“Jester” aka Brandon Martine – Part 1 of 2

On 04/29/99, Northglenn Police Department was contacted regarding lead DN1796. Detective Steve Hipp provided a transcript of the interview with Brandon Martine (bd:12/31/81) of Northglenn High School that lives in Westminster, CO. Martine claimed to know Eric Harris from the Internet. The interview details communications between them and the use of computer games involving school simulations. The interview does not indicate any knowledge on Martine’s part that Eric Harris or his friends were planning to commit crimes or possessed weapons or explosives.  

Martine nervously stutters a whole heck of a lot in his awkward q/a conversation with the investigators. The detectives often pressed him and tried to elicit their desired response but Martine never admits to anything out of the ordinary, dangerous or sketchy, in his mostly, online gaming friendship with Eric (well, other than the Duke Nukem school level replication).  There are a few interesting tidbits about Eric and Dylan’s friendship as witnessed from Martine’s casual friendship subjective perspective. His vantage point also indicates that Dylan could be quietly elusive to those he was unfamiliar with.  The excerpt highlights below have been cleaned-up and edited and sometimes paraphrased to make for easier reading.  Part 2 of this interview to follow..

BRANDON MARTINE:  “I talked to him (Eric Harris) about uh, his philosophy class, he was in a philosophy class.  He said he really liked it and was getting along in it and stuff and uh, I told him I was going to do a philosophy class next year and he really, we went off a little bit about our philosophies and they were similar.  He was talking to me about how uh, he liked Aristotle’s stuff and, and how he, he just liked the, the concept of, of talking to each other .”

“Doom II, um, Duke Nukem 3D, uh, Quake and I tried talking about Quake II with him but he said he didn’t get into that ‘cause it was, his computer wasn’t fast enough and stuff.    There was one particular one though, it was a Duke Nukem 3D that uh, I remember, he said he replicated it in his school. He created a level personalized to his school and it was the first time that, that he ever personally like gave me a file to play like that and uh, we played against each other, privately, modem to modem, just me and him on it and uh, we played the level.  I played him on it.”

“He told me that he liked women a lot, uh, he had problems with girls sometimes and stuff and I had problems with them as well and we always talked it through each other. Uh, one night, I came back from a place called Rock Island and uh, I told him I wasn’t feeling very good and we just were talking and he said, you know, he got dumped down by a girl too and uh, and I did as well and, and, I was talking to him and he said that um, he was helping me through it. He was telling me all this stuff like saying, you know, it’s okay, and stuff and um, I tried tell’, saying the same back to him and told him that I wanted to get together with him, you know, to talk things out and work things with him. I wanted him to come down and uh, he said that he couldn’t, all the times that I talked to him, he always said that he couldn’t ’cause he had, he was really busy and stuff because he worked and he went to school and, and we live pretty far apart from each other.”

“We did talk about jocks though and uh, he, I remember us, getting a little bit mad about it but we didn’t um, he said he played baseball one time and, and I told him I played baseball my freshman year and uh, he, he related something to that but he wasn’t, he never told me that he was like really mad at ’em. He had the same opinion as me, like when uh, you like join a team or something, it’s all favoritism, you know, you get on it and they don’t care about uh, if you get to play or not, it’s all about winning and stuff and we talked about that but that was all.”

“Uh, he did wear pants that had a lot of pockets on ’em, never, I’ve never seen him in a trench coat, um, He always, no, he never wore, I never saw him as a Gothic person, he, he wore a hat always though, I remember him always wearing a hat. The other kid though that hung out with him, um, he seemed a little bit Gothic to me, uh, for some reason. He wasn’t very talkative, he, they, they sounded like they were best friends though and um, he just didn’t seem like the, that’s why I don’t know him as well and didn’t like talking to him because I just didn’t feel that he was a comfortable person.”

“Um, on his website it was black and it had like red stripes and stuff on it. It was mostly related to the game Quake, which was a new, and Doom II, he had uh, stuff on there that you can download. Um, he put my name down on the bottom with some other people that we knew that would put like special things to these people, you know, for creating the page and stuff and he had a private page to it in the back room and you had to enter a password on the bottom and it was something like 4tequila something. I can’t remember exactly because I had it written down and, and he took the site down a while ago, and I never got to see, uh, I never went to it as much ’cause it didn’t have anything that really interests me.”

“On the private section he had Mama jokes I guess you would consider ’em, they we-, uh they were just jokes. He had a big long uh, text tiling on there but I  wasn’t interested on reading it a lot of it, he had files you could download. He mentioned something about clan and clans related on the internet are different from like gangs and cliques or whatever.   Clans on the internet are a group of people that play the game are teams, and they play a team versus a team, and he wanted me to, actually, we’re on a clan together and uh, we, we had our friends on it as well and we’d play this game and against other people and uh, he then said that the clan would he said that the clan broke down and it went away and he said that now it was just his personal clan with him and Vodka, which was his friend, uh, that he hung out with. I really can’t remember. I just remember before it was like RB [RC – Rebel Clan] or something like that. “*

*this was after Eric ousted Zack Heckler/Kibbz from their threesome clan, Reb-VoDkA-Kibbz

“His friend Vodka, was this tall guy that I think was the picture of his of uh, gunman.  Eric was the only person that I knew that hung out with, you know – had a real good best friend or something and that would be considered him. Uh, he came to the net parties with us once in a while, he never, he never really talked a lot to us about like him playing. I never saw him (VoDkA) online a lot, he just hung out with him a lot is what I remember. “

“I never really got to talk to him (Eric) about. I never knew his parents, I called his house and his parents would answer the phone but I asked if he was there and they would just get him for me. I remember him talking about his brother, he said he had an older brother but he really didn’t talk about his family life that much.”