Columbine

Cullen recounts a heart-to-heart talk about coaching and parenting had between Principal DeAngelis and Dave Sanders. Sanders goes to coach girls’ basketball practice, then returns home on the night of April 19 to his wife, Linda Lou, with seventy dollars in single-dollar bills. It’s Linda Lou’s mother’s seventieth birthday on April 20, and she likes to gamble. Sanders’s wife thinks the money a good gift. The next morning, Linda Lou and Dave are running behind and leave one another without kissing goodbye. 

This chapter outlines the hours and minutes leading up to Dylan and Eric’s attack. Dylan leaves the house at 5:30 am and meets up with Eric. They go to the grocery store to buy propane tanks and return to Eric’s house, after which they go their separate ways, with Dylan procuring gasoline and Eric filling the propane tanks. Cullen notes that several of Eric and Dylan’s friends were surprised to see them missing from school, as both boys were invested in their schoolwork.

Just before 11 a.m., Eric and Dylan leave for school.“Dylan wore cargo pants, a black T-shirt printed with WRATH, and his Red Sox cap turned backward, as usual. His cargo pockets were deep enough to conceal most of the sawed-off shotgun before he pulled on the duster. Eric’s T-shirt said NATURAL SELECTION. They both wore black combat boots and shared a single pair of black gloves—the right on Eric, the left on Dylan” (41).

The boys take separate cars to school. They arrive at 11:10 a.m., just as the class period before “A” lunch begins. Dylan parks in the lot reserved for seniors while Eric drives to the junior lot, “about a hundred yards to Dylan’s right,” where Eric would be “directly facing the student entrance, where the bulk of the survivors [of the bombs] would presumably flee.” Harris would also be able to “cover the full southeast side of the building and interlock his fire with Dylan’s to his left” (41).

A classmate and friend of the boys, Brooks Brown, notices Eric pulling in to the parking lot. The two have an exchange, with Brooks yelling, “What’s the matter with you…we had a test in psychology,” and Eric responding, “It doesn’t matter anymore...Brooks, I like you now. Get out of here. Go home” (42).

Eric and Dylan enter the cafeteria “shortly after 11:14,” and are running behind schedule. Cullen says that not one of the “the five hundred witnesses noticed them or the big, bulky bags” (42). The boys plant the bombs and leave the school building, arming themselves. Cullen states that both Harris and Klebold “had a semiautomatic against his body, a shotgun in his bag, and a backpack full of pipe bombs and crickets” (42).

By complete chance, there is no surveillance footage of Eric and Dylan planting the bombs. The cameras would have“if either the bombers or the custodian had been on time. Every morning the custodian followed the same routine: a few minutes before “A” lunch, he pulled out the pre-lunch tape and set it aside for later viewing. He popped an old, used tape into the machine, rewound it, and hit Record” (43).

On April 20, however, because the custodian was behind, he hit stop at 11:14 a.m., the precise minute the boys enter the school and plant the bombs. The new tape starts at 11:22 a.m., making for a gap of eight minutes; the initial frame would show “the bombs visible and students near the windows beginning to react. Something peculiar outside had caught their attention” (43).

Patrick Ireland, one of the shooting victims, spends lunch in the library, above where one of the bombs is planted. Cassie Bernall, a second victim and “the Evangelical junior who transferred to Columbine to enlighten nonbelievers,” was also in the library. Patrick will survive the attack; Cassie will not. Cullen also notes that Principal Frank DeAngelis is “oddly absent from the cafeteria on the day of the attacks” (43). He is waiting to talk with a new teacher to offer the teacher a permanent position at the school. We learn that the community resource officer, who works for the sheriff’s department, has departed to Subway for lunch.

Meanwhile, another victim, freshman Danny Rohrbough, has gone to the commons to find two friends to go smoke a cigarette with. Cullen says that the group “headed out a side exit at the worst possible moment.” Eric and Dylan hold by their cars for a minute or two; the decoy bomb, planted in the field three miles away, has not gone off due to improper wiring. While other, minor explosive devices around the central device have gone off (upon a surveyor finding the devices), the chief bomb has failed. Officials learn of this bomb “four minutes before the first call from the school” (44).

Cullen concludes the chapter: “As far as Eric and Dylan knew, cops were already speeding south. They would see the commons disintegrate, though. Each car was positioned for a perfect view. The cafeteria would explode in front of them; they would watch their classmates be torn apart and incinerated, and their high school [would burn] to the ground” (44). 

Cullen contends that by 11:18, Eric realized the bombs hadn’t blown. He meets back up with Dylan and the two head towards the school. Their “new position set them on the highest point on campus, where they could survey both lots and all exits on [their] side of the building” (45-46). However, it also takes the two away from their main target, the student entrance. From the top of a set of stairs, one of the two begins to open fire. Cullen reports that “Eric wheeled around and shot at anyone he could see. Dylan cheered him on. He rarely fired” (46).

