Online Crush – Sarah Slater (JC-001-004433): Sarah said she was close to Zach Heckler, and also knew Dylan. Sarah said she used to chat with Dylan online, that Dylan had a “crush” on her, and during her Freshman year. Dylan “wanted to date her”, but she declined. Sarah said that Dylan did not persist in his efforts to go out with Sarah.

At age 14, Dylan started at his freshman year at Columbine High School together with Eric. They were good friends with their classmates, and fit very well into the environment. “That’s back when they were just like everybody else”, said classmate Katie Rutledge. “They dressed normal, I’d even say preppie.”

But in his sophomore year, Eric and Dylan started hanging out with the group later known all over the U.S. as the “Trench Coat Mafia”. They were angry and rebellious, and united by their differences. People said they always wore black trenchcoats, therefore the name.

Dylan became an “outsider”.

But Sarah Slater, a member of the same theater group as Dylan, e-mailed with him for a while, and she didn’t at all think he was that much more different than anyone else.  “I liked him”, she said. “He was really shy, although he wasn’t all that shy with me.”

When they came home from the theater at nights, they spent hours communicating by e-mail. “We talked about a lot of stuff, mostly about alcoholic beverages and how he hated school.”

Sarah understood that hatred. With her baggy pants and spiked jewelry, she didn’t fit in until she started dressing more conventionally at the end of her freshman year. She worked hard to change her negative attitude, and discovered when she did that she enjoyed Columbine.

Dylan never did.

“Just when I talked to him, I don’t know, it was like he would end the conversation with, ‘(expletive) the school’”, Sarah said. “If I asked how he was doing, he’d say, ‘I wish I didn’t go here’, or ‘I wish I was somewhere else.’”

Sometimes during their online chats, Dylan would say he had been drinking. Sometimes Sarah could tell by his typing mistakes. Sometimes he would invite her to go out drinking.

But other classmates doesn’t remember Dylan drinking a lot. Maybe he was just trying to impress Sarah, trying to come across as a party animal, trying to make her think he was living up to his nickname, VoDkA.

After Sarah quit theater, she lost touch with Dylan.

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Dylan rarely dated. “He liked girls, you know, but he would never approach them because he was too shy or waiting for them to approach him,” said Sarah Slater, a friend from theater.

Nate Dykeman has another opinion on why Dylan didn’t date. “Dylan wanted to wait,” he said. “He didn’t want to get into anything in high school.”

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