocks and preps. “We vowed we would never wear Abercrombie,” said Jones, adding that she could not afford the $30 shirts and $25 hats even if she did like them.

[Source]

A Deeper Understanding

Randy Brown trashes Cullen

by randybrown on March 22nd, 2009, 12:00 pm #722168

Article Discussion: Greene: Backward, forward on Columbine
[Article is under the cut]

To a Columbine insider this book is full of errors and speculation. It is as if a complete outsider decided to do a book on Columbine, with a few notes and very little research. I was very upset at the number of glaring errors and the total lack of research. But, it is the pure speculation and the imagined responses and emotions he ascribes to Eric Harris that I find so disturbing. They are absurd.

Unknowing people will read this book and accept it as fact, and they will be sorely mistaken. The psychological profile reached in the book is based on so little information it should be an embarrassment to the investigator.

This book is a joke to anyone who knows many of the truths about Columbine. A joke. A sad, full of misinformation, joke.

The final verdict, according to the book, is that Eric and Dylan were not bullied. I guess the writer has never heard of the Regina Huerter Report, or read the many accounts of bullying from students.

Oh well, let’s just rewrite history. It is much easier than telling the truth, and much less painful. If Eric was crazy, as the book contends, no more questions need to be asked. If he was not crazy, and his reactions were a response to the bullying and resulting hyper-vigilance, then we need to change ourselves. Crazy as an analysis is so much easier.

I hate this book. If you read it,remember that it is a fictional account of Columbine. Learn your lessons accordingly.

Randy Brown

A Columbine Parent.

—

Article Discussion: Greene: Backward, forward on Columbine
Postby randybrown on March 26th, 2009, 2:39 pm #729873

The author has a responsibility.

I have just read the book by Dave Cullen on Columbine. I was angry at first, and then just disappointed.

I read it knowing that this was not a novel, not fictional, but a story about a real tragedy, with real people involved. I read it knowing that the story is so complicated that some errors are expected. I read it with the expectation of imperfection, but with the assumption that the author would research his story, and try to get as close to the truth as possible.

What I have found is just the opposite. The author relied on two main sources for his book, a police officer from Jefferson County and the lead FBI Agent for the investigation. Both are not reliable sources without some corresponding research into the other facts that exist, and they both certainly have a biased agenda.

The police officer and the FBI Investigator both have slanted agendas, biased by the Law Officers point of view, and both should have been kept out of any objective story about Columbine. At the very least they should have been interviewed, and their interviews weighted with the real facts as they were revealed years later. I am not saying they are dishonest, just that they have such specific agendas that the story shouldn’t rely on their input for its soul.

Unfortunately, it does.

The bullying, which is such a large part of Columbine, is dismissed by the FBI agent and the author, and that glaring omission changes the story of Columbine to a work of fiction. So many students from the school have told us about the bullying, and so many interviews by the police during the tragedy mention the bullying that it is inconceivable to me that this was left out of the book and dismissed in its entirety. There is actually a report made during the Governor’s investigation with Chief Justice Erickson that mentions and explains the bullying, from the constant fear to the persecution of a Jewish student by the school athletes. Perhaps the author should have read the Regina Huerter Report. To leave this major part of the tragedy out of the story is to rewrite history.
That is what this book is, a revisionist version of the Columbine Tragedy, which leads the reader to believe so many falsehoods that, upon completion of the book, I even questioned all of the things I know to be facts. I even questioned my knowledge of Columbine, and I lived it. In fact, I not only lived it, I researched it for years. This book, and the stories in it, will change the way people look at Columbine, and it will forever confuse researchers and lead them down false paths that are not the real truth.

