Tag: Rachel Scott

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…

everlasting-contrast:

“People wil never know how far a little kindness can go.”
—Rachel Scott

One of the shooters, Dylan Klebold, had known Rachel Scott since kindergarten and had even been the sound tech for a talent show she performed in, in 1998. Ironically, when the sound broke down, it was Dylan who saved the performance by hooking up a reserve tape deck. Rachel had been performing a mime dance “Watch the Lamb" which portrayed Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus cross along part of the Via Dolorosa. That same mime dance was later performed behind her coffin during her funeral.

“I do shit to supposedly ‘cleanse’ myself in a spiritual, moral sort of way, yet it does nothing to help my life – mainly. My existence is shit to me – how I feel that I am in eternal suffering, in infinite directions in infinite realities.” —Dylan Klebold

It’s like I have this heavy heart and this burden upon my back but I don’t know what it is. There is something within me that makes me want to cry…and I don’t even know what it is.“
—Rachel Scott – April 20,1998

Both Rachel and Dylan had their funeral on the same day – April 24, 1999

Classic Reblog in honor of Rachel Scott’s birthday – August 5, 1981. 

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

Dylan the asshole: the Adam Kyler story

burnandraveatcloseofday:

Dylan could kind of be a dick at times, shall we say.

image

Adam Kyler, sophomore during the 1998-1999 school year. He was in the cafeteria before the massacre started, at the same table with Kyle Velasquez (who apparently went to the library afterward, where he would be shot to death by Dylan)….

Great post! It’s been speculated on a Columbine forum whether Dylan had some sort of subconscious issues with special needs kids and finding some sort of perverse enjoyment out of making them an easy target to victimize. (His first pick off in the library was Kyle Valesquez, who supposedly did not have the sense to hide.) The speculation is that Dylan somehow felt slighted/ cheated by his mother’s career which focused her attention specifically on special needs students and so there was, on some level, a sort of competition for focused attention. I’m not convinced and it’s a slightly convoluted theory. Of course, regardless of any deep seated issues Dylan may have had, there isn’t ever really a good justification for bullying and screwing up someone else’s self esteem. In short, you could simply say he displaced the bullying that was dumped on himself by going after those he considered more vulnerable and easy to attack (additionally, certain girls in gym class and teachers that were easily frazzled.) Thankfully, Adam had Rachel’s random act of kindness extended to him to keep him afloat and break the perpetual cycle!

Dylan the asshole: the Adam Kyler story

Rachel and Dylan – Two paths on a date with destiny

I wonder if I’ll ever have a love…my love
(Zach) got his, i don’t, won’t ever get mine. Here’s all the people i’ve loved, or at least liked (or thought i loved) – all the same meaning.

(redacted)..is the newest…the purest
(for now)..seems perfect for me…
I seem perfect for her. I was delusional
& thought she waved at me at the last day
of school. oh well.. my emotions are gone.
so much past pain at once, my senses are numbed. The beauty
of being numb..lately

——————

Rachel performed another mime in the 1998 talent show. As Rachel started her performance, the audiotape sound became very garbled, and the music stopped. The audience started looking around to see what was wrong. Meanwhile on stage, Rachel kept right on with her mime. It was probably at least two minutes before the tape was fixed and the music came back on. Since Rachel had been keeping the song going in her head, when the tape restarted, she was in perfect step. She was miming the Ray Boltz song “The Hammer.” It is about a Roman soldier who witnesses Jesus’ crucifixion and asks the question, “Who would nail this innocent man (woman?) on a cross?” In the song, he comes to realize it was his own sin and the sins of the world that crucified Jesus. Ironically Dylan Klebold was in the sound booth that night, and he was the one who eventually fixed the audiotape. Once again, through Rachel, the gospel had gone forth even to her killer.

Excerpt from Rachel’s Tears

—————-

Q – Beth, you write, Rachel had a growing sense that she did not have long to live. We picked up only inklings of this while she was alive. What did you pick up? What did she tell you? Did she talk about some of the things that were going on in Columbine?

A – No. It was nothing like that. It wasn’t until hind sight that we actually saw that she was saying things that would later come true. She would say things like she was never going be married. She would say things like, I don’t ever think I’m going to get old. That kind of thing. And of course when you’re hearing that, it’s just like teenager talk. You’re like you just don’t want to get old. Really I think there was something in her that just gave her that feeling that that was true about her life. Then of course her writings substantiated that.

