Likewise, Pat Ireland, another badly injured survivor, has no answers for why Harris and Klebold turned violent, and he's almost stopped looking. Ireland was "the boy in the window," the wounded Columbine student who hung and then tumbled out of the library window, a scene caught on tape and beamed around the world, perhaps the grimmest public image created in the moments following the tragedy. The young man who answers the door to an off-campus apartment in Fort Collins, Colo., 90 minutes north of Denver, is a strapping fellow of 6 feet, 3 inches who moves easily and speaks in complete sentences and paragraphs, and for a moment, I think I've come to the wrong address.

Ireland was paralyzed on his right side for months after the attack. He walked again in June 1999, though he'll always carry a bullet in his brain from Klebold's shotgun. "There were cognitive issues and speed-of-processing issues," Ireland says, "and some speech and visual problems." Months of rehab and tutoring followed. The speech problem cleared up, although short-term memory can still be a bit of a problem. "Sometimes I have to think things through a little bit more, take a little bit more time."

Ireland enrolled at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, a business finance major. He'll graduate this May, then take a job with an investment firm or maybe enroll in grad school, get an MBA. None of this, he hopes, will take him too far away from his girlfriend, a fellow student and an aspiring model whom he has been dating since freshman year.

I ask what sort of emotion Ireland feels now, five years later. Anger? Relief? Regret? "I'd say a lot of pride," Ireland says right away. "I'm proud of my high school and the fact that I spent four years there. Some people asked me if I would transfer, and there would have been no way. I love that place. And I'm proud of all I've accomplished since then. I was on track to be valedictorian and I finished that up." His GPA: 4.0.

"Some people go through things like this and their whole view on life changes drastically. I haven't changed a whole lot. I still have the same interests and the same groups of friends and the same family values."

Ireland told me he doesn't spend much time following the Columbine investigations. He didn't travel out to the fairgrounds press conference in February. "I try not to dwell on that," says Ireland. "What's done is done. It's better to look forward."

Another student who survived that day, Sam Granillo, is equally sanguine. With some friends, he hid in a room off the Columbine cafeteria as Harris and Klebold unloaded. Granillo still seemed terrified, a day later, when I interviewed him at his home in Littleton.

Granillo gives off a Zen-like calm, today, at the age of 22. He tried film school in Boulder, dropped out, and moved back in with his mother. At a comfortable cafe in Englewood, the sort where reading and conversation matter more than running up a big bill, Granillo can be found most afternoons, making coffee.

"Every time I went back to the school," says Granillo, "it just seemed like I was going back over a story I already knew. Everyone was pretty calm and cool by the following fall. The summer after the shootings gave kids time to sit and think. It didn't take much time for the school to go back to the way it was."

For some who experienced Columbine, like Brian Rohrbough and Randy and Judy Brown, the past five years have been a time of anger and reexamination. For others, for some of the victims, like Richie Castaldo and Sam Granillo and Pat Ireland, the years have been a time to develop an incredible resilience in the midst of all the heated debate.

Ireland's negligence lawsuit against the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department, for allegedly failing to rescue him sooner, was settled last month for $117,500. A lawsuit filed by Dave Sanders' daughter, against Jefferson County officials, was recently settled for $1.5 million. Only one suit remains pending, filed by the family of Isaiah Shoels, an 18-year senior at the time of his death.

In their important book on antisocial behavior in children, "High Risk: Children Without a Conscience," Dr. Ken Magid and Carole McKelvey present a chart that lists 20 traits commonly found in a psychopathic child. Eric Harris seemed to have every one of them: from pathological lying and a grandiose sense of self-worth to juvenile delinquency, a knack for manipulation, and a tendency never to express remorse. Whether his parents know this, even in 2004, remains to be seen.

Early on, when he was still hospitalized, Pat Ireland and his mother found themselves discussing the shooting. His mom was furious at Eric and Dylan. Pat wasn't. "I told her, 'Please forgive them. They were confused. They didn't know what they were doing.' And at that point she knew that I would be OK and not have a bunch of hate inside me."

I asked, "Do you think there's been a coverup?"

"I don't know," Ireland replied. "I don't really care."

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At the February fairgrounds press conference, while no public official would admit to a coverup, one speaker did concede that Jefferson County authorities might have done more to prevent the Columbine shootings. "There should have been a search warrant executed on that house," said Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar, referring to the Harris home, which had been turned into a bomb factory. Why wasn't a search warrant executed? An assistant district attorney, Salazar said, didn't think there was enough evidence for probable cause, despite Harris' hate-filled Web site. Who was that prosecutor? Salazar, now running for Congress, had not been able to find out. And so it goes with Columbine.

Salazar distributed a new report, another in an unending series of reports about the tragedy. Another minor bombshell: On page 32, a sheriff's deputy, John Hicks, explains how a senior officer told him to talk to the press, right after the shooting, about what the department knew, or in this case didn't know, about the two shooters beforehand. "Hicks knew he would not be able to tell the truth, so he refused," the report states. "Shortly after that, Hicks was denied permanent promotion to sergeant and told that he would never be promoted under the current administration."

Then Randy Brown, Brooks' father, took the podium, his hands shaking with anger. "The only way to honor these children is to get the truth out and not let this happen again," Brown shouts. "So if you're a policeman, do your job."

Eric Harris had written in his journal, found in his room after his death, "There is nothing that anyone could have done to prevent this. No one is to blame except me and VodKa." Brian Rohrbough thinks that's just another Columbine myth. Still, at the fairgrounds press conference, his body mike stuck to his skin as usual, he seemed happy to receive the limited validation that Salazar's report offered. Of course, it's too little too late. "It's a beginning," Rohrbough tells me. "And they think it's an ending."

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