Yes, I know that some truths can be perceptions, and can be discussed by experts for many years. I understand that some theories are going to vary about the two killers, and about the way Columbine is perceived.
As an example, the failure of the police to go into the school for hours is seen by many as cowardice. It is the glaring example of the failure of the police to protect children and citizens, and the failures at Columbine led to drastic and serious changes to first responder methods. That is basically a truth. But, the book makes light of this failure and doesn’t clearly show the terror and the abandonment of the children left alive in the library that were rescued many hours later. The name Lisa Kreutz is barely a footnote, and she is the best example of the failure of the Sheriff’s department. Ignored are the wounded children who may have died while waiting for the police. Ignored is the complete absolvement of the SWAT team by the D.A. before the ballistics report was returned from the CBI, a most questionable and suspicious situation.
In addition to the failure to police mistakes, is the absurd way he gives the two killers emotional responses and feelings of regret when no evidence exists to support this. It is akin to a WW2 reporter saying that the Nazis were sorry and that they didn’t really mean it. Really?

As a Columbine parent, I find this book repulsive, for the main reason that it rewrites the Columbine tragedy. The author doesn’t owe me anything, even though I was interviewed for the book. The author owes the public an attempt to tell the true story about Columbine, not an agenda influenced version based on the stories of two policemen and some incomplete research. I am disgusted, discouraged, and disappointed, and sorry that this book fails the people of Columbine in so many ways. I am mostly sad that some reader will read it in 3 years or 25 years, and think that this is the truth. They will be very wrong.

The people who lived through Columbine know parts of the truth. Everyone knows a different story, and every story is painful and sad. It is better not to tell the story of Columbine if the truth about bullying, the environment at the school, and the causes for the murders are diminished by pseudo-experts who use the tragedy to further their own career or to rewrite history to make the police look good.

Anyone who watched the police response at Columbine for hours, and saw staging but no activity, knows the truth about the police response. It is described in one word: Failure. In fact, the police failed us before, during and after Columbine. In their defense, the new first-responder policies are a direct result of brave policemen watching the failure at Columbine and correcting the problem with new policies designed for a quick, direct and effective response to a school shooter situation.

But, the biggest problem I have with the book is the easy summary that the author and his expert arrive at: There was no bullying, Eric was just crazy. That is so easy it is banal. That is so easy and so convenient.
If one of the killers was crazy, then we can all relax. It is beyond our power to change it. It is an act of God, and craziness stands as the panacea for all of the worried parents.

“Crazy” means that we do not need to acknowledge our part in this tragedy. We do not need to acknowledge our violent world, the environment of bullying and humiliation in the school, the alienation, the loneliness, the depression, the failures of the psychologists and counselors before Columbine and the pain. We do not have to change. We do not have to try to stop the next school shooting, because you can’t stop “crazy.”

Crazy is easy. Self-analysis and acknowledging our failures is very difficult and very painful. How will we ever learn from this, and stop the next school shooter, if crazy is the final analysis? That is the source of my disgust. This is a revisionist story about Columbine that does not acknowledge the many truths about the Columbine tragedy, which actually dismisses the real cause of the tragedy, in print for the parents, principals, psychologists, counselors, and others to read. This Columbine story, told by an outsider without the complicated and multiple causative factors explained, leaves the reader with a misconception that will last forever.

It was a real tragedy. If the author can"t tell the truth, he should have written a fictional novel.

Randy Brown

A Columbine Parent

By the way… The latest on Randy Brown’s book is that he is self-publishing and will make it available online. No date yet as to the title or release date. Probably will be a self-publish sold on Amazon. Since I am in complete agreement with Randy on the bullying factor to Columbine, I personally cannot wait to read it! 🙂
—

Here is the entire Denver Post forum discussion.

Another Columbine Parent that goes by AVSgirl (unknown who their identity is) also adds their disgusted reaction to Dave Cullen’s book too. The publisher of Jeff Kass’ book also expounds on the reasons why “Columbine: A True Crime Story is the better read. ( Jeff Kass’ and Cullen’s book both came out in 2009).

The article referenced by the Denver Post forum which Randy responded about is under the cut :

Greene: Backward, forward on Columbine

By SUSAN GREENE [Source]

The Denver PostMarch 21, 2009 at 1:35 pm

You can forget a lot in 10 years.