Q – Didn’t Dylan have a crush on Rachel?

A – He actually did at one time. In fact, even Judy Brown collaborated that to me a few weeks ago when I met her at an anniversary dinner for Columbine. Dylan had had a crush on her. I don’t know where that went. Rachel had actually tried to be friends with Dylan, not in a boyfriend-girlfriend kind of deal. She was a kind person. When everything went wrong for Dylan, I guess he kind of turned on her. Rachel was known as a Christian at Columbine and there was a lot of hate about Christians and Jews. They fed their anger. They had to keep it at a level and to do that they fed it through books, games, movies, very violent sources. They kept up this mock bravery or toughness and they fed one another with it. They had to keep that anger at a certain level in order for them to seed the plan they did. I know when Rachel was performing one night at a variety show, her tape got garbled. It was Dylan in the sound booth. I was told that he was so anxious to get that right because she was performing a mime during the tape. I think it was kind of a love-hate thing. He hated her for her Christian point of view, but, at the same time he was drawn to her because she was a kind person.

– Beth Nimmo, Rachel’s mother

———————-

Well, of course, just because the two mother’s corroborate that Dylan had a crush on Rachel doesn’t necessarily give it more credence. However, to me, it is interesting to speculate about that distinguished “R” heart on Dylan “Likes and Loves (all the same to him) List”. And, yes, certainly, the “R” could easily have been Robyn as a fond like/love. Hell, some have pointed out Reb. Sure, why not – brotherly love then? 😉 ) The length of the scratched out, redacted name seems to fit the length of ‘Rachel Scott’ rather than the longer character length of ‘Robyn Anderson’. But, meh, that doesn’t really prove anything either. At any rate, Dylan knew Rachel and he anxiously worked like mad to help her correct the audio in her play. That part is a fact. Even if he no longer ‘liked’ her at that point, for her religion or whatever – for what it is worth, it was random act of kindness on his part to do damage control and help her out.

Whenever I listen to “Who Am I Living For” by Katy Perry, I think of these two – both stating their individual missions and purpose as each plays a resolved role in their fated destiny. Columbine, being an, almost, spiritual-like war ground in which, Rachel as the first sacrificial victim, sparked the chain reaction. The grave impact of that day weighs heavily echoing on in the many years thereafter, like a giant stone plunged into a vast pond, with ripples continuing to echo outward even to this day. The repercussions from ‘It’ transformed universal consciousness like a sleeping giant. The two huntsmen, suiting up for the final battle, looking for sacrificial retribution could have been thwarted. There were several signs, several ways in which the warnings of impending doom could have been stopped – and yet, it was somehow meant to occur, to play out, for the greater purpose within the universe. Like the Phoenix rising from the ashes to transform the wrongs of the past – a better future paved with a more mindful sense of awareness, compassion and kindness.. Yes, of course, we have a veeeeery long way to go with all of this but Columbine was the impetus that veered us on to this new path. It was the ultimate wake up call. Dylan surrendered to Fate “Fate is my only Master.” as to whether he would partake in a Two Man War known as ‘Judgment Day’ and Rachel surrendered to her God, begging to be used for a great purpose that would reach the world. Both’s message were received and heard by the world.

Dylan:
I can feel a phoenix inside of me
As I march alone to a different beat
Slowly swallowing down my fear. Yeah, yeah.

I am ready for the road less traveled
Suiting up for my crowning battle
This test is my own cross to bear
But I will get there

Rachel:
I can feel this light that’s inside of me
Growing fast into a bolt of lightning
I know one spark will shock the world
Yeah, yeah

So I pray for favor like Esther
I need your strength to handle the pressure
I know there will be sacrifice…But that’s the price

Both:
It’s never easy to be chosen
Never easy to be called
Standing on the front line
When the bombs start to fall
I can see the heavens
But I still hear the flames
Calling out my name

I can see the writing on the wall
I can’t ignore this war
At the end of it all
Who am I living for?

Anyway, I suppose this post is sort of a ‘Happy Belated B-day’ to Rachel Scott in some odd sort of way. 😉

Today, April 24th, fifteen years ago, Rachel Scott and Dylan Klebold’s funerals were held.

“Rachel Scott’s funeral on April 24, 1999 was attended by more than 2,000 people and was televised throughout the nation. It was the most watched event on CNN up to that point, surpassing even the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.”

