Tag: Columbine


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January 30, 1998  ~ 19 years ago on this night ~  January 30, 2017

 Dylan was having a okay, ordinary day at school – even doing an Interview for the Rebel News Network in the afternoon (interview clip) – but by 8 pm that evening, his life had changed for ever.   All it takes is one day, one choice, one event that can alter destiny forever like the abrupt switch of a train on a different set of tracks.  It was the day that a bright, clean cut boy with so much future potential had made the wrong choice and had in effect, fallen from grace. The disappointment in his parents eye’s reflecting back at himself upon his arrest at the police station. Before, he could do no wrong..but now?   He felt his life a fuck up and with one major slip up, this was now a nail on the coffin to confirm it.  

The event wounded and mortified him deeply.

From that day forward, he would embark on the beginning of his end as he slowly eroded inside himself in silence.   It was the beginning of his downward spirals decent as a troubled juvenile on a crash course with an infamous destiny set to self destruct.

This is the tale of..

The January Incident 

The next incident during Dylan’s junior year was the most catastrophic of all.
On January 30, a few days after Dylan scratched the locker at school, he and Eric were arrested for breaking into a parked van and stealing electronic equipment.

Dylan had agreed to go with Zack to an activity at his church that night, and the two of them planned to come back to our house for a sleepover afterward. Tom and I were listening to music together in the living room when the phone rang around 8:30 p.m. It was Zack’s dad, audibly upset. Zack had quarreled with his girlfriend and left the event with her. He’d gotten hurt, possibly after stepping out of a moving car, and wasn’t making much sense. It was all very confusing, but Zack’s parents wanted us to know the plan had changed. Dylan wasn’t with Zack; he’d left the church with Eric.

I thanked Zack’s dad for the update and immediately called the Harrises, who were as concerned as we were not to know where the boys were. Both sets of parents promised to get in touch immediately if we heard from the kids. Within minutes, our phone rang again. It was the county sheriff. Dylan and Eric had been arrested for criminal trespass.

Tom and I drove to the local sheriff’s auxiliary office; the Harrises were already there. The offenses included First Degree Criminal Trespass and Theft, both of which were felonies, and Criminal Mischief, a misdemeanor.

My mouth hung open when I heard how serious the charges were. I could not believe that our Dylan, who had never done anything really wrong in his life, could do something so terrible. This was the kind of trouble that might seriously impact his future. Neither of us had ever been arrested, so we called one of our neighbors, a lawyer, for advice. He told us Dylan should “spill it,” tell the complete truth. Before he hung up, he reassured us. “Boys do dumb stuff. He’s a
good kid. He’ll be okay.”

We waited for what felt like an eternity. Mrs. Harris wept. Then a deputy followed the boys through the substation office door. I practically threw up when I saw Dylan paraded past me in handcuffs.

We waited hours to learn whether our children would be sent to a detention facility or allowed to return home. Finally, the officer who arrested them recommended they be considered for a Diversion program, an alternative to jail for first-time juvenile offenders accused of minor crimes. The program would provide supervised counseling and community service, and allow
the boys to avoid criminal charges and placement in a detention facility. The boys were released into our care.

Our drive home was silent, as all three of us contended with our various emotions: fury, humiliation, fear, and bewilderment. We arrived, emotionally and physically exhausted, around four o’clock in the morning. Tom and I needed to discuss how we wanted to respond. There would be consequences, we told Dylan, but we would talk about them after we got some rest. Exhausted as I was, the sun was up before I was able to close my eyes and sleep.

Tom woke before I did. When Dylan got up, they took a long walk. Afterward, Tom told me Dylan had been very, very angry—at the situation, the cops, his school, the unfairness of life. He was so angry that he didn’t seem to accept or acknowledge the wrongness of what he had done.

I was still mad myself, and didn’t want to talk to Dylan until I could be calm. Later in the day, the two of us sat together on the stairs. The master bedroom was on the ground floor, and Dylan’s room was upstairs, so we often sat on the stairs between them to talk. I recounted our conversation verbatim in my journal that night, and have relived it in my mind countless times since his death.

I began, “Dylan. Help me understand this. How could you do something so morally wrong?” He opened his mouth to answer, and I cut him off. I said, “Wait. Wait a minute. First, tell me what happened. Tell me everything, right from the beginning.”

He told me the story of his bizarre evening. After Zack left the church, he and Eric decided to go light some fireworks, so they drove to a parking area not far from our house where recreational cyclists stowed their cars while they biked the scenic canyon road. There, they saw an empty commercial van parked in the darkness. They saw electronic equipment inside. The van was locked. They banged on the window and tried to open it. Dylan rationalized this by
noting the van was deserted. When the window did not open, they broke it with a rock.

I asked Dylan if breaking the window was Eric’s idea. He said, “No. It was both of us. We thought of it together.”

They took the equipment and drove to a secluded spot close by. Minutes later, a deputy drove by and saw the damaged van. He found the two boys in Eric’s car with the equipment a short distance down the road. As soon as the officer approached the car, Dylan confessed.

When I’d heard the whole story, I asked my question again. “You committed a crime against a person. How could you do something so morally wrong?” His answer shocked me. He said, “It was not against a person. It was against a company. That’s why people have insurance.”  My jaw dropped. I cried out, “Dyl! Stealing is a crime against a person! Companies are made up of people!” I tried to appeal to his sense of reason. “If one of our renters decided to steal a light
fixture from one of our apartments, would it be a crime against a rental company, or against us?”