Like most reporters who covered Columbine, I was content to let much about the massacre slip from memory.

Such as bickering over the crosses at Clement Park. The human chain shielding students from journalists. And the debate over whether victim Cassie Bernall really died for God.

So it was with some hesitation that I picked up “Columbine” by Denver author Dave Cullen, touted as “the first complete account of an American tragedy.” And it was with some surprise that he managed to hook me in his first pages.

The book took 10 years of research, financial struggles and self-doubt for Cullen, a former Arthur Andersen consultant who as a closeted high- schooler was the target of homeroom spitballs. I’m happy to report that he hit it out of the ballpark.

In April 1999, he writes, “Littleton was observed beyond all recognition.”

Jefferson County instantly became a symbol of godlessness, bullying and all that’s wrong with Goth culture, video games, school safety, suburbia and the demise of families in general. Not to mention Abercrombie & Fitch.

“Columbine came to embody everything noxious about adolescence in America,” he writes.

Cullen goes on to set the record straight by chronicling the lives of victims, educators and law enforcers through years of investigations, legal maneuvering, and recovery.

He takes us to college and even the wedding of Patrick Ireland, the junior who saved himself by flopping out the library window live on national TV.

He walks us through years of depression haunting outwardly peppy principal Frank DeAngelis, including the demise of his marriage.

Cullen takes to task local evangelicals for exploiting the massacre with the folk tale that Bernall was shot for her Christianity. In one of the trickiest tightrope walks I’ve seen by a writer, he debunks the martyr myth while still dignifying the need for Bernall’s religious family to find meaning in her death.

Cullen shows the failure to protect the public from Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both long known by Jefferson County to be violent and criminal. Then he shows, step by tax-funded step, how officials lied about that knowledge. If you lacked respect for Sheriff John Stone before reading the book, you’ll now want an indictment.

Cullen’s finest work is his portrayal of two killers he came to understand as well as if he had carpooled with them to bowling class or tossed pizzas with them at Blackjack’s.

He explains Harris not through the lens of normal teenage mental illness but as a psychopath consumed with contempt for everything from the WB Network to all of us idiots sucking up air on a planet he considered fit only for himself.

“For Eric, Columbine was performance. Homicidal art,” he writes.

Cullen’s read on Klebold in some ways is simpler — as a kid who was deeply lonely and pining for love. But it grew complicated when, over years studying his journals and videotapes, Cullen told me he “absorbed a lot of Dylan and his pain.”

“There were times I got depressed and found myself sympathizing with him,” he admits.

Before you conclude that Cullen’s a nutcase, do read his book. For empathizing with a killer isn’t the same as defending him. Rather, it’s such insight and sensitivity that make his work powerful.

If Columbine was analyzed beyond all recognition in 1999, it has taken a decade finally to hold a mirror to the wounds that still fester there. It turns out that some scabs in fact do need to be picked, but only with Cullen’s brand of honesty, meticulousness and care.

Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.greene@denverpost.com.

Breakfast of Champions 2017 with Sue Klebold

Published on Jun 29, 2017 by SJHC Foundation

Sue Klebold talked about her life after Columbine and how it’s led her to become a passionate mental health advocate at this year’s Breakfast of Champions event on April 29, 2017. The event hosted by St. Joseph’s Health Care Foundation in partnership with the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) Middlesex was attended by more than 1,200 local community leaders and mental health advocates.

CVA Update…

Well, CVA finally popped back into existence and here is the update on his mysterious disappearance.

“Well, this last month has been rough. I travel a lot with work. Upon arrival to this new country that I am currently in, I was hacked.

My email that is linked to my Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter account were all DELETED (columbinevideoarchives@gmail). The guy(?) that hacked me didn’t play with my personal info. He didn’t steal my identity, he just deleted all content. Then deactivated the account. I have been contacting google for a few weeks…and they are just about useless as gun free zones. (bad joke?)