While hundreds of mourners crowded today’s televised funeral for 17-year-old Rachel Scott, a victim of the attack, Klebold’s low-key service at a mortuary 20 miles northeast of Littleton was attended by his parents, his older brother and 10 others, Marxhausen said. He said Klebold’s remains are to be cremated and that funeral arrangements for Harris are still being worked out. [x]

—-

“Possibly my biggest regret of my life is attending Rachel’s funeral and not Dylan’s.”
– Devon Adams

—-
Wouldn’t it be strangely profound in a tragic romantic way if Rachel was Dylan’s secret true love? Not that I believe this to be the case but it is interesting that both had their funeral on the same day and likely at the same time.

A Passing Sense of Magic

“There’s a standard story. Almost a script now, after so many years, but still a story then. The confusion, chaos, uncertainty, fear, running, screaming, searching, calling out. Being found, being lost. The numbness and the rain and the lights and the insensitivity. So much so fast.

"Then I told him about other things, things that happened before. My Subway sandwich disappearing and Rachel being so upset. The expressive way she spoke – so expressive that it literally blew her skirt off. Her speech piece about having sex with a piece of toast. That she had been liked by everyone but her family until after her death. At least, that’s what we thought. That I had lost it at her funeral and laughed and laughed as they played the theme from Titanic, her most-hated song. And that she had been friends with the boy who had a hand in killing her. That he wasn’t a monster until that day.
And that I hadn’t just lost her, I had lost him. And, while I got to say goodbye to Rachel, Dylan had been buried without any friends near him. I had betrayed him, and in the process, I had betrayed something inside myself.”

—Devon Adams
September 30, 2008 

A Passing Sense of MagicBy

Miss Dev

Tue Sep 30, 2008 1:26 PM

I lost Rachel when I was 16-years-old. Torn out of my life like, suddenly, cruelly, irreversibly. No more laughter in the dark theatre, no more ridiculously silly situations.

I visited her often. I visited her until they closed off the back access to the cemetery and I couldn’t bear to drive past "Baby Land” any longer. The day I graduated high school, I stopped and left her my program.

I don’t remember the occasion nor the day of the week. I can’t recall if it was sunny or cloudy, warm or cold. I think was autumn – but I remember leaves on the trees.

I was sitting on Rachel’s grave, telling her all of the things that I couldn’t tell to anyone else. Filling her in on the gossip. Pretending, for myself more than for her, that she was still alive. In my peripheral, a man lingered. I was always cautious when people approached these two isolated graves. I didn’t trust them. Often they were tourists intent on experiencing something of the more gruesome part of our history, or our story here. And when they weren’t tourists and they lurked, as this man was lurking, they were media, thirty to capture some untold story. As if any of our stories remain untold. I touched the card I laid against Rachel’s gravestone (so it must of been August, her birth month) and stood.

He addressed me first. He asked if I had known her. There’s no reason to lie – especially not when one is so close to death.

“Yes.”
He nodded.
“Did you?” It wasn’t meant to be hostile, but I held an irrational protectiveness over my friend’s grave site.
“No. No, I did not.”
Then why are you here? I didn’t ask it, but he answered anyway.
I just don’t remember his answer.

But it must have satisfied me because I stayed. He asked where the teacher was buried, so I led him up the small hill to the bench marking the his resting place. We looked down over Rachel and the other student’s grave. The grass looked vibrantly green that day. It must have been cloudy else the grass would not been so stunning.

What made me open up to him? Seasoned from (one may say too) many interviews with the police, FBI, private investigators, the media, film writers, counselors, family, friends… I was used to being honest about it. About it all. No, not all. Omission is a form of dishonesty in some cases, in this it was a form of survival.

I had my wall. The things I spoke about, horrific, terrifying, sorrowful things I had created a fortress for where they could reside and I could visit them when I needed to, but I could check my emotions at the door. These were things that had happened to me, that was fact. I’ve found it’s often harder for others to connect with a story when one inserts very personal emotions into it. So I don’t. My emotions, my pain, my tears… those were things that others didn’t need to be privy to, so I stashed them away for a rainy day.

I think there were thunder clouds in the sky.

We sat. He may have asked me questions, I don’t recall. I don’t know if he pried or if I just told him what I thought he’d like to know.