Dylan relented, “Okay, okay. I get the point.” But I didn’t stop. I explained that the owner of the van would have to pay a deductible to the insurance company. “There’s no such thing as a victimless crime, Dylan.” I’d heard a story about a programmer who figured out a way to siphon tiny, nearly untraceable amounts of money from calculations that left an odd penny. “Before long, you’ll know enough to do something similar,” I told him. “Do you think that’s ethical?” He said he knew it was not, and assured me he’d never do anything of the kind.

What he’d done was wrong, and I wanted him to know it. Appealing to his empathy, I asked him how he’d feel if someone stole from him. “Dylan, if you follow no other rules in your life, at least follow the Ten Commandments: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal.” I paused to consider which of the other commandments might have relevance, and then decided to stop
haranguing him. “Those are rules to live by.”

He said, “I know that.”
We sat in silence for a little while. Then I said, “Dyl, you’re scaring me. How can I be sure you’ll never do such a thing again?” He said he didn’t know, and seemed frightened to learn he could do something so bad on an impulse. He was obviously miserable. I felt no anger at that point, only compassion.

Before we stood, I told him he had broken our trust. We would be watching him more closely, and his activities would be restricted. He complained it wasn’t fair for us to punish him on top of the Diversion program; weren’t the legal consequences enough? But his actions had left us no choice. I also said I thought he should see a professional counselor. He said he absolutely did
not want to do that. When I told him we would seek help if it was in his best interest, he said definitively, “I do not need counseling. I’ll show you I don’t.”

I was grateful Dylan could get on with his life without going to jail. Years after his death, though, I visited a secure treatment program for juvenile offenders, the type of place Dylan would likely have been sent to, and learned that what I had feared so much would almost certainly have been better for Dylan than returning to school, especially if the culture at Columbine High School was as toxic for him as we believe it was.

The administrator told me, “We’re into saving kids, not punishing them.” He described the supports that would have been available to Dylan, such as professionals who specialized in dealing with mood disorders and PTSD, common in kids who have been bullied. The multidisciplinary team would almost certainly have diagnosed his depression, as well as any other brain health disorders he might have been living with. The staff worked closely with the
offender’s parents. There was even a computer training facility there.

We never know what lessons are in store for us, especially when our prayers are answered and events seem to turn out the way we want. At the time, we were grateful he’d qualified for Diversion. But I can’t help wondering if sending Dylan to a juvenile detention facility would have saved his life, and the lives of everyone he took with him.

~ end ~

Living In The Aftermath Of Tragedy

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives.

For the last sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently?

These are questions that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy. In A Mother’s Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible.

wamc.org  Click Listen for the audio interview

Living In The Aftermath Of Tragedy

How Could You Not Know? The Sue Klebold Story

By Patricia Salber MD, MBA (@docweighsin) -December 14, 2016 

On April 20, 1999, 17 days before his graduation, Dylan Klebold and his friend Eric Harris, killed 13 people, wounded 24 more before shooting themselves to death at Columbine High School. It was one of the worst school shootings American history.

Almost immediately, everyone was asking how could this happen? What was wrong with him? And, what was wrong with his parents? As his mom, Sue Klebold relates at the beginning of her TedMed 2016 talk, everyone was wondering, how could you not know? What kind of a mother were you? These are questions that she has spent almost 17 years trying to figure out.

She told the audience that the tragedy convinced her that she had failed as a parent. He was a completely different person from the one that she thought she knew. She said,

“Aside from his father, I was the one person who knew and loved Dylan the most. If anyone could have known what was happening, it should have been me. But, I didn’t know.”

Sue Klebold has spent the ensuing years combing through her memories to try to figure out where she had failed as a parent. But, she said,

“The truth is there are no clear answers. I can’t give you any solutions…I can only tell you what I have learned.”

By reading through his diaries after the tragedy, she discovered that Dylan had written two years before that he was cutting himself; he wrote that he was in agony and wished he could get a gun to end his life. She did not know this at the time—Dylan was very good at keeping his feelings and actions hidden from his parents. Once she discovered that he had been depressed and suicidal, she tried to learn how suicidal thinking could lead to murder.

Suicide is a brain health problem

She became active in the suicide prevention community and spent a lot of time talking to suicide survivors. Sue came to realize that the problem of suicide is a matter of mental health—brain health as she prefers to call it—because…

“from 75[%] to maybe more than 90% of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable mental illness of some sort.“

But many of them are never assessed or treated. People who have persistent ongoing thoughts of suicide and go on to devise a plan to carry out the act have a brain pathology. Their thinking is impaired. They are unable to make choices in the same way as people who are not so afflicted. She calls it a Stage 4 medical health emergency.

Dylan, she told us, had a perfectionistic, self-reliant personality and that probably played a role in his response to triggering events that had occurred at school. In addition, he had a complicated relationship with his friend, Eric Harris, a boy that she says was disturbed, controlling, and homicidal. Finally, she said, it was easy, way too easy, for him to get guns without her knowledge.

Being Dylan’s mom

According to her 2016 book, A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, it took her a long time to accept that Dylan had been an active participate in planning and carrying out the horrific acts that April day. She initially believed that he must have been duped by Eric or that he went along with it at the last minute. But the evidence that he was a full participant was incontrovertible, including videos he had made with Eric that showed the depth of his rage and intent to kill.

She alternated between grieving for her beloved son—the little boy she cuddled and the young man who was weeks away from attending the college of his choice—and shame and self-loathing for being the mother who raised a mass murderer. She wrote letters to all of the victim’s families even though she knew many hated her and blamed her, in part, for what happened.

The aftermath of Columbine took its toll on her. Two years after it happened, she developed breast cancer. And, four years after, she began having panic attacks that would last for weeks. She said,

“My mind would suddenly lock into this spinning cycle of terror…It felt as if my brain was trying to kill me.”

