Columbine: Episode 1 - What's the plan?

Right now, I could tell you about hundreds of different mass school shootings which have happened around the United States of America, but we are going to go back and take a deep dive into what started the phrase, pulling a Columbine.  This is a 4-part series covering the mass school shooting, which took place at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on Tuesday, April 20, 1999.

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Transcript

[Underscore Music]

Right now, I could tell you about hundreds of different mass school shootings which have happened around the United States of America, but we are going to go back and take a deep dive into what started the phrase, pulling a Columbine.

[Theme Music Start]

Welcome to The Secret Sits, I’m your host John Dodson.  Join us every Thursday as we uncover the Secrets behind the world’s most fascinating true crime cases.  You can find all episodes of The Secret Sits for free on Apple Podcast, Spotify or where ever you get your podcasts.  And if you like what you are hearing, reach out to us on Instagram and Facebook @The Secret Sits Podcast or on Twitter @SecretSitsPod. Now, on with our story.

[Theme Music Play Out]

[Under Score Music]

Frank DeAngelis walked out into the center of the basketball court.  The gym was packed with two thousand hyped up teenagers, and when Frank spoke, you could hear a crack in his voice.  Frank did not even try to hide it either, because he knew that his emotions broke true.  And when he reached that microphone in center court, a hush fell over the crowd, the silence rumbled with respect. Frank talked to the students about three tragic events in his life; Frank had a friend in college who had died in a motorcycle accident, Frank said, “I can remember being in the waiting room, looking at his blood.  So don’t tell me it can’t happen.”, Frank then described holding his teenage daughter after her close friend had died in a horrifying wreck, and then Frank told his most difficult story, one of having to gather his baseball team together to inform them that one of their teammates had lost control of his car, as Frank choked up again, he said, “I do not want to attend another memorial service.”

Frank took his time and took a deep breath, “Look to your left,” he told them. “Look to your right”, he told them to close their eyes and imagine one of those people being gone.  “Open your eyes.” Frank told them.  “I want to see each and every one of your bright, smiling faces again Monday morning. When you’re thinking about doing something that could get you in trouble, remember, I care about you, I love you, but remember, I want us all together.  We are one large family, we are Columbine!

All 2,000 students did in fact return safety to school that Monday morning after their weekend prom.  And with that worry behind them, it never occurred to them that the very next day, Tuesday, April 20, 1999, two dozen of Mr. D’s beloved kids and members of the faculty would be rushed to local hospitals, fighting for their lives.

Eric Harris liked to smoke, drink and date girls, as many girls as he could.  His hair was cut in a short-cropped military style, which he kept spiked up with plenty of product.  He liked black T-shirts and baggy cargo pants.  Eric also liked to break rules, he loved shooting bottle rockets off and blasting German industrial rock music from his Honda.

Eric, was usually pretty good at getting a date, when needed, but he had yet to secure a date for prom.  He worked in the Blackjack Pizza shop in a strip mall just a quick walk down the road from his house.  Girls would routinely come into the shop to visit Eric and cash in on his promise of a free slice, if they came to see him.

Eric’s best friend also worked at the Blackjack Pizza shop, but Dylan had already secured a date for prom.  Dylan Klebold was much more of an introvert than Eric.  He could be painfully shy and self-conscious, in fact Dylan was sometimes so shy that he could not even speak in front of strangers, especially females.

While Eric could carelessly walk up to any girl in the mall and flirt with them, Dylan would pass girls Chips Ahoy cookies in class as a way to let them know he was interested. 

Dylan also hated the way he looked.  His face was slightly lopsided and he thought his nose looked like a giant blob which simply sat in the center of his face.  He had long curls which fell down toward his shoulders.  And Dylan was tall, something else that made him stick out and look awkward around his peers.  Dylan stood at around 6 feet 3 inches tall, but he slouched so much he took off a couple of inches, trying to hid in the crowd.