So, I took a week to contemplate my return….if at all. I didn’t want to come back and be the same. I took it as a time to evolve. I have huge plans with this new channel. (Vlogs, Face reveal, Live streams, guest speakers) Still, focusing on Columbine, but also going above just researching it, but also how to prevent and read warning signs of mass shootings. I also want to help people learn how to deal with loss, I am no stranger to that.

I could keep going and going and going…but I think everyone gets the gist. I hope that my old 8200+ subscribers would be interesting into something like that. It will be a fun and engaging road! Thanks to everyone for the videos on youtube saying goodbye to me.
But from the looks of it. I’m just getting started.”

Update: CVA’s new channel

His first video sounds melodramatic almost like this was a publicity stunt? 😉

At last! I’ve located the 60 Minutes interview featuring that Nate Dykeman interview. Among other goodies; 🙂

1:12 sharper senior photos of Eric posed by the bench
30:04 – Brooks Brown, Randy and Judy Brown interviews
35:51 – two more clearer Eric senior photo
34:02 – Nate Dykeman interview (yes that one!)
34:44 – Devon Adams interview – reported Eric to the school; clearly no love.

I found this 60 minutes to be pretty interesting thorough show. They really pursue and demonstrate to us how unquestionably poor Jeffco police/SWAT handled Columbine. Lives were lost due to their lack of action. They justify it as following the protocol they had in place which is basically a passive ‘wait and see’ response but no adequate excuses can be given to justify the lives that were lost because of their lack of flexibility in an emergency situation. Their fuck up cost their own children’s lives. Some of those cops had children in that school too! The poor parents, two years in and filled with grief, still do not understand how police could’ve stayed outside waiting hours to get the green light to go into the school and do their job. Even then, the cops went in on the far/east side of the school (where none of the action occurred) and slowly combed through. Such a waste of time and resources. Today, Eric and Dylan would not at all have had the upper hand they were given by the authorities back in ‘99. It’s amazing when you think of E and D walking around lazily in the cafeteria trying to get the bombs to explode when they could clearly see the cops surrounding the school from the cafeteria windows. They must have continually wondered why in the back of their minds that no confrontation was happening. They were ruling the roost for far longer than any school shooter today would be allowed to.

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

First glimpse inside the CHS April 17, ‘99 prom with it’s ‘New York, New York’ casino theme in the gymnasium..and also, brief photo of Dylan in his tux (that we’ve seen before). His hair looks very flaxen blonde in the photo. 🙂

A never before seen extended video snippet of Dylan behind Blackjack pizza which Sue is watching with a forlorn expression while presenting at the Breakfast of Champions. [video] (Who wants to capture this entire snippet? ;))

The End of Innocence

Dustin Gorton spent the morning of April 19th filming the The Breakfast Run video (entitled by the two “American Dream) with his 3rd period Video production class partner, Dylan Klebold. The video was to start off with Dylan hastily dashing away from a house (presumably Eric Jackson’s) and into Dustin’s classic car. They rrush off down to Burger King for a quick bite on the way to school as Eric Jackson films Dustin driving and Dylan as the passenger from the backseat vantage point as Americana by The Offspring plays on the radio. (I wouldn’t doubt that they planned to use the song for their final product).

The very next morning, on 4/20, Dustin’s *video production partner never shows up for class to present their video. Dustin mentions in his recent reflection (see below) that he was complaining about his missing partner during A lunch as the Columbine massacre begins to interrupt like a shock wave rippling over the cafeteria. Dustin finds himself in survival mode as he yanks his friends down under a cafeteria table and instinctively assumes the role of “leader” trying to find a way to help his friends to safety and some scattered into the kitchen area. He and his friend Brett manage to hide in a bathroom and the two get separated which also panics Dustin greatly until they reunite in a massive bear hug and tears of relief just outside.