For the first time, she told us, she found out what it felt like to have a dysfunctional mind.

If love were enough

Everytime someone asks her, “How could you not have known?“, it feels like a punch in the gut. It carries accusation and plays into her feelings of guilt that no matter how much therapy she has had, she will never fully irradicate them. But she said, “here is something I have learned,

if love were enough to stop someone who was suicidal from hurting themselves, Suicides would hardly ever happen. But love is not enough.

No matter how much we believe that we can control everything that our loved ones think and feel, we cannot. And no matter how much we think we are different, that someone we love would never hurt themselves or someone else, can cause us to miss what is hidden in plain sight.”

We must learn, she says, to forgive ourselves for not knowing, for not asking the right questions, or finding the right treatment. When someone we love is in distress, we must listen with our whole being, without judgment and without offering solutions. In the end, however, we must accept the tragic fact that even the most vigilant and responsible amongst us may not be able to help.

“But for love’s sake, we must never stop trying to know the unknowable.”

[Source]

“I’m sick of waking up each day with a broken heart, of missing Dylan and wanting to scream loud enough to wake up from the nightmare my life has become. I want to hold Dylan in my arms again, to cuddle him as I did years ago, to hold him in my lap and help him with his shoes or a puzzle. I want to talk to him, and stop him from even considering this horrible act.”  
                            — Journal entry, May 11, 1999, Sue Klebold

Ascent of the Fallen: My following in their footsteps up the iconic CHS Commons staircase.  

And yes, I’m walking Dylan style up the steps, with one giant foot step up using the middle step.  It was..something else to do this.. to actually be able to replicate his pathway up.. Gave me the chills in the moment.  While upstairs wandering literally all by myself the very first time, my arms were all tingly electric.

I marked the location of where Dylan’s locker was kitty corner to the former library entrance doors.  I did snap a photo of locker 837, however, I am not sure if this is someone else’s locker that was just reassigned Dylan’s locker number. I do know though that his locker was in that vicinity.

 I wandered down the Science hallway and knew immediately the moment I recognized the room Dave Sanders had fought for his life. Unfortunately, I only was able to wander down there once and didn’t take photos or film anything. Ah, well..just experiencing that purely in the moment of my first exploration. 🙂 

p.s. Apologies for the fuzzy captioning. I’m having difficulties figuring out how to make them clearer. 

Anyway, here’s the Fallen angels last ascent and journey to their final destination.

Enjoy..well, sort of. 🙂 

What kind of dynamic do you think was in the “three musketeers” group(zack+d&e). Zack and Dylan were obviously much better friends than Eric and Zack and even Eric and Dylan at that time. Do you think Eric ever felt left out or was kind off like the friend third wheel? I wonder what Zack did think of Eric, they did have a fall out in the end and what he thought when his best friend started hanging out with Eric a lot, maybe he was to busy with Devon to really care.

Well, Dylan knew Eric longer though since they’d met in Jr. HS. Zack met Dylan in a class in second semester of Freshman year at Columbine High. Eric would come into that adjoining class to talk to Dylan so Zack also met Eric through Dylan. Dylan really ‘clicked’ with Zack as he came to know him and they spent a lot of time together one on one. As Sue had mentioned in her book, both boys were immersed in a love for technology and the two hit rummage sales near Zack’s house and invented a portable phone out of spare parts (before cellular phones hit the market). You know how it is when you get a new friend that your share so many things in common? You just kinda become immersed in that friendship and you can’t get enough a good thing and want to hang out a whole heck of a lot. I feel that’s how it was for Dylan having found Zack. It’s like after all these many years, he felt like he met his kindred personality who understood who he was the best. So, Dylan was hooked on his new friend and spent a lot of time over Zack’s house going swimming at pool parties, BBQs or going boating and other “zany” (as Sue describes) flux of activities constantly going on over at the Hecklers.

But at the same time, from ‘96 on until October ‘97 the three were what I coined the “Three Musketeers” when they were all hanging out together. I don’t really see it as though any of the three felt left out. The three were a very smart, bored and mischievous bunch of dudes. The trio was like a super power in their alliance together that had the potential to use their intelligence for either great good or bad..or both. lol. Eric’s idea of fun was to sneak out past curfew (yes they had those in Littleton back then) and the three would drive around in the car in Eric’ neighborhood. “Reb” directed which houses they were going to target and throw firecrackers at for whatever reason they’d annoyed him. Eventually, Reb along with his flank of VoDkA and Kibbz escalated the nighttime shenanigans by partaking in other dares and pranks on enemies which became known as their “RMs” or “Rebel Missions”. They’d present rotten eggs at the front door step, super glue locks or TP (toilet paper) wrap trees.

By summer of ‘97, Zack began to work at Blackjack pizza and soon Eric and Dylan followed suit. At this time, Zack then met Devon and eventually his desire to hang out with his two best buds tapered off because he was spending all of his time with his girlfriend. Zack states also that during that summer he’d gone away for two weeks to Pennsylvania and that during the time he was away, Eric and Dylan had taken things to a whole other level of mischief: the two had built their first pipe bomb together. During this time that Zack was head over heels in his new relationship with Devon, Dylan was going through a lot of jealous and mourning for the loss of his best friend. Dylan was in a lot of pain feeling “abandonment” as he wrote in anguish in his journal about it: what a lucky bastard Zack was for having a soul mate – why couldn’t he have the same? So, to fill in the void of his loss, he began to immerse his time even more with Eric and the sort of ‘technologies’ that Eric was more interested in getting up to. Who cares about building a phone from spare parts when you can build weapons of mass destruction?

