Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
While questions about what led to the tragedy remain unanswered, the factual details of what transpired on April 20 have been nailed down quite cleanly. As the initial shock wore off last April, an increasingly common question became not why Harris and Klebold killed so many students, but why so few.
"You had 500 students in the cafeteria," one source said. "They could have killed a lot more if they wanted to. If they had gone in two different doors, they could have literally had a murderous crossfire. They could have killed hundreds of students, and that's not counting the pipe bombs."
Investigators have no way of explaining why Harris and Klebold improvised so poorly once their initial plan went awry. Harris' writings provide detailed plans for the attack, but there was no plan B. "I know the plan was to kill as many kids as they could," a top investigator said. "Why didn't they kill more when [the bombs failed]? I don't know. Let's just call ourselves lucky."
What they do know is that the attack was set to begin in the packed cafeteria, just after the start of the first lunch period. Harris and Klebold planted the two main propane bombs in the center of the room just after 11 a.m., then returned to their car to gear up. They strapped on a daunting arsenal of weapons, harnessed them with military web gear, pulled on the trench coats to cover it all and waited in the parking lot for the explosions. After the blasts, the plan was to "either go in, or wait as students came streaming out and then start shooting at them," an investigator said.
The bombs were set to detonate at about 11:16. They waited an extra four or five minutes, then apparently concluded there was a problem, an investigator said. "Then it looks like they decided: 'Well, what the hell; the bombs didn't go off, let's just start shooting.'"
Random passersby on the steps outside the library served as the first targets: two killed, several more injured. Then they entered the building on the second floor, gunned down Dave Sanders in the hallway, and made their first trip into the library, where they eventually took down most of their victims.
They never entered the cafeteria until later, after most of the students had fled. At that point, they again attempted to detonate the bombs, with Klebold even hurling a Molotov cocktail at one. It's commonly believed that the shooting began in the cafeteria, because so many students fled that area reporting gunfire. But those students were actually hearing gunfire and seeing smoke from the steps just outside the building.
The number of students killed in the library has been widely perceived as irrefutable evidence that the killers selected their targets. Just over 50 students were trapped in the library, the reasoning goes, and only 10 were killed. Therefore, Harris and Klebold must have been selecting carefully. But that reasoning ignores more than a dozen additional students shot there, several more shot at, and many who escaped when Harris and Klebold temporarily left the room.
What investigators can't explain is why they chose to kill so sporadically once the operation was under way. "We know after they killed them in the library they had kids that had locked themselves in classrooms all over the place," an investigator said. "They could see [Harris and Klebold] walk by and they had glass on the doors. There were still little pockets of two or three kids here or there hidden under tables in the cafeteria. They could have easily walked around, and in numerous ways killed more people. So why didn't they? Maybe we're just lucky that these were 17- and 18-year-olds who were not as superior as they thought."