Dylan had rented his tux and purchased a corsage; he and 5 other couples had gone in on renting a limo for the evening.  He was going to prom with Robyn Anderson.  She had long straight blond hair and a very pretty face, but Robyn was also smart, she was currently away on a trip to Washington DC with her church’s youth group, she would return just in time for the prom, and after that she would graduate as Columbine’s class valedictorian.  She and Dylan share a calculus class and also enjoyed spending time together in the hallways between classes.  Despite this, Dylan mostly saw her as a friend and not a girlfriend per se. Robyn had completely believed Dylan’s stories he told her, which resulted in her assisting in the boys acquiring 3 of their 4 guns.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were not athletic at all, but they were really into school events.  They attended football games and most school organized events.  The two boys produced videos for the Rebel News Network at their school and Dylan ran the sound board for school plays and talent shows.  At one talent show a tape jammed right in the middle of Rachel Scott’s performance, but Dylan saved the day and saved Rachel from embarrassment.  In a few more days, Eric will shoot and kill Rachel Scott.

Eric was a typical teenage nonconformist.  He also had a short temper which could be inflamed by the slightest form of disrespect. He had given himself the nickname Reb, obviously short for Rebel, which he so earnestly wanted to be. But for someone who was such a rebel, Eric always knew the correct answers in class and was more than confident enough to answer whenever the teachers asked.  He wrote a poem in his creative writing class about ending hate and loving the world.  Maybe Eric missed the fact that in trying to be such a nonconformist, he had inadvertently named himself after his school’s mascot. The Columbine Rebs.

Lunch time in high school is a big event.  The cafeteria in the Columbine school was a wide-open space, it is off set from a corridor between the student entrance on the south corner and a giant stone staircase, so large that almost a dozen people could stand across one step.  This area of the school was referred to by the students as “The Commons”.   The space was constructed with white steel girders and awnings and decorative white steel cables stretched across the space.  When the lunch began for the A group, around 600 students flooded into the area.  This was not always a busy area of the school, but more of a lay station where students met up with friends and then headed off to other parts of the school to spend their time away from teachers.  Two hours after the assembly Mr D was on lunch duty, one of his favorite parts of the day.  “I love it down here” he said, “That’s were you get to see the kids.  That’s when you get to talk to them.”  He made his way around the vacuous space and spoke to students, joined in on their lighthearted conversations and tried in any way that he could to offer help and support.  He also had a strict rule against discipline for activities during lunch.  But one thing that Mr. D could not handle was entitlement and carelessness. When he noticed that some students would leave their leftover food and trays just laying around it made him upset.  So upset that he had four security cameras installed in The Commons.  The school janitor would swap out a tape for the cameras every day at 11:05 am and the rotating cameras would record short 15 second bursts of video as they slowly rotated back and forth.  You could probably imagine the benign video footage that these cameras recorded each day for the first four months they existed, then all of that changed.

America is now, in the year 2022, captivated by news of each new school shooting and if you ask most people when school shootings became a thing, they are going to tell you Columbine, it is now in our daily lexicon.  But Columbine was not where school shootings started.  In February of 1997, a 16-year-old in Bethel, Alaska brought a shotgun to school and killed his principal and a student, two other students were also injured.  October of 1997, Pearl, Mississippi, two students dead and seven more wounded.  December 1997, two more shootings, West Paducah, Kentucky and Stamps, Arkansas.  At the end of 1997 seven had been killed and 16 more wounded.

1998 was worse, 10 dead and 35 wounded in 5 separate school shootings.  Shootings typically took place in the spring, toward the end of the school year, students began referring to it as Shooting Season.  Every shooter had been a white male and every shooter had worked alone.  

But then for the 1998-1999 school year, there was not a single shooting.  And everyone started to calm down and they stopped thinking about the past school shootings, just as Eric and Dylan started to finalize their plans.

Eric and Dylan were assigned group A for lunch, they did not hang around the commons, as most of the older kids had their own cars, they would head off campus to get their lunch at Subway, Wendy’s or any of the other countless fast-food restaurants dotted around the area.  Kids who attended Columbine were typically from families with enough money to support their kids getting some kind of car, when they reached the right age.  Eric had his black Honda Prelude while Dylan drove a refurbished vintage BMW.  During lunch break, the boys, with several friends, would pack into one of the cars and take off to get some food and smoke some.

Eric and Dylan knew that they had plans, which proceeded all the way through their weekend and into the following Monday.  Friday night, they would work their final shift at Blackjack.  Eric had made no real plans for after graduation, but Dylan was set to attend college, he planned on getting a degree in computer engineering. He had already been accepted into several schools, of which he selected University of Arizona.  Dylan and his father had driven down to Tucson so that Dylan could pick out his dorm room.