In October ‘97 of Junior year, the ever clever but bored Three Musketeers put their heads together yet again for some more mischief while at school. They discovered by hacking into the school’s computer system they were able to recover some locker combinations. They tested them out to see if they worked and discovered they did. Dylan then gave the list of combos to Eric (shame, shame!). I believe the two Tech wizards, Dylan and Zack, worked together on the hacking and therefore they got the most days of suspension. After that incident, Zack’s dad put the breaks on him spending time with Eric and Dylan. Things cooled off a bit and Zack and Devon continued to hang out together. Dylan and Zack still hung out together – just not as much as they used to..sometimes he hung out with Zack with Devon. Dylan continued to hang out with Eric on an separate bases from Zack. Eventually over time, by second semester of Junior year, Eric began to shun Zack by giving him the cold shoulder. “The subject stated that this past summer of 1998, Eric Harris didn’t like him for some unknown reason but the subject stated that he was still good friends with Dylan Klebold”. Despite Eric’s falling out with him, Zack continued to call Dylan nightly around 10:30 pm to have their usual discussions about school and the video games they were playing.

The Three Musketeers had come to an end.

Video: Did Investigation Miss Key Moment in Columbine Attack? | Westword

The media is just now responding to our CCTV footage find of the boys planting the bombs in the cafeteria (due to CVA breaking it on YouTube a few weeks ago). Thanks to Alan Prendergast, thorough veteran Westword journalist of all things Columbine for championing our important news to (the rest) of the world. He posts CVAs video, ponders the revised timeline of events and calls into question how/why JeffCo missed this important evidence (Oopsy!)

JCSO spokesman Mark Techmeyer declined to comment on the video. “This is a closed investigation, and we no longer have anything of evidentiary value to evaluate,”

Boo, JeffCo.

Otoh, it’s interesting that the media is keeping it’s tabs on our internet discussions and kind of cool that they’ve slowly gotten around to breaking our big finding. 😉 Though, it’s old news for us.
Video: Did Investigation Miss Key Moment in Columbine Attack? | Westword

How do you think Dylan (and Eric for that matter too) would feel knowing that pictures of their dead bodies were shown everywhere? Do you think they’d feel humiliated or just not care?

Humiliated?  No.  I really don’t think they’d care what anyone thought other than the fact the the sight of the two of them would make a useful, shocking impression on the world.  That they did what they did to themselves because they didn’t give a shit, they didn’t fear death and dying and they certainly didn’t have any remorse, apprehension and revulsion over taking other people’s lives and dragging them all kicking and screaming into death along side them.  Their battered bodies laying on the library floor in pools of deep crimson bloody gore represented how they were made to feel worthless and so therefore, everything in their wake would be dealt with as worthless crap.  ‘You all consider us worthless garbage so we’ll take out all of you out as the same worthless garbage and pieces of shit.’  

They were two bombs that exploded and imploded all at the same time.

They were the equalizers by leveling the playing field. War is war and death isn’t pretty is it people?  We’re ugly and scary to look at. They threw it all back in your face and the truth hurts.  Their bodies would be A Symbol that they feared nothing – not violence nor death.  And in so doing, they were a symbol of power that none could touch.  They took their own lives and no one on this shit hole of a planet was about to take them as prisoners. 

And, well, actually.. I do believe they’d be  morbidly fascinated as to how they looked in death..but also disgusted thinking about it in retrospect that the whole thing did not go down as they fantasized. It started out heady but rapidly became more of a nightmare in the end so they needed to end themselves by way of their own deaths to escape it. 

Revolving subjects:

a.k.a. “Yeah, guess you could say Eric has a one track mind, pretty much. Hey… have you heard the new Rammstein cd?”


Danielle Danford said that she’d met Dylan Klebold in her Freshman year (his Senior year), and that she met him through Kristen Theibault.  She said they usually met him out in the parking lot by his car.  She described Dylan Klebold as a good kid and she didn’t know of him having any major problems.  She said their conversations never was really involved.  Their conversations usually revolved around how their days were going.  She knew that Dylan Klebold was into the rock group Rammstein, and that’s all he seemed to talk about.  He would ask if they’d heard their new CD or the new album or new songs.  She said she never had any conversations about him being picked on, but she knew that the jocks had been giving him trouble.  She said that on one occasion, he spoke about how the jocks were giving him trouble but he didn’t elaborate any further.  She said that she had heard from Klebold that he was friends with Eric Harris and that in one conversation she remembers Klebold telling her that Eric Harris’ life revolved around guns and that was all he ever talked about.

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The Brooks Files!

As promised…this is the infamous, sleazy chat files that took place between Brooks and a girl that went by the name ‘Alice’ and ‘Chloe’.  She was into the aesthetic of looking like a human doll. Apparently, she also trolled the Columbiner communities online and contacted Brooks on FB.  Brooks seemed to take a liking to her doll-like looking FB photo so decided to continue giving her the time of day chatting with her. Their conversations quickly devolved into sex chats.  There first convo took place October 7, 2012 on Facebook progressing to AIM October 23 through November possibly Decemeber-ish 2012 in which Brooks used his ancient AOL username ‘littletonpunkguy’ or hil gty while chatting with ‘Alice’.  

Here’s snippets from their convos with highlights:

Brooks and Alice – part 1    Brooks and Alice – part 2   

Brooks on E & D

For the entire chat transcript files between BB & Alice:  [X]


Warning!  read at your own risk for kinky sex content. What has been seen cannot be unseen. 😉 


I don’t believe these are all of her chat transcripts but they are the ones that Alice chose to leak on Tumblr so we don’t really know how long they kept in touch and when their online shenanigans ended.  It must not have ended too well so that by the time Brooks crashed Tumblr she had it out for him being that creepy older guy trolling girls much younger than him and even into non legal, under aged girls as she had found out.  The chats between the two of them was a mutual kind of fuck-up.  He wanted the kinky scenario of making her his young, pure porcelain doll in which he spoke about breaking’ but in exchange, she told him he could have her as his possession as long as he would continue to comply and divulge insider information about Dylan and Eric. 

