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 ]