There’s a standard story. Almost a script now, after so many years, but still a story then. The confusion, chaos, uncertainty, fear, running, screaming, searching, calling out. Being found, being lost. The numbness and the rain and the lights and the insensitivity. So much so fast.

Then I told him about other things, things that happened before. My Subway sandwich disappearing and Rachel being so upset. The expressive way she spoke – so expressive that it literally blew her skirt off. Her speech piece about having sex with a piece of toast. That she had been liked by everyone but her family until after her death. At least, that’s what we thought. That I had lost it at her funeral and laughed and laughed as they played the theme from Titanic, her most-hated song. And that she had been friends with the boy who had a hand in killing her. That he wasn’t a monster until that day. And that I hadn’t just lost her, I had lost him. And, while I got to say goodbye to Rachel, Dylan had been buried without any friends near him. I had betrayed him, and in the process, I had betrayed something inside myself.

How long did we sit there? How long did I weave my story, tragic and yet true, in that cemetery? How long did I allow the broken bits of me tumble out onto that cold, stone bench and down the green hill to settle like so many scattered birthday cards upon Rachel’s grave? I couldn’t tell you then, and, after all these millions of seconds, I can’t tell you now.

From this distance I would almost believe that he was a ghost. He had no car, no companion, he seemed to have materialized and, in memory, to have simply disappeared. I would think that he was nothing more than an apparition except that we embraced.

It was time to go. Hanging around the dead too long leads me down a dark road and I had to leave before I lost the light. I went to hug him goodbye, and he said the only thing that I know he said:

“When you hug a friend, always hug with your left arm raised, because it brings your hearts as close together as they can be.”

And I left. I drove away with the sense that I had just experienced something that would change me. A Moment that would be an indelible part of who I was and am for the rest of my life. But it was only after I left that I felt that. I wonder if he did, too.

As much as I miss my friends who are dead, their absence is a finality. I can never see them again, talk to them, laugh with them, touch them. They are gone. My longing for them is something different than what I feel for this man who I met for such a brief time on a dreary autumn afternoon years ago. Who was he? Where did he come from? What quality did he possess to allow me to transcend years of careful suppression?

I will probably never know. Without so much as a name or even a solid memory to begin from, there is little hope that I will know anything beyond my vaporous memories and a passing sense of magic.

And for that, I am sorry.

Published on Youtube – Nov 2, 2013

Former AfA youth poet and Columbine student Dev Adams, talks about her experience in the Phoenix Rising program and reads a recent poem about that experience at the Art from Ashes at the 10th Anniversary Soirée on October 24, 2013, at Skylite Station.

Devon Adams is still very much grappling with the aftermath and ripple effects of the tragedy and losing three friends even today at 31.  She struggles with being on both sides of the fence: friends with the victims – including Rachel Scott and “best friends” with the shooter, Dylan Klebold.  

It’s interesting to note that she mentions someone on Tumblr portraying her as a roleplayer and doing a better job of herself then she would. *g*  I do recall seeing that blog over a year ago and then it was abruptly yanked. 

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

He actually did at one time. In fact, even Judy Brown collaborated that to me a few weeks ago when I met her at an anniversary dinner for Columbine. Dylan had had a crush on her. I don’t know where that went. Rachel had actually tried to be friends with Dylan, not in a boyfriend-girlfriend kind of deal. She was a kind person. When everything went wrong for Dylan, I guess he kind of turned on her. Rachel was known as a Christian at Columbine and there was a lot of hate about Christians and Jews. They fed their anger. They had to keep it at a level and to do that they fed it through books, games, movies, very violent sources. They kept up this mock bravery or toughness and they fed one another with it. They had to keep that anger at a certain level in order for them to seed the plan they did. I know when Rachel was performing one night at a variety show, her tape got garbled. It was Dylan in the sound booth. I was told that he was so anxious to get that right because she was performing a mime during the tape. I think it was kind of a love-hate thing. He hated her for her Christian point of view, but, at the same time he was drawn to her because she was a kind person.

Beth Nimmo, mother to Rachel Scott, when asked if Dylan Klebold had a crush on her daughter (via sweet-rachel)


“People wil never know how far a little kindness can go.”
—Rachel Scott

One of the shooters, Dylan Klebold, had known Rachel Scott since kindergarten and had even been the sound tech for a talent show she performed in, in 1998. Ironically, when the sound broke down, it was Dylan who saved the performance by hooking up a reserve tape deck. Rachel had been performing a mime dance “Watch the Lamb" which portrayed Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus cross along part of the Via Dolorosa. That same mime dance was later performed behind her coffin during her funeral.