Dustin wrote about the powerful impact Columbine had on him, how it changed and effected his life greatly. He reflects on the ‘before’, on how 18 years ago just hours before the massacre, he realizes what an innocent, naive “fool” of a kid he was. And in the blink of an eye in one hour of great devastation, his life and way of thinking about himself in relation to others – and what is truly important and matters the most in life above the minutia – had been irreparably altered forever.

Reconciling the Dualism within Dylan

The fifteen/thirteen debate came up again when I met with seventeen-year-old Devon Adams, who was completing her junior year at Columbine. She had been a good friend of Dylan Klebold and was part of a small circle of CHS students who had met regularly since May 1999 to work through the tragedy by writing poetry. Because of her friendship with Klebold, it had been difficult for her to express her grief through the standard avenues, such as school assemblies or memorial tiles.

Devon wrote a poem called “A Blessing” in which she struggled to reconcile two Dylans. There was the kind and playful Dylan she remembered, who used to bounce balls off her head in the swimming pool and who wore a goofy Hawaiian shirt to her “murder mystery” sixteenth birthday party, playing Les Baggs the Tourist. Then there was the other Dylan–the one who hid semiautomatic weapons under his trench coat and laughed after calling Isaiah Shoels a racial epithet.

When, during her junior year, Rachel had performed a pantomime called “Who Nailed Him There?” about the man who put the nails in Jesus’ hands and feet to secure him to the cross, the background music cut out midway through her performance. She continued without the music. When the music finally came back on, it picked up where she was in the routine. Dylan Klebold was the sound technician that day and some have speculated that he might have purposefully sabotaged her performance. But Devon Adams, who was a friend of Rachel and Dylan, was in the sound booth with him when it happened. She said Dylan rescued Rachel’s performance. "He was freakin’ out,“ she said. "He’s going, ‘Stupid tape!’ Rachel kept going, and he tried his best to get it back up. It was just a bad tape. He got it to work better than it had been. He adjusted the levels a little bit and it came out okay.” Devon said Rachel was “a wreck” after that performance but that she thanked Dylan for fixing the tape. "That was the only time I ever saw her cry,“ she said. [

p. 183 ]

As part of her grieving process, Devon planted a tree and wrote about it in the poem ‘A Blessing’ excerpted ( see above).

Her longing for absolute understanding was a prayer everyone in the community seemed to utter at some point, but it was a longing that for many remained unmet. Devon’s frustration was real: In all of the community-sponsored healing events, two names never came up. To most people, there was only that one Dylan, the evil one. "There are people who won’t accept that he was a friend to people, that he was nice, smart, gentle. Some won’t hear about it,“ she said.

Still, Devon did not cling to sentimental remembrances of her lost friend, as if to absolve him of his crimes. She was in math class when the shooting started and escaped quickly without encountering the killers. She reached safety and was listening to news reports that included descriptions of the killers, but no names. "I knew immediately that it was Eric, and when I heard the description of the other boy, I knew it had to be Dylan,” she said. Devon returned to the school and went to police to identify her friend as one of the killers.

“I have never tried to defend Dylan, ever. There’s nothing to defend. What he did was wrong and I can never make excuses or defend that,” she said. "The boys had to be punished. They did something terribly wrong and they hurt so many people,“ she said. But Devon felt frustrated that the people of one church condemned Eric and Dylan to hell but “were never willing to talk about it.” That is, she felt that church–and others–seemed unwilling to talk about the other Dylan and Eric, the human beings. She said, “I felt sorry for any kid who knew them in that church. It was harsh.”

This was when she brought up the cross controversy. “Those [two] crosses were in no way there to glorify them. They were there as a memorial for their friends. They were our friends, and we’re allowed to mourn too. By ripping down those crosses, people were saying that we weren’t allowed to mourn. According to the Bible, Christ died on the cross for all sins,“ said Devon. She felt that destroying the two crosses implied that Christ died for all sins–except Eric’s and Dylan’s.