 
Around the time period that these tawdry chats took place, Brooks ended up making some drastic lifestyle changes, he and his wife divorced and he ended up moving from the San Francisco Bay Area for LA.  He switched from LucasArts to working for James Cameron’s Lightstorm productions. 

In March 2013, Brooks decided he wanted to give Tumblr a try as an experiment to expand his presence in social media.  He spent the first part of the week answering Q’A’s under his selected username ‘defens’ . A ¼ of the questions were about him and his video game careers and the majority was about, you guessed it! Columbine questions since Tumblr has a rather vast Columbiner community – which he should’ve known about and probably did.  Alice/Chloe had a Tumblr as ‘cherrypoppies’ and when she caught wind of his Tumblr appearance and decided that his creepy, pedo pursuit of her was something that other young girls should be aware, she decided to blow the whistle on Mr. Pedo brooks by posting the chats as well as his erotic masturbatory vids sent to her.  Within the span of one week, and a weekend maybe, of Brooks’ stint on Tumblr, his blog suddenly quietly vanished and his Facebook and Twitter was heavily filtered and on lock-down from the public and only open for people he knew. 

The stilted, sophisticated, arrogant manner in which hil gty speaks to Alice comes across the way Brooks communicates online in both his Reddit and snarky Tumblr q/a answers.  There’s also clues as to why I feel it’s him besides the sheer volume of chat dialog.  Brooks seems evasivee to speak to Alice about Columbine and he refers to it as ‘sad’ which, in the past, seems to be his main adjective used to describe his feelings on Columbine in other instances. When he does finally divulge something to Alice, it’s like little snippets of good memory that he’d previously forgotten that seems to have popped into his head as in when he remembers doing lights with Dylan and Zach during the Bye, Bye Birdie production at Columbine or camping out for the re-release of Star Wars at the Continental Theatre (if you look it up, that theater checks out as having been one of the selected to show the re-releases in ‘97)  or watching ‘great and terrible’ movies in Zach’s basement.  His knee jerk sensitivity when she mentioned that he was ‘selling out’ sounds like him.  He denies that he’s used Columbine or that he’s lied not hasn’t made money off of it and yet there he is doing it – using Columbine by exploiting her for his own twisted sexual predatory ambiitions.  There’s just many components about the chatter’s style of speaking and what is said that makes it very convincing that it’s Brooks.

During the time this all leaked while I was in the midst of observing Brooks doing Tumblr answers and I even asked him a couple of questions myself, I just had that sinking feeling after seeing bits of the evidence that began to post all over. And then those gawd awful videos of him. It was a moment you wanted to bleach your eyes out.  It just seemed to all click and make a sick kind of sense. You know how that feels?  When you know something to be true even though you really wished it wasn’t.  My idea of who Brooks was vastly changed in the course of a week. He was no longer the role-model that had survived Columbine that wrote a book against anti-bullying and spoke in favor of his victim friends, Eric and Dylan.  No, Brooks had changed from what he was back in 2002 when he wrote No Easy.  Now, he was just an adult in his thirties with an unsatisfactory marriage who was looking for cheap sexual kink entertainment even at the expense of exploiting a young, but not so entirely innocent girl. Moot point whether her behavior was innocent or not at eighteen, he, as an adult male, ought to know better!  While, I don’t doubt that Brooks has done a lot of positive representation about Columbine in the past, he’s not doing a very good job of it these days.  It’s apparent to me that he’s made it out of Columbine as a warped individual.  He’s simultaneously runs away from Columbine yet comes back to it all at the same time by using Columbine as something to leverage his own video game career. And with this, he’s exploited Columbine as a sexual predatory to gain certain fantasy kink satisfactions.   The fact that she laid out the bait and he took it and wouldn’t let go, says a lot about his character. In knowing that she may actually be 15 and not 18, well, apparently, that was not a problem for him either. The idea that he’d get off on being a predatory with the satisfaction of soiling her virginal purity and ‘breaking’ her even is just not healthy behavior.  He ought to know better but he apparently didn’t give a shit.  Since his Tumblr stint, I simply see Brooks with a very different lens. Others prefer to ignore this incident and to still see him as that great Columbine ‘celebrity’ but I don’t really see him as being helpful to youth the way he had been in the early days when he really gave a fuck.    Brook’s is weary of Columbine. Who can fault him for that?  But when he uses Columbine to garner attention or exploits Eric and Dylan memories to obtain a teenage girl to satisfy his kinky perversions, it’s just for all the very wrong reasons to keeps himself associated with the tragedy.  Not to mention that it’s just scummy.  And why did he come on Tumblr?  He had to have known the plethora of  Columbiners who almost certainly would hound him for questions on the subject, most especially E & D, and yet he came here and mostly gave out snark answers about the subject.  In the end, Tumblr bit him in the ass and he tucked tail and left.  Funny that he had the arrogance to think he could do what he did in a chat with a girl and think that none of that might come back on him or his career. There is no easy answers for me about Brooks Brown after this incident which I personally believe to be the truth.  Anyway, the scandalous, cheap,and dirty ‘Brooks Files’ are now available. Take a look and judge for yourselves!

 If anyone else was present during this epic Tumblr scandal (lol) and has anything to add about the incident, please do so. 🙂 

A dramatic lolzy reading of Brooks skanky chats with Alice. 