The first two students hit are Rachel Scott and Richard Castaldo. They were eating their lunch outside. Rachel dies instantly, while Richard is hit multiple times and plays dead. Danny Rohrbough, along with friends Lance Kirklin and Sean Graves, sees Eric and Dylan firing but believe it “a paintball game or senior prank” and,instead of running away, run toward the shooters (46). Danny is hit in the knee, chest and stomach. Lance is hit and goes down. Sean, meanwhile, still believes the entire act a joke. He is also shot and collapses, unable to feel his legs.

Eric shoots at another group of five students. He and Dylan walk past the injured Lance Kirklin. Lance “reached up toward the guy, tugged on his pant leg, and cried for help.” Eric says, “‘Sure, I’ll help,’” before shooting Lance again. Meanwhile, Dylan heads down the hill, toward the injured Sean Graves. Other students are trying to pull him inside the building but an adult stops them, and Sean is now “propped in the entrance, with the door pressed against him” (47). A janitor tells Sean to play dead. Dylan steps right over Sean and enters the schoolbuilding.

Inside, there is panic. Dave Sanders hears the student noise from the faculty lounge and goes to investigate. He enters the cafeteria and directs the students, with the aid of two custodians. There are nearly five hundred people in the cafeteria, almost all of them students. Sanders tells them to head to the second level via a “wide concrete stairway.” Only a few doors away, “in Science Room 3, students were immersed in a chemistry test. They heard something like rocks being thrown against the windows, but the teacher assumed it was a prank. ‘Stay seated and concentrate on your test, he said.’” (48)

Roughly one hundred students are caught on the stairway, trying to get to the second floor and away from the shooters. Dylan enters the cafeteria and raises his TEC-9 at the crowd of students but doesn’t fire. Cullen comments, “For the second time, Dylan appeared to lose his nerve” (48). Dylan leaves the room and rejoins Eric. Cullen offers, “It’s not clear why Dylan made his cafeteria excursion. Many have speculated that he came down to see what went wrong with the bombs. But he never went near them. He made no attempt at detonation. It’s more likely that Eric sent him in to check for opportunities and rev up the body count” (49).

From his spot at top of a set of stairs, Eric shoots student Anne Marie Hochhalter twice as she attempts to run away. A friend picks Anne up and gets her inside the building and out of Eric’s line-of-sight. A pipe bomb explodes where the friend sets Anne down. It’s now 11:23.

Deputy Gardner receives a 911 call from the custodian who has loaded the videotapes into the school surveillance system and witnessed the shootings. More 911 calls arrive: “dispatch hit the police band at 11:23, just as Gardner drove around the building to the commons and Dylan rejoined Eric at the top of the stairs. ‘Female down,’ the dispatcher said” (49). Gardner sees students fleeing and smoke rising. He is unable to clearly identify a source.

Cullen next points out that the majority of students were either utterly unaware of what was transpiring at Columbine or, alternately, found the commotion annoying, as they tried to take tests or listen to their teachers. While there were hundreds of students fleeing Harris and Klebold, many more were simply trying to block out the noise, oblivious to the fact that a massacre was taking place around them. Meanwhile, Dave Sanders leads “nearly five hundred students” up the stairs from the cafeteria and down a hallway, where the group “charged the length of the building.” One floor up, art teacher Patti Nielson,the hall monitor at this time, never sees the enormous group of students fleeing. She has heard the noise and also assumes the actions are a student prank. Nielson looks toward the school’s west exit: “Through large glass panes in the doors she could see a boy with his back to her. He had a gun. He was firing it into the senior lot … Neilson stormed down the hallway to tell him to knock it off” (50). This is Eric Harris, who shoots at Neilson and a student who is trailing the teacher. The glass in the door shatters but the bullets miss. Eric fires again and both Neilson and the student take shrapnel from the glass and metal, though the bullets miss. The two head toward the library. Neilson finds a phone and calls 911.

On the exterior stairway, Eric fires ten rounds at Officer Gardener, who has arrived on the scene and gotten out of his car but is still not fully sure what is happening. Dylan, once more, does not fire. Gardner returns fire and Eric “spun around like he’d been hit” (51), but then fires off more shots and goes inside the school building. Cullen reports that in the five minutes since the attack began, Harris fired forty-seven bullets from his rifle, while Klebold fired five times. The two then head toward the library. Dave Sanders continues to try to get students out of Eric and Dylan’s line of fire. 

Cullen points out that “the story took twenty-eight minutes to hit local television.” The larger news story during this period is Kosovo, and the conflict in the Balkans: “Night has just fallen in Belgrade, and American warplanes were massing on the horizon, about to pulverize fresh targets across the Serb capital” (52). CNN cuts to the school shootings at 11:54; broadcast networks interrupt normal daytime television.

Cullen reports that as police, fire, and parents arrive at the school en masse, more and more students leave the building, though the majority is unclear as to what exactly has, or is, transpiring. Many think that there are at least several shooters, not two. While Cullen attributes some of the lack of clarity to “standard crime-scene confusion,” he goes on to note that as Eric and Dylan shed layers, “each costume change created another shooter” (53). For a short while, a repairman working on an air-conditioner is believed to be a shooter.

Students gone off campus for lunch attempt to return, meeting a bevy of law enforcement personnel. One of the students trying to return is Nate Dykeman, a friend of Eric and Dylan. He suspects that Eric and Dylan may be behind the events at Columbine. Nate and his girlfriend go to Nate’s house and call friends in an attempt to find out what’s happening.

