Thursday, May 15, 2008
Sheriff's department releases shocking video of massacre scene -- for $25 a tape.
Apr 27, 2000 | Stung by mounting criticism, lawsuits and now judicial rulings against a yearlong policy of selective silence about the Columbine High School tragedy, the Jefferson County sheriff's department abruptly reversed course Wednesday and began distributing a bloody, music-backed video tour of the massacre site directly to the public at $25 a pop.
Victims' families, outraged, accused the county of gross insensitivity and possibly even retaliation for the nine lawsuits filed last week on behalf of 15 families against Sheriff John Stone, the department and the county.
"I'd say that they're doing it as a spiteful slap in the face of the families," said attorney Barry Arrington. Last week he filed one of the most explosive lawsuits on behalf of five families who lost children in the attack. It charged that a friend of Eric Harris' father in the sheriff's department squelched a search warrant that could have averted the massacre; that students were needlessly trapped in the library for slaughter; and that Dan Rohrbough was killed by a sheriff's deputy rather than by Harris or Dylan Klebold.
The families also expressed outrage that the sheriff's department had been characterizing the tape as a "training video" since it came to light last fall. At the time, the sheriff's department publicly apologized and gathered up all copies of the tape. Officials said they had granted the Littleton Fire Department access to view and then duplicate the material for instructional purposes. It was used in 82 seminars across the United States and Canada. Since then, the families have repeatedly asked to view the footage but have been consistently refused.
The video released Wednesday is in fact a memorial montage -- in questionable taste -- with absolutely no instruction of any kind. In fact, it includes no narration whatsoever, and is organized around three pop songs.
The video opens with the "Friend of Mine" song written and performed by two Columbine students just after the massacre. It moves on to give a detailed tour of the wreckage inside the library and the rest of the school, set to the three songs. No bodies are shown, but it's hard to imagine a viewer who won't be disturbed as the camera zooms in on fresh bloodstains, wandering from small splatters to enormous pools. Each site is set off by numbered yellow evidence markers -- several clearly labeled with the name of the child killed there -- all accompanied by Sarah McLachlan crooning "I Will Remember You."
"Don't let your life pass you by," she wails, as the camera hovers over a staggering pool perhaps 4 to 6 feet wide, so thick it visibly rises up over the floor.
The video closes with Cheryl Wheeler's political folk song "If It Were Up To Me," which sounds as if it were written specifically about the rampage, but was actually recorded and released earlier.
"Maybe it's the movies, maybe it's the books/Maybe it's the bullets, maybe it's the real crooks/Maybe it's the drugs, maybe it's the parents," Wheeler sings. The final lines break the rhythmic mantra of the song and conclude: "Maybe it's the end, but I know one thing. If it were up to me, I'd take away the guns."
Attorneys for the families howled at the characterization of the video as remotely related to training. "It's voyeurism," Arrington said. "Voyeurism is the only purpose it serves."
Attorneys for the Rohrbough and Fleming families said they couldn't stomach watching it last week without turning down the volume.
The video does not contain footage of the killers shooting up the cafeteria, as had been widely reported in advance of the public release. This exclusion raised some puzzling questions, the answers to which were not immediately clear Wednesday afternoon. The so-called training video was widely understood to have been the source of the infamous 90-second cafeteria footage broadcast by CBS last October. And victims' attorneys had been quoted widely in major news outlets Wednesday describing the cafeteria footage on the advance copies of the video they viewed. The county statement Wednesday said those reports were incorrect, but did not explain the omission.
The video also includes two hours of helicopter footage shot by the local CBS affiliate, which the department had previously refused to release to the families.
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