When their Friday night shift at Blackjack ended, the two headed to Belleview Lanes for their Friday night special, “Rock and Bowl”.  This was a typical Friday night for the boys and a over a dozen of their friends.  They weren’t great bowlers, but no one really cared.  After the night’s events, Eric called Susan, as the two had planned, but when the phone was answered at Susan’s house, it was her mother.  She told Eric that Susan was not there and that she was out at a friend’s house.  Eric became angry, which surprised Susan’s mother, who had always found Eric charming.  She gave Eric Susan’s pager number and he calmed down.  Susan received that page from Eric and called him, the two sat on the phone talking for about half an hour, they talked mostly about other kids, who Eric felt had stabbed him in the back.  And then at the end of the conversation, Eric finally asked Susan if she had plans for Saturday night?  She wasn’t busy, and Eric finally had a date for the prom.

When Monday morning arrived, the school was all a buzz with what had taken place over the prom weekend.  The prom after party was held in the school gym and had been set up by the parents, the after-party theme had been New York, New York, but it was not necessarily about New York City, it was more of a Las Vegas Resort theme with fake money for all of the kids to play card games at Vegas style gambling tables. This is fitting, as prom is simply a facsimile of adult life, kids dressing up, going out to dinner and riding in limousines, so why not go to Las Vegas and gamble afterward?   But, just as Mr. D had asked, every kid showed up on Monday morning after prom, safe.

In The Anarchist Cookbook, which Eric had found online, he learned how to make bombs, which followed the barbecue design: Simply take a standard propane tank, like the one in your backyard grill and attach a detonator, there you have twenty pounds of explosive gas, ready to go.  This bomb would be employed as a diversion.  Eric and Dylan knew that if they could keep the police and emergency response units distracted, they could astronomically increase their body count.  They wanted to surpass the 168 people killed by Timothy McVeigh during the Oklahoma City Bombing, in fact, they wanted to triple that count.

The day of reckoning had been designed into three acts, like acts in a play or a movie.  First, would be a massive explosion inside of the commons ripping apart the group A lunch students.  Two bombs were needed for this, and each bomb would be filled with shrapnel, the plan was for around 600 students to die in this first surprise attack.  The explosion would also set the school building on fire.  The bombs would be set at two large supporting structures and when they exploded, the portion of the second floor of the school, the section which contained the library would come crashing down.  As the timers for the bombs counted down, Eric and Dylan would exit the school and would take up positions in the parking lot.  This would set the boys up to begin act two of their plans.

 Act two would begin as the survivors of the initial attack filed out of the burning building, still shocked and confused as to what was happening.  Eric and Dylan could then just pick the students and faculty off one by one as they come through the doors.  Dylan would use an Intratec TEC-DC9, which is a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, he would also have a shotgun.  Eric would handle a Hi-Point 9mm carbine rifle, and he would have a shotgun with him as well.  Dispersed amongst the two boys, they would carry up to 80 portable explosives, a mixture of pipe bombs, carbon dioxide bombs and Molotov cocktails.  

As soon as the initial bombs blew up, and everyone started piling out of the school, the two teens would make their initial approach back to the building.  They had planned out every move with military precision.  But this is also the phase of the acts where Eric and Dylan expected to be killed.  Even in their own plan, they would not live to see Act three take place.

After the boys were dead and the police announced that the threat had been neutralized, first responders and the media would flood the area.  Forty-five minutes, after the initial attack, both Eric’s Honda and Dylan’s BMW would explode in a fiery furnace, which would engulf everyone who had showed up to help, it would be pure carnage.  The two did have concerns though, concerns that they had yet to accumulate enough ammunition for their mission, so Eric contacted Mark Manes, a small-time local drug dealer, who also delt some guns and ammo on the side.  Mark got the additional ammo for the boys at K-Mart, it was just two boxes, 100 bullets in total, for 25 bucks.

Now, Tuesday morning and Dylan was up and out of the house by 05:30am.  He met up with Eric at the grocery store, here they would purchase the last of the propane tanks they needed and they traveled to Eric’s house, Eric set about putting together their bombs and setting up the cars.  The boys had allotted 30 minutes to set up the bombs and then another hour to get themselves ready, relax and have some food.

The two were not ones who often missed classes, so when Robyn Anderson noticed that Dylan had not show up for their calculus class, she was a bit concerned.  And then Brooks Brown noticed that Eric had not shown up for psychology.  