A second officer, Paul Smoker, meets up with Officer Gardner and the two see Eric just inside the west exit doorway, where Eric has recently shot at Patti Nielson, the art teacher. Eric opens fire and retreats. More police arrive and even more students flee. Eric’s last shot at law enforcement officers is at 11:26; “law enforcement would not fire on the killers again or advance on the building until shortly after noon” (57).

Misty Bernall, the mother of one of the victims, Cassie Bernall, arrives to campus. Both Cassie and her brother, Chris, a freshman, are currently missing. The Bernalls live adjacent to Columbine High, with soccer fields between the Bernall home and the school building. Misty’s husband, Brad, home sick that day, had no idea what was transpiring at the school;he had “heard a couple of pops, but thought nothing of them. Firecrackers, maybe some pranksters” (58). He looks outside and sees the grounds of the school swarming with cops.

Cullen mentions that two rendezvous points have been established: the public library and nearby Leawood Elementary. He describes the students’ actions upon fleeing the high school: “When they poured out of the high school, students saw two main options: a subdivision across Pierce Street, or the wide-open fields of Clement Park. Hardly anyone chose the park. [The students] crouched behind houses, worked themselves under shrubbery, rolled under cars. Any semblance of protection. Some pounded frantically on front doors, but most of the houses were locked. Stay-at-home moms started waving teenagers in off the street” (59).

Misty Bernall heads to the library and does not find either of her children there. A faxed copy of the student sign-in sheet arrives from Leawood, the other rendezvous point, but her children’s names are not on it.

Command of the school shooting falls to John Stone, Jefferson County’s recently elected sheriff. Cullen reveals, “The metro cops were horrified to discover that the county was in charge,” that many cops “were open with their disgust,” and that “even suburban officers thought of sheriff’s deputies as security guards.” Things do not improve when cops learn Stone is in command. Cullen describes Stone as looking “the part of an Old West sheriff: a big, burly guy with a large potbelly and a thick, gray mustache, weathered skin, and craggy eyes” (60). Stone has a background as a county supervisor; both he and his undersheriff, John Dunway, are bureaucrats.

Dunway names police lieutenant David Walcher as the incident commander for Columbine. A SWAT team comprised of a dozen officers approaches the school just after noon. They split into two groups of six. The first half-dozen enter the building at 12:06. The school’s fire alarm is still blaring, making it impossible for the SWAT team members to communicate except via hand signals: “Every cupboard or broom closet had to be treated as a hot zone. Many doors were locked, so they blasted them open with rifle fire. Kids trapped in classrooms heard gunfire steadily approaching. Death appeared imminent” (61).

Meanwhile, on the west side of the building, firefighters attempt to rescue students, with “half a dozen bodies [remaining] on or near the lawn outside the cafeteria.” Deputies give cover for paramedics and EMTs. Eric shoots at the group and the officers return fire. Paramedics rescue three students. Danny Rohrbough is “pronounced dead and left behind” (61).

Half an hour later, the other six members of the SWAT team reach Richard Castaldo and Rachel Scott. Castaldo is rescued after being on the lawn for seventy-five minutes. Rachel Scott is moved as far as a fire truck, determined to be dead, and left there. Another SWAT team enters the building at 1:15; Cullen describes what they see in the cafeteria: “Food was left half-eaten on tables. Books, backpacks and assorted garbage floated about the room, which has been flooded by the sprinkler system. Water was three to four inches high and rising. A fire had blackened ceiling tiles and melted down some chairs. They did not notice the duffel bags, held down by the weight of the bombs. One bag had burned away. The propane tank sat exposed, mostly above the water, but it blended into the debris. Signs of panic were everywhere, but no injuries, no bodies, no blood” (62).

The SWAT team finds scared students hiding anywhere they can. They search them and send them out of the building. A teacher had attempted to hide in the ceiling and then crawl to safety. Two people hid in the cafeteria freezer. Robyn Anderson, who has helped Eric and Dylan obtain firearms, watches from her car. At one point, she sees Eric, but is too far away to tell that it’s him. Nate Dykeman, still at home, has not heard from Dylan or Eric by phone. Nate finally calls the Klebold residence and gets hold of Dylan’s dad, Tom. Nate communicates to Dylan’s father—who has no idea about the happenings at Columbine, at this point—that the gunmen were wearing trench coats. Dylan’s father searches Dylan’s room and finds that Dylan’s trench coat is not there. Tom Klebold calls 911, to say Dylan could be involved, and then calls a lawyer.

Cullen notes, “The televised version of the disaster was running thirty minutes to an hour behind the cops’ view.” Television journalists question what is happening; at 12:30, they gain access to where injured students are being treated and the world has its first images from the school shooting. The sheriffs demand that news helicopters stop filming live from the air because the shooters could have access to television. Fatalities are omitted from coverage. In Science Room 3, someone places a whiteboard in front of the window: “The first character looked a lot like a capital I but turned out to be a numeral: ‘1 BLEEDING TO DEATH” (64).