“I do shit to supposedly ‘cleanse’ myself in a spiritual, moral sort of way, yet it does nothing to help my life – mainly. My existence is shit to me – how I feel that I am in eternal suffering, in infinite directions in infinite realities.” —Dylan Klebold

It’s like I have this heavy heart and this burden upon my back but I don’t know what it is. There is something within me that makes me want to cry…and I don’t even know what it is.“
—Rachel Scott – April 20,1998

Rachel Scott spent spring break in Albuquerque with her friend Alisha Basore, shopping for things for the apartment they planned to rent together in August. “She saved me in so many ways,” Alisha said. “She taught me the value of life. She taught me to love every second you have.”
—————————————————————————————
WHAT PUSHED OUTCASTS OVER THE EDGE?
Douglas Montero | New York Post | Posted: 12:00 AM, April 26, 1999 | LITTLETON, Colo.

Alisha Basore has every reason in the world to hate Dylan Klebold.

Her best friend, Rachel Scott, 17, was a casualty of the bloody massacre at Columbine HS.

Instead of moving into an apartment with Scott after graduation as they had long planned, she gave a tearful eulogy at her wake.

But rather than feeling anger at Klebold for what he took from her, Basore wonders what drove him and his friend Eric Harris into the heart of darkness.

“He was a real nice guy,” the 17-year-old said yesterday.
“The fact that he did this is so strange. It wasn’t like him.”

Basore – who was in the school when the rampage began – thinks Dylan would have never shot her like he did her friend Rachel.

“I was never mean to him and I would talk to him,” said Basore, who sat next to Klebold in economics class.

But she said other kids at the school were mean to Klebold.

They didn’t talk to Klebold and Harris – who were inseparable fringe members of an outcast group called the Trench Coat Mafia.

And part of the reason why the school jocks and their followers castigated Klebold and Harris, she said, was because there were rumors about their relationship.

“He was not gay,” Basore said adamantly about Klebold, who attended the senior prom with a young woman last week.

Other students confirmed rampant speculation about the two teens’ sexuality – without anything in the way of evidence to back it up.

“People were saying that they were actually gay,” said fellow student Josh Nielsen, who admitted making jokes about the teens behind their backs.

Another student, Sean Kelly, 16, added:

“There were rumors of their being homosexuals and they were always being taunted and chastised about it.”

Klebold and Harris’ death spree followed months in which they were mercilessly picked on and treated like lepers.

Investigators are trying to determine if the gay taunts helped light the fuse that ignited the bomb that left 13 dead and many more injured.

“Part of the investigation is to find out what drove them to this point,” Jefferson County District Attorney David Thomas told me.

“We need to know what created so much anger in these boys,” Thomas said.

Investigators are carefully reading the detailed diary of one of the killers for clues to what motivated the rampage.

They’re looking for key events and patterns – and for details about Harris’s and Klebold’s relationship.

Thomas emphasized there is no proof the teens had intimate relations, but pointed to evidence that Harris and Klebold were “real tight,” as he put it:

After killing 12 students in the library, the two retreated to a corner, away from the bloodbath, before committing suicide.

“They wanted solitude, in a way” said Thomas.

Investigators found their bodies “almost touching” with one of the teens’ heads at the feet of the other.

“The teens shared the same pair of fingerless gloves – each wearing one glove. "That to me symbolizes that they were really committed to each other,” Thomas said.

In all pictures showing Klebold and Thomas with other members of the Trench Coat Mafia, they are always side-by-side goofing around in an affectionate way, Thomas said.

Being gay – or simply being suspected of it – is no easy proposition in Colorado.

State voters passed an anti-gay-rights law in 1992 that was so discriminatory it was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It is certainly not acceptable here like it is in New York and San Francisco” said Tom Bohnsack, 51, who works in a gay bookstore in Denver.

Several Columbine students said they didn’t know of any gay classmates, an indication that the rumors about Klebold and Harris – true or not – must have added to their outcast status.

Fact or fiction, something fueled the hostilities of their fellow students that may have sparked the youths’ passion to kill.

It lives on even after their suicides; signs at yesterday’s memorial service in Littleton contained an anti-gay epithet.

source