Day of Reckoning: Columbine and the Search for America’s Soul by Wendy Murray Zoba [ p. 196-198 ]

everlasting-contrast:

everlasting-contrast:

thecolumbinevictims:

I would like to light a candle for Cassie Bernall, Steve Curnow, Corey DePooter, Kelly Fleming, Eric Harris, Matt Kechter, Dylan Klebold, Daniel Mauser, Daniel Rohrbough, Rachel Scott, Isaiah Shoels, John Tomlin, Lauren Townsend, Kyle Velasquez and Dave Sanders. May you all have found peace wherever you are. You are not forgotten.

April 20, 1999 – April 20, 2015

April 20, 1999 – April 20, 2016 – 17 years

April 20, 1999 – April 20, 2017 – 18 years ago…

PRX

What
was he like as a kid – what was your son like?

“That’s
funny you should mention that I was just looking at pictures this
morning. He was an adorable child – he was the kind of child that
every parent wishes they could have. He was..um, you know we called
him our ‘Golden Boy’. He was loving, playful, adorable, cute – he
looked like cupid – he looked like one of those Renaissance
paintings of a cupid. He had thick curly blonde hair and blue eyes –
and he was extremely bright. The thing that I adored about Dylan, I
think more than anything else, was how it tickled me- how easily he’d
learned. This child was doing equations with number magnets on the
refrigerator when he was an early three year old and he was still
wearing a diaper at night. He was just so interested in numbers and
letters and reading. He was really, from a very young age, very
scholarly. He wanted to learn things. He could read books.like hard
cover books like Stuart Little or Charlotte’s Web silently to
himself. And when he was in kindergarten and he entered kindergarten
a year older, a year ahead of everyone else so he was only four years
old when he could read like that. So, he was a very extremely bright
child but he was a very normal child in terms of his social
interactions. My family albums are filled with pictures of him doing
what healthy little boys do he was in cub scouts, he built snowmen,
he carved pumpkins. I mean, this is what our family album looks
like.”

PRX

The Biological & Social Sides Of Love, And Advocacy Helps Columbine Shooter’s Mother Move Forward

By STEVE KRASKE & CLAIRE TADOKORO • FEB 6, 2017

kcur.org 89.3

Sue Klebold writes about her relationship with her son, Dylan, in a new memoir, ‘A Mother’s Reckoning.’ He was one of two shooters at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.

Valentine’s Day is next week, and it can be either the greatest or the worst holiday of the year. Today, we get some perspective on the nature of romantic love, and try to reconcile two different ways of thinking about it. Then, Sue Klebold recollects the morning her son, Dylan, and Eric Harris opened fire at Columbine High School. She speaks of the aftermath of the shooting, and her advocacy for mental health and suicide prevention.

[Source]

Did they show hitman for hire in class?

Eric Veik stated that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold asked him to film a video for them that they needed in Eric’s Government Economic class. The assignment was to create a business. Eric and Dylan came up with the idea of being hitmen. The title of the video was: “Hitmen for Hire” and the original title was “Revenge for Hire”.

Eric showed the HMFH video in class and Mr. Tonelli gave him an A for it with a score of 83 out of 90.

Eric’s typed report under the cut

Quentin Brown [1,324] class did not find hitman video funny; made video with “Du Hast” (song by Rammstein) in background

Devon Adams: Articles / Comments

I recently found this article commentary by Devon on what constitutes ‘Evil’ and decided it was definitely post worthy. 🙂 Any future articles I find of hers will post with this title above^^ for easy searching.

Her response to this article:

Evil, Freedom and Forgiveness: Two Years After the Shootings In Norris Hall, A VT Professor and Student Challenge The Nature of Evil Itself

Miss Dev – APR 17, 2009

Thank you for that. One of my arguments from very soon after the shootings at Columbine were that we needed to find forgiveness for the shooters and their families and friends. This is a call that has been widely ignored.

