Columbine, five years later

The kids who survived the worst school massacre in U.S. history have graduated, and some of them have even forgiven. But many of their parents have not.

By Peter Wilkinson

Apr 20, 2004 | Brian Rohrbough is wearing a wire. It's a fancy digital rig, capable of capturing 22 hours of conversation before Rohrbough needs to fiddle with it again. He bought it, he says, when he became fed up with being lied to about the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history -- April 20, 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed his son, Daniel, along with 11 other fellow students, a teacher, and themselves at Columbine High School.

"I record everything," Rohrbough says here at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds in Golden, Colo., one Thursday morning late in February; it is yet another Columbine news conference, just two months before the fifth anniversary of the tragedy. "My format is mini-disk, but I have others."

The event at the fairgrounds is billed as an unprecedented gesture of openness for Columbine and, indeed, for every criminal case anywhere that has never gone to trial. In the interest of providing full disclosure and of quieting the howls of skeptics who still want further investigation, the new sheriff, Ted Mink, has ordered that all of the Columbine evidence, every bomb and bullet, be put on display for one afternoon of public viewing.

What has been only read about can now be seen, though not touched. And, for the first time, the enormity of the arsenal deployed that day can be grasped. Take the contents of Klebold's car, remarkable for the hate and premeditation they represent: five pipe bombs, three other incendiary devices, three 16-ounce propane bombs, two 5-gallon red gas cans, three 2-gallon, 8-ounce red gas cans, two 20-pound propane tanks, two and a half gallons of lane conditioner (a highly flammable substance used on bowling alleys), bottle rockets, bullets, fuses, nails and duct tape. And this was the stuff he didn't take into the school.

"That's Dylan," one young woman says to a friend, pointing at a freeze frame photo taken by security cameras in the cafeteria that day. "He's the one who shot at me."

Ropes separate the evidence tables from the viewers, museum style. Anybody who leans over to get a better look at Klebold's muddy sneakers, maybe, or the television sets whose screens were blasted out by bullets, is shooed back by a sheriff's deputy. People speak in whispers. Some sponge away tears using tissues provided. They loop around the two big rooms, once, twice, three times. If the instruments of mass murder are impossible to ignore, they take on a larger, even more disturbing significance when the victims are teenagers and one of their favorite teachers, Dave Sanders.

"I work full time now," says Erin Walton, who, with others, tried in vain to save Sanders, offering up her sweatshirt to absorb some of the blood seeping from his neck. She was 15 then. She didn't go on to college. "It's hard me to think about going back to school," she explains. "I can't be in a room with big windows."

"Brian still cringes when he hears the sound of a helicopter," says Bob Warnier, stepfather of Brian Anderson, then 17, who was shot three times in the chest and survived. Brian decided not to come to the fairgrounds today.

Before the viewing ends at 4 p.m., 975 people pass through the evidence rooms, many of them former students, survivors, and friends and relatives of the dead. Absent, as they have consistently been in the five years since the massacre, are Wayne and Kathy Harris, Eric's parents, and Tom and Sue Klebold, who raised Dylan. Although they live in the same Littleton-area homes they occupied on April 20, 1999, they have contributed virtually nothing to the public's understanding of who their sons were and why they killed. The Harrises and Klebolds denied requests for interviews for this story, but plenty of people are willing to talk about them. "They're scared. They're terrified," a friend of the Klebold family says of Tom and Sue. "Sue Klebold looks like a skeleton dipped in wax. They're sick and tired and depressed all the time. A lot of people in Littleton wanted their blood."

Beyond Littleton, the Columbine shootings became a defining cultural moment, the inspiration for two acclaimed novels; a Gus Van Sant film, "Elephant," winner of the top award at Cannes this year; and Michael Moore's Academy-award winning "Bowling for Columbine." Every interest group, it seemed, wanted to claim the massacre for itself as a horrifying example of what can occur when its message is ignored. Some of the many born-again Christians in and around Denver felt a school shooting on this scale was the sort of thing that happens when the Ten Commandments aren't displayed in a high school. Gun-control groups weighed in when it became clear that the some of the weapons Harris and Klebold carried had come from that American shame, the unregulated gun show. For a time, some cried racism because the pair murdered one of Columbine's few black students, Isaiah Shoels. And the fact that Harris and Klebold had been bullied seemed to prove, at least to those advocating stricter codes of conduct in high schools, the deadly menace that unchecked bullying can create.

Everybody's message was essentially the same: What happened at Columbine could have happened at any high school in America, and we must all be prepared. And yet much about Columbine remains unexplained. Even five years later, no one can conclusively say why a couple of sheltered, upper-middle-class teenagers became murderers or how a community can best heal itself after a tragedy of this magnitude, let alone precisely what steps to take to prevent a similar massacre in the future. For all its public importance, Columbine remains a private tragedy, and its survivors differ hugely over what it meant and how best to move on.

Next Page: "The aftermath of Columbine should have been about the kids. It never has been about the kids"

• View blog reactions