Columbine

Around the six-month anniversary of Columbine, CBS gets its hands on surveillance footage from the school of “the killers roaming the cafeteria” (281). With the anniversary, and with many Columbine students and parents seeing video footage for the first time, conspiracy theory rumors start anew. “On October 18, a fresh rumor surfaced: a friend of Eric and Dylan’s who had worked on their school videos told someone he was going ‘to finish the job’” (282). The boy is arrested, charged with a felony, and kept on suicide watch. On October 20, 450 students call in sick to Columbine High. The following day, fourteen percent of the students remain out; the “normal absentee rate was five percent,” notes Cullen. This same week, the mother of Anne Marie Hochhalter, the shooting victim with the ruptured spinal cord, walked into a Denver pawn shop and killed herself. By the mandatory, six-month deadline, twenty families file notice to sue law enforcement and/or governmental agencies, including the parents of Dylan Klebold. Wayne and Kathy Harris, parents of Eric, meet Sheriff Stone on October 25, but there is no paper report of the meeting.

The only two people ever officially charged with a crime tied to the Columbine massacre are