“Two co-workers, Kim Carlin and Sara Arbogast, were in the same grade as Eric and Dylan.

Sara: “Eric was nice and talkative and funny and just a cool guy. He never expressed any hate toward anything, just the normal teen-age angst. A lot of people say they don’t like school. I said it all the time.”

Kim: “Dylan and me never got heart-to-heart like me and Eric would. I don’t think Dylan fit into us very well. He was too quiet. We would get into massive food fights or water fights. He wasn’t into playing with us. If you would ask him something embarrassing he’d turn red and give you this little grin.”

On slow nights, the crew would sit behind the building and set off firecrackers or homemade explosives.

“We used to make dry-ice balls behind the store,” Kim said.

“You put dry ice and hot water in a 2-liter bottle. It just shoots up. We stole a cone one time when they did road construction in the parking lot. We would see how high we could shoot the cone.”

One night Dylan brought a pipe bomb to work. The manager wrote him up and told him to never do that again.

Shortly afterward, Dylan quit Blackjack. Eric stayed.