After the shootings at Columbine, many people said that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were “evil.” I struggled with that not only because I knew them and I knew that Dylan, in particular, was not “evil.” It was discovered that both young men, documentably Eric and anecdotally (and with post-mortem psychological investigation) Dylan had severe mental health issues. Even with this information, I believe that a conscious choice was made to commit the shootings and thus, as I understand it, their actions would be evil. Or, because of their mental illnesses, would their actions not be evil?

Another situation to ponder are the actions of certain community members after Columbine (and to this day) who refuse to allow any public recognition of the grief experienced by the friends and family of Eric and Dylan. One event in particular, the two crosses erected for them being ripped out of the ground, stands as a symbol. To me, the man who put up 15, rather than 13, crosses was acting out a great act of love that brought comfort to those of us laden with guilt and grief that we couldn’t express for fear of retaliation (emotional or physical). The act of ripping those crosses out of the ground was an act of pure, raw anger. It was an act done out of selfishness, intolerance, and hatred towards not only the killers, but everyone who wanted to mourn them, but couldn’t. To me, that act and the exclusions that have followed have caused incalculable pain to myself and others. But there’s no word for that act. There’s no “classifying” term. I’m not saying that the act was evil, but if I understand the definition correctly (no guarentee there), these are acts committed by a group of people acting selfishly with the intent of injurying others (emotionally) – so that would place this in the realm of evil.

Or does evil only exist where there is physical harm?

I know that was a bit rambling, but I am having trouble organizing my brain at the moment. A summary, of sorts: having seen so much “easily” definable evil, I wonder about these things that cause irreparable harm, but that no one seems to think are wrong but those who are on the receiving end.

Thank you for your time, Courts. And you were certainly in my thoughts yesterday.

—-

Courts APR 17, 2009

As you are in mine. Thank you for that–I’d say that it hasn’t been an easy week but no week is easy.

Dylan and Eric weren’t evil and what they did wasn’t evil. Pre-meditated? Sure. Caused by mental illness? Possibly. But, in the end, they were criminals who committed a terrible and horrific crime.

In Columbine, very angry, very hurt individuals tore down crosses. In Blacksburg, very angry, very hurt individuals refused to lay a stone for Cho.
Both fly in the face of the kinds of forgiveness and compassion that grant understanding and transcendence.

But you’ve hit on an important point–we argue that evil is wrought upon the bodies of victims. Baumeister, who wrote a book about evil, talks about “white collar evil.” The concept is ludicrous. There is no evil without, as you say, physical harm.

There are, obviously, many facets to our understanding of evil–the notion of the political and modernism, anxiety and loss, intent and choice, group dynamics, dehumanization and ideology, physical harm. Together I think they give us a better understanding of evil.

But I in no way want to diminish the kinds of irreparable harm and human suffering that fall outside what we call evil.

—

SuperSaiyan APR 17, 2009

One of my arguments from very soon after the shootings at Columbine were that we needed to find forgiveness for the shooters and their families and friends. This is a call that has been widely ignored.

Yeah, I also thought that for years myself and it’s sad that it’s, as you’ve stated, ignored.

However, as you’ve probably read in one of your recent columns, MissDev, I stated that there may be a sea change in this now, at least amongst the general public, when I cited the example of the reaction to Ric Flair’s WWE hall of fame speech last year when he mentioned Chris Benoit and that he didn’t get a negative response for it( http://www.nationalledger.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=23&num=19765 ).

Yeah, that kind of rubbed me the wrong way myself, but the instance that truly disturbed me is the treatment of the Pastor that offciated Dylan Klebold’s funeral, which I also thought particularly flies the the face of the notion of kindness and compassion to people who have lost their son as well.

Again, as I’ve stated, I think that it’s changing now and I think that this is an intresting subject to ponder and I particularly have to thank Courts for exploring this topic and to MissDev and everyone else who posted on this topic for their thoughts on this subject.