Wouldn’t the police have confiscated the basement tapes if they had sent them to the media?

Back in the day, when school shootings weren’t so fashionably ennui and unoriginal, the media was all over the place vying for a story to the point where they were overbearing and unscrupulous for a scoop. The media even released the Basement Tape transcripts inappropriately with TIME magazine  right around the holidays of ‘99 which opened many families’ wounds.  The media was less mindful back then and just went about everything wrong, without consideration to the victims and then got their hand slapped for it after the fact. Had Dylan and Eric’s mailed their tapes directly to four media sources, you can bet at least one or two of them would’ve wanted to have the edge over the rest by running with that story of publishing the tapes. This was before youtube so we’re talking snippets of the tapes showing up in 20/20 or Primetime Live or even that dramatic “Columbine Massacre of Tragedy’ documentary switching back and forth between E & D on the tapes back to each of the victims noble stories.  It’s just very different now days because these shootings happen so nauseatingly often that the media has been told to only refer to them as ‘the shooter’ and not to acknowledge their actual names or to not give them any sort of attention which would play into the celebrity attention they were ultimately seeking.  I mean, it still happens, with the media coverage received for Virginia Tech, Adam Lanza and Eliot Rodger but not to the lenient degree Eric and Dylan received back in the day.   Eric and Dylan were on the cover of People magazine and had larger photos that dwarfed the victim photos. How insulting is that to the victims’ families and what sort of message does that send out to the world?  All the media cared about at that time period was getting the dirt on these infamous teenage shooters. Hell, why not make them gay trench coat goths too to make it more racy?. 😉 The late nineties sensationalism to this degree would never happen that blatantly politically incorrect in this day and age. Now, the primary focus of news coverage is ensuring that attention is given to the victims as a first priority so as not to be gratuitous with the perpetrators.  Yes, because of the innocent time it was, the Basement Tapes would’ve been ripe for being broadcast by the media before the police ever ceased anything from them.

Do you have an opinion on Donna Taylor’s claim, that a girl named Misty Hall said she was helping Dyl come off antidepressants? She claimed his parents were split up and Tom was moving back home, and that’s why Dyl was depressed.

My opinion on Donna Taylor and her multitude of conspiracy claims is that she is all over the freakin’ place and so has lost her footing as any sort of credible source. She whistle blows at everything to the point where it’s become like ignoring a bunch of car alarms all going off all at once. Not only does she support the butt rape claim in conjunction with the January incident, she’ll also toss in witchcraft or the military mind control projects and hey, why not the covert, ubiquitous Illuminati all to stir up a whirlwind of bizarre drama about Columbine.  The question surrounding SSRIs and mass shootings is, however, a valid, reality-based problem just for the sheer fact that most rage shooters have been proven to have either been on one or more varieties of psychotropics or have abruptly going off them, as with Eric. When I searched for Donna’s Misty Hall claim, I’ve come up with absolutely nothing in the search returns. If it’s legit, why is there nothing on it?  I don’t know the exact details surrounding Misty Hall (

If you would like to point me to the info, I’ll take a look at yet another Donna Taylor claim). 😉 .  What I do know is that the Klebold’s had some financial troubles there for a while along with Bryon’s drug issues which ensued family counseling. I do seem to recall that Tom and Sue had a rough patch at some point but those types of things can happen with marriages at certain stressful points potentially brought on by those two types of crises mentioned.  I do not believe Dylan was on anti-depressants. The autopsy report says no drugs or alcohol was present in his system which is a legitimate source (unless, of course, you buy into a string of conspiracy theories to make things more mysterious).  Also, half used bottles of St. Johns Wort were found in both Dylan’s car and also his bedroom. His mother was stunned as she knew nothing about it and asked his friends if they knew the reason why he was taking the herbal medicine.  This suggests that Dylan was trying to be self reliant and attempt to manage his depression and lack of motivation all on his own by using natural products that he could buy at a store without warranting a prescription for it. He could attempt to fix it without making waves in his family or worse, his parents asking him to see a shrink to help him which to him, would’ve just sucked since he likely already hated the family counseling sessions concerning Byron. Also, it’d be a potentially dangerous combo for someone already taking SSRIs to also take St. Johns Wort. If Dylan was on prescribed anti-depressants then technically he should never have needed to secretly dabble with St. Johns Wort since you would think the prescribed SSRI’s would’ve had some sort of therapeutic effect on him.  My personal opinion is that Dylan was not on prescription based pharmaceutical anti-depressants similarly to what Eric had been on. 

Do you know exactly what things Dylan and Eric said that were sexist? Thank you!

Here’s a few. A couple legitimately recorded on the Basement Tapes and the other, is supposed accounts witnessed by Columbine students.  

Excerpts from the Basement Tapes:

“Yes, moms stay home. That’s what women are supposed to f—ing do.”
– Harris, on the role of women.

“F—ing make me dinner, bitch.” – Harris, on what he would say to a woman. 

—  

Harris: “Shut the fuck up, Nick, you laugh too much! And those two girls sitting next to you,
they probably want you to shut the fuck up, too! Jesus! Rachel and Jen .. . and … whatever.”

Klebold: “I don’t like you, Rachel and Jen, you’re stuck up little bitches, you’re fucking
little . .. Christian, Godly little whores!”

Harris: Yeah … “I love Jesus! I love Jesus!” — shut the fuck up!”

Klebold: “What would Jesus do? What the fuck would I do?”

*Klebold acts like he’s shooting the camera with his hand, with sound to accompany it.*  

and..