Moments before the clock struck 11:00am, Eric and Dylan decided to begin their mission, they were already behind schedule.  Dylan had donned cargo pants, a black t-shirt with the word WRATH printed across it and his typical Red Sox hat on, backwards as always.  Eric’s shirt read, Natural Selection.  Both boys wore black combat boots and between the two they shared one pair of black gloves, Dylan wore the left, while Eric sported the right glove.  As they left, Eric laid a microcassette on the kitchen counter which contained his final thoughts.  They also left their infamous basement tapes, with a final good bye, which they had recorded that very morning.

They drove their cars to a park near Eric’s house to set up their decoy bomb, the time was set for 11:14am.  Places for Act one.

Now, on their way to the school.  Fourth period ended at 11:10, once the bell rang, they would have seven minutes to move their bombs and supplies into the school, set the bombs in the Commons area and then retreat back to their vehicles where they would put on the rest of their attack gear and prepare for Act 2.

Eric’s car pulled into the parking lot at exactly 11:10, they are now behind schedule. Dylan followed Eric’s car into the parking lot.  Dylan drove to his assigned spot in the senior parking lot and parked his car directly in front of the cafeteria.  Eric pulled into the junior lot and parked facing the main student entrance.

Brooks Brown, stepped out of the school building for a cigarette.  He spotted Eric and walked over to him, “What’s the matter with you?  We had a test in psychology!” Brooks shouted to Eric as he approached.  Eric, now carrying a big duffle bag remained calm, and said the Brooks, “It doesn’t matter anymore, Brooks, I like you, now get out of here, go home.”

Brooks just walked away shaking his head, but enjoying his cigarette.  Eric headed toward the school entrance with his duffle bag, it was now 11:12am, the diversion bomb in the park would go off in just 2 minutes.  At 11:14am, Eric and Dylan enter the commons, the bombs were set to go off at 11:17am, 3 minutes to place them and retreat to their secondary position at their cars, 3 minutes was not a lot of time.  But the boys made it out to their cars and began preparations for act two.  They had practiced this, drilled it like military boot camp, but they had always been right by one another’s side, now they were each alone.  They had trained to communicate with hand signals, because they were too far apart to hear each other.

They finished their quick change and now had their arsenal of weapons strapped to their bodies; the last layer was their long dark dusters.  Each one had a semiautomatic on his body, a shotgun in the duffle bag and a backpack full of improvised explosive devices.  The timers were set for the car bombs, the carnage for act three, that the boys knew they would never see happen.  

We know that the school custodian switches the tapes out of the surveillance camaras in the commons each day just before A lunch began, however; on this day, he was running late and he did not hit the stop button until exactly 11:14am, just before Eric and Dylan had left the bombs in the commons area.  The new recording picks up at 11:22am, this created an 8-minute gap in the video, but when the video resumes, you can now see the bombs visible and you can also see that some students in the commons, near the window are reacting to something strange happening outside of the school.

At the sound of the lunch bell, Patrick Ireland, headed to the library to finish his stats homework, he had been on the phone the whole previous night talking to Laura.  Cassie Bernall, was also behind on her homework, so she headed to the library to work on her MacBeth assignment. 

Mr. D who would usually be making his lunch rounds in the commons, was absent on this day.  His secretary had booked an interview with new young teach, who Mr. D was going to make a full-time offer, so he was in his office at the opposite end of the corridor from the commons.  The school’s full time resource officer was Deputy Neil Gardner, he was a member of the sheriff’s department, but worked full time at Columbine.  Gardner loved to take his lunch in the commons with the kids, it gave him time to bond with the kids.  Today, on the lunch menu was teriyaki, which he did not really care for, so the Deputy went off campus for lunch at Subway, along with his boss, who was an unarmed civilian security guard. The two brought their sandwiches back to campus and sat in Gardner’s squad car, in the faculty lot, just behind where all of the smokers congregated, filling their lungs with a high schooler’s version of self-esteem and confidence. 

Robyn Anderson was in her car waiting on friends, when the girls finally appeared, the three friends drove away, completely unaware that shots had already been fired on the opposite end of the school.  Danny Rohrbough and a couple of friends left the commons and walked out of the side door, the door which was directly in front of the senior parking lot.

Eric and Dylan’s plan was finally in motion, or at least they assumed so.  Join us next week on The Secret Sits, as these two indignant youths enter their school building, packed with their friends and acquaintances and open fire.