Saturday, May 17, 2008
The long-delayed CD-ROM details the events of the massacre but fails to answer the central question: Why?
May 16, 2000 | The investigators' report of the Columbine massacre fleshes out portraits of the killers and fills in many logistical details of the attack, but concedes "it cannot answer the most fundamental question -- WHY?" It was released Monday on CD-ROM by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department, following six months of delays. "Although no clear-cut answers were found, there were clues," the report says.
The central focus of the package is a minute-by-minute timeline describing the events of April 20, 1999, in great detail. It dramatically collapses the amount of time the massacre took to unfold, claiming gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold only spent seven and a half minutes in the library, killing 10 and wounding 12. "They carried more than enough ammunition to kill all 56 people in the library," it says, adding that the 34 victims were killed or injured in the first 16 minutes of the attack. After the killing rampage, there were 33 minutes in which nobody was shot until the gunmen killed themselves.
The report provides the most comprehensive profiles yet of the killers, offering newly disclosed passages from a variety of sources, including school essays, journals kept by both killers and interviews with the killers' parents. While some information was known about Harris because of his Web site, and passages from his journal published by Salon, one of the biggest surprises in the report is writings from Klebold. Klebold's newly revealed journal depicts him as depressed, outcast, paranoid and suicidal. "I swear -- like I'm an outcast, and everyone is conspiring against me," he wrote in 1997. He mentions suicide repeatedly and in November 1997 describes getting a gun and going on a killing spree.
His tone changed only briefly in 1997, during a period where he describes his "first love." "It appeared that this was an unrequited love," the report says. "Throughout his journal, Klebold named several girls he 'loves' but he did not indicate that he ever actually spoke to any of them. He even went so far as to write letters to one girl but it appears he never sent them because they remained in his journal."
Harris' journal doesn't begin until the spring of 1998. The report describes it as expressing Harris' hatred of mankind and love of his own anger, though it omits the journal's opening line, which sets its tone: "I hate the fucking world."
"There were also many common themes throughout their writings. Harris and Klebold both wrote of not fitting in, not being accepted and their lack of self-esteem. They reflected on natural selection, self-awareness and their feelings of superiority. They plotted against all those persons who they found offensive -- jocks, girls that said no, other outcasts or anybody they thought did not accept them. Most of those teens were unaware that they had ever offended Harris or Klebold."
Klebold's journal provides evidence confirming what investigators have been saying for months: that Harris and Klebold were both involved in the planning of the attack. Shortly after the shooting, media reports focused on Harris as the mastermind, casting Klebold as a somewhat reluctant follower. The report also states that a "hit list," generally attributed to Harris, was created by both killers, and puts the final figure of people whom they listed as disliking for various reasons at 67. It does not reveal the names, though in September, lead investigator Kate Battan told Salon News that the list included some unusual names, including Tiger Woods.
Investigators had repeatedly said that no one on the lists was killed or injured, but the parents of Rachel Scott strongly protested in December that comments on the videotapes clearly identified their daughter. The report concedes that one person on the list was "injured," but that the person was a male. "There is no evidence that he was specifically targeted," the report says.
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