Excerpts copied from a Columbine Yahoo Group that was created long ago circa September 1999 that paid “tribute” to the Columbine killers. These types of yahoo groups are either dormant or long since defunct but the incidences were captured of what alleged Columbine witnesses described that they saw/heard Eric and Dylan say in the school.  I think it’s credible these types of exchanged happened with these two as part of their behavior of a ‘pack mentality’. When the two got together, or also in the company of other dudes, they acted out and behaved badly to show off. Yet, by themselves in the company of girls, they behaved themselves and were subdued and more or less respectful gentlemen. Unless..they didn’t like a certain girl -or guy – for a certain reason of course. 😉

For anyone interested, I found a couple of quotes from one of the groups a while back that I saved. I can’t remember what group these are from. I’m sorry. One is friends with someone who went to school with Harris and Klebold (I’ll call her girl) and the other is that friend (boy). I highly doubt either account is still active but I won’t post the usernames regardless. I’m copy-pasting so forgive the spelling and awkward structure.

”..eric and dylan were standing at the very end of a hallway. and they were standing there talking to two other guys. one of the guys was complaining about his girlfriend [troubles he was having with her, fights, etc] and they were talking about it and eric said ”these bitches need to learn to stay in their place”. and they nodded their agreement. and then he went on to say how the world was fucked up about that now because in the 1500’s women knew what they were supposed to do- clean, fuck, and cook. one of the guys said something about having kids and he said oh yea and keeping the shitty human race going. this was a while before the shootings and they all laughed of course..” (girl)

”..he also told me of another incident which in a way highlights their attitude towards women—-eric and dylan and a few other guys were watching theses two blonde girls one day. they were standing talking to each other. one was sucking on a lollipop as she talked to the other one. eric called to them and he said ”hey i’ll give you something to suck on” and made an obscene gesture involving his crotch.. the girls were all pissed off and they stomped away. dylan and the other guys didn’t say anything , but they hooped and yelled.he said that eric was a perv a lot of the time.” (girl)

”..i had no classes with them. they were really cool guys. eric was very funny. dylan was nice and polite. where you saw one you always , almost saw the other one. they were really close friends. they were always talking to each other. sometimes they would carry out these long convos in german. eric was very forceful about some things. dylan was too in ways but not as much as eric. they always tried to defend themselves against assholes, but sometimes it was just too much for them. people in the caf would throw things at their table;say mean things. they were humilated but angry. some people liked them but most thought they were weirdos. dylan’s feelings were easy hurt. dylan was so big physically he looked a little scary but he was nice. erics sense of humor was sarcastic a lot of the time. they talked about girls a lot. eric was kind of a perv. but he was nice to girls most of the time.” (boy)

”..one time they were talking about that David Koresh guy. they were saying that he had had the perfect setup. they were talking about how cool it was that he had all those wives and kids. and they said they wished they could have the same thing. eric said it would be awesome to have all those women under your complete control. and dylan agreed. eric said that you can have all the children to let the world know that you were master of your domain and dylan said yeah. eric said he would give his children AND his wives a hard smack on the ass if they got out of line .and dylan said he would do the same thing. they talked about how cool it would be to live in a huge house with all their wives. but eric said they would have a much better place than koresh had. that he wouldn’t live in a place like that. they talked about all the cool guns he had and that it would be great to make your living selling guns like he did. they just seemed very fascinated by his lifestyle.”

Zach wore dark clothes too though, and actually on the night Eric and Dylan were arrested they were hanging out with Zach Heckler in their cars. Zach left earlier, and then Eric and Dylan were bored, and then went on to do the stupid thing that pretty much changed their lives. But Zach was still Eric’s bud by Jan ’98

Yes, Zack would sometimes wear the dark clothing too; he shared in his love of NIN with Dylan and wore the band’s dark nihilistic t-shirts.  However, Zack didn’t really participate in the trenchcoat wearing. (By comparison, Nate Dykeman occasionally wore his trench).

According to Columbine: A True Crime Story by Jeff Kass:  “On Friday, January 30, Eric, Dylan, and Zach were in a car at a local church listening to music, according to written statements Eric and Dylan later gave police. Around 8:30 p.m. Eric and Dylan left in Eric’s gray Honda Prelude to go home but stopped on a gravel road near a white van and red truck. Dylan says Eric set off some fireworks. Eric says, “We got out of my car and looked around for something to do. We found some beer bottles and we broke those for about 15 minutes.” 

Sue Klebold recounts in Far From the Tree: 
“ The spring of his junior year, Dylan had asked to spend the night at his friend Zack’s place, and when Zack had to cancel, Dylan took advantage and went driving with Eric. On their way to set off fireworks on a canyon road, they stopped at a parking lot and noticed a van with video equipment in the front seat..”

While Eric may have been still on friendly terms with Zack, by March ‘98, he no longer considered Zack a good enough friend to count on his Diversion Report questionnaire.  Only one close friend came easily to the forefront of Eric’s mind and that was 16 year old Dylan Klebold.

image

do you think dylan warned brooks about the shooting before or that brooks is telling the truth and eric spared him (though eric seems to have hated him)?

Do you believe Brooks that Eric told him to go home on the day of the shooting though Eric hated him? perhaps Dylan warned him?

Excerpt from No Easy Answers, Page 14

I don’t really remember what (4th Period Creative Writing class) Mrs. Kelly had us do that day. I was already thinking about going home after fourth period and missing my last class. I had stayed up late on my computer the night before, and I was tired. I already had my cigarettes in hand by the time the bell rang to signify the end of the period. I had no idea that this would be the last time I would ever attend a class at Columbine High School. That it was the last time I’d ever take a philosophy test, or write a paper for Mrs. Kelly, or grade papers for Mrs. Caruthers, or play dodgeball in gym class. The world I knew was about to be altered forever. As I took a drag on my cigarette, I was a little surprised to see Eric suddenly pull into the parking lot right in front of me. It seemed strange that he would skip two classes, then suddenly show up back at school.


