Because of his friendship with Klebold and Harris, and his actions on April 20, Brooks Brown, a tall, rangy and proud member of the high school's outsider crowd, became one of the most controversial figures to emerge from the crisis of Columbine. Brown and Harris fell out sometime in 1999, after Brooks' parents complained to police about Eric's threats against their son, and Harris put Brooks' name on a "hit list" he maintained on his personal Web site. But on the morning of April 20, when Brown encountered Harris headed into the school, locked and loaded, Harris did not kill him. "Go home, Brooks," Brown recalls Harris saying. "I like you now."

The first time I saw Brown, a couple of days after the shootings, in the cafeteria of a hospital near Littleton, he looked like a zombie. Brown had just left the intensive care unit, where his friend Lance Kirklin was recovering from multiple gunshot wounds. Much of Lance's face had been shot off.

Brown's life, too, would soon change forever. On May 4, 1999, Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone appeared with reporter Dan Abrams on NBC. "I'm convinced there are more people involved," Stone said. "Brooks Brown could be a possible suspect." Abrams asked about the Harris Web pages. Stone scoffed, saying these were a "subtle threat," and denied that the Brown family had ever reported them to the police in the first place.

The Browns interpreted Stone's remarks as an attempt to intimidate them and shut them up, but they refused to be muzzled. Countless press interviews and public records requests later came vindication. Documents surfaced that proved that county sheriff's deputies had indeed visited the Brown home several times prior to April 20, 1999, to hear their complaints about Eric Harris' Web site.

Now 23, Brown has moved into a suburban development close to Littleton with his girlfriend of four years, Meagan Fishell, 21, a mortgage loan specialist. A chain smoker with green hair, and a devoted fan of the band Insane Clown Posse, Brown can be found most days in his basement, tinkering with computers, and acting as webmaster for a couple of youth-oriented Web sites. He delivered pizzas for Domino's for a month, the only regular job he's held in the last few years.

One unseasonably warm evening in February, Brown fired up another in a long series of Camel Turkish Jade Lights and settled into a beanbag chair in the basement. We ate Chinese food and drank A&W root beer. Brown was still recovering from six fillings he had earlier in the day, which had required eight shots of Novocain. That much painkiller, it became clear, hadn't dulled his anger toward Jefferson County officialdom.

Although his parents harbor some anger at the Klebolds and Harrises, Brown himself seems not to. In fact, six months after the killings, he says, Brown drove up to the Klebold home, in the wooded foothills outside Littleton. Dylan's parents were there. Sue Klebold served Brown some strawberry shortcake. "I was chilling with Tom and Sue, and we talked about all the different lies the sheriff was telling, and Tom said, 'You know who would be great to get out here? Michael Moore. Go on his Web site -- it has his e-mail. I can't do this because our lawyer won't let us. But that would be awesome.' I sent Michael Moore an e-mail and said, 'I'm this kid from Columbine, you might have seen me on the news. I'd really like to talk to you for a couple of minutes and see if you'd want to come out and do a movie on Columbine.' So Tom Klebold's the reason 'Bowling for Columbine' happened."

Brown would go on to co-write a thoughtful book, "No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine," which describes widespread bullying at the high school. In a culture of exclusion, loners were singled out for verbal and physical abuse by a coterie of jocks with a swelled sense of entitlement. Brown also assisted Moore with his film, some scenes of which were filmed in and around Littleton. Though Brown admires the film, he feels that Moore didn't give him enough credit for shooting footage used in the movie. "He or the people around him are users," says Brown, who says he was promised an assistant producer credit but received only a simple "thank you."

Columbine became the centerpiece of Brown's life, the driving force behind a constant battle to defend himself and make the world understand what life was like inside Columbine High School in the bloody spring of 1999. The usual post-traumatic conditions presented themselves. Brown struggled with depression, he says; he'd sleep all day one day, then stay up for three. Empty bottles of Southern Comfort 100 and Jack Daniels piled up around the house. "Anything I could get my hands on I would drink and drink and drink." He recently quit drinking, he says, a sign of his recovery.

"I wrote off a lot of my friends after Columbine, and most of my friends wrote me off. Immediately after Sheriff Stone said that I was a possible suspect, a lot of my friends just didn't even want to be seen with me. People would scream out the window of their car that I was a murderer or they'd tell me to get out of here before they killed me. And no one wants to be around that." No evidence of Brown's involvement in the massacre was ever produced, but that didn't stop Columbine administrators from banning him from the high school after he graduated in the spring of 2000. "They thought I was going to kill somebody," he says.

Meanwhile, Brown thinks school officials turned a blind eye to jock-led bullying, which Brown believes led to the tragedy. "For a year after Columbine, the administration said there was no bullying at Columbine," he says. "They just said it never was. Then the governor created a commission that said there was bullying at Columbine. So they came out and said, 'Well, we've solved the bullying problem.' That's the brilliant doubletalk they did for three years, and that was long enough and now no one really pays attention anymore."

Brown lit another cigarette. "It's like beating your head against a wall, trying to get things changed. It's painful. It's so stressful and depressing."

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