First of all, as a little aside, I just want to say that it’s a little suspect how Brooks underscores how he left Creative Writing class and started smoking a cigarette.. on school grounds, mind you.  Smoking isn’t really permitted on school grounds.  I mean, the whole reason for the Smokers Pit was to allow a designated place for students to go smoke off grounds because the Pit is situated within Clemente Park bordering on the edge of Columbine but not directly on campus. Dylan sometimes used to smoke in his car during lunch break. That must have felt hella rebellious for him to do.   Buuut… lighting up a smoke right on campus in front of entrance ways and rows of windows plus the potential school guard driving by on his usual patrol of campus..that’s ah, really something, Brooksie.  I do have to say, I slightly question whether that would be possible to do or if he was just embellishing that ‘scene’ right as he was about to confront Eric. 

Anyway.. on to your question:

I don’t believe that Dylan blatantly warned Brooks with the specifics as to what he and Eric planned to do.   Brooks mentions he was considering ditching his last class after 4th period Creative Writing and he doesn’t offer in his book what class that was.  I tend to think that Dylan knew what class he went to fifth period and it wasn’t the commons or the library so he knew Brooks would be somewhat safe and would probably escape on his own.  Dylan may also have considered that since it was Senior ditch day on 4/20, that it was a good bet that Brooks would just skip out his last class as they pretty much all were doing lately.

Dylan may have hinted in a subtle way to Brooks with suggestive hints along the lines of:  ‘Man, I’m so sick of it here, I think I’m going to ditch my last classes Tuesday, are you planning to?’     Plus, I think Dylan felt Brooks was somehow safe enough given where he’d be at that point in time on 4/20 and that Brooks would be smart enough to get out.  

Yes, I believe it’s plausible according to Brooks’ story that he confronted Eric pulling up and getting out of his car, and in the wrong parking lot space for that matter, and that Eric told him ‘he liked him now and to go home’.  Where I do find it suspect is when Brooks said he felt uneasy when Eric commanded him to leave and so then Brooks actually does just that – he just took off and did as Eric told him to like an obedient puppy.  That’s the odd part for me.  The moment Brooks started walking away, he immediately started thinking Eric was up to something nefarious and yet, he still..just.. kept on walking. Then he hears ‘cracks!’ which he mentally chooses to construe as neighborhood construction but then finally comes to his senses and realizes it’s the sounds of gun shots. And again, his immediate conclusion is that it’s Eric up to no good.  So, why Brooks would just do Eric’s bidding and walk away and ‘go home’ is more of the big mystery to me than why Eric actually decided to spare the dude during that little confrontation they had in the parking lot.

It makes perfectly good sense to me that Eric wouldn’t have started the attack prematurely by shooting Brooks out in plain site. It would’ve drawn too much attention and too early pn before their plans. They never would’ve been able to do what they planned to do if he started hastily with one person egging him on in the parking lot. This was no longer a personal vendetta as it was a year or so ago when Eric ranted on his website about Brooks. No, now it was a grand scale plan, a full on military attack against the school. Waiting until just the right time would be a much sweeter vengeance for Eric. Plus, Eric was busy at the moment, he had work to do hauling all his shit out of the car and dragging it up the school lawn. He was already late and Eric hated to be behind schedule. Brooks was simply in the way.  Eric had  bigger fish to fry rather than small fish the likes of Brooks rather foolishly mouthing off at him for missing an insignificant test. It was a bit like a small fish innocently swimming up to a shark to peck off of him. And I think Eric was amused by that irony and plus, well, he did actually liked Brooks ‘now’ , as in this point in time and Brooks admonishing him and flippantly insulting him just made Eric chuckle to himself and go ‘man, you just have no idea, do you dumb fuck of a friend?’ Here, just a few months before, the two were at each others throats and then, Eric wouldn’t have given it a second thought shutting the dude up with the receiving end of his shotgun. 

In A Mother’s Reckoning, Sue Klebold, for the first time, recounts, based on her recollections, her daily journals, and the difficult and harrowing writings and video recordings her son left behind, the days and months leading up to the tragic shooting at Columbine High School, where 12 students and one teacher, as well as the shooters themselves, died–and the indelible impact on Sue, her family, the community, and our culture. In large measure, this candid and unflinching narrative was written to explore how Sue and others close to Dylan missed potential signs. How did her beloved golden boy go so utterly off the rails, without her knowledge? Did she miss the indications, subtle or obvious, that Dylan was in trouble? That her child, who had just attended the senior prom and was soon to graduate and go off to college, had a dark, secret life, and an inner rage, that she could not even imagine? Is there something valuable and important that she can share with other mothers and families in terms of recognizing the signs that might get others the help they need?

In an age when the number of mass shootings has escalated to unprecedented levels, is there something we as parents and concerned citizens and community members can do to help our children and prevent such senseless tragedies? With fresh wounds from Newtown and Charleston, never has the need or yearning for insight and understanding been more urgent.

About the Author
Sue Klebold is the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two shooters at Columbine High School in 1999 who killed 13 people before ending their own lives, a tragedy that saddened and galvanized the nation. She has spent the last 15 years excavating every detail of her family life, and trying to understand the crucial intersection between mental health problems and violence. Instead of becoming paralyzed by her grief and remorse, she has become a passionate and effective agent working tirelessly to advance mental health awareness and intervention.

Author profits from the book will be donated to research and to charitable foundations focusing on mental health issues.  
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