4/20/99: A Narrative Reconstruction

A few years ago, I translated one of the chapters from Tim Krabbé's Dutch book (Wij Zijn Maar Wij Zijn Niet Geschift) about Columbine. Krabbé took the time to streamline the conflicting witness statements into a narrative that works quite well and makes sense overall. I've added some footnotes from a subsequent chapter in the book and tried to keep the dialogue as close to reality as possible, but any faults in translation are obviously my own. It's very, very long but well worth the read! (I've taken the liberty of editing out the full racial slurs, in compliance with your forum rules, but I can't remove them entirely because they're a jarring point in the narrative that factually happened in regards to the death of Isaiah Shoels. I hope that's all right!)

On Tuesday morning of April 20th 1999, around a quarter past eleven, Eric Harris drove his Honda Prelude onto the school grounds of Columbine High School in Littleton. Two girls, Kristi Epling and Alyssa Sechler, who drove away in their own cars, saw him. They were good friends of his and they raised their hands and honked at him for a second; Eric smiled back and waved.

He didn’t drive to the senior year parking lot where he, being in his last year of school, had his own parking spot. Instead, he drove to the parking lot for the junior years. He parked his car in someone else’s spot at the edge near the south entrance of the school.

Fourth period was just over and fifth period started – lunchtime for those students who’d been scheduled for 'A’-lunch. April was usually a rain-filled month for the Denver area and it had even snowed a couple of days before (you could still see patches of snow in the adjacent Clement Park), but the weather was good now and looked to become the first nice day of spring. 'Today is not a good day to be in school’ had been that morning’s Quote of the Day on school TV ; a lot of students wore shorts, skirts, T-shirts and ate their lunch outside on benches and low walls near trees or on the grass. Some seniors and juniors in possession of their own cars went back home for lunch, or to a fastfood joint in the nearby Coalmine Shopping Center, but most of them ate lunch in the commons the way they always did. On the busiest moment of 'A’-lunch, between a quarter past eleven and twenty past eleven, around five hundred students could be found in the commons (cafeteria) and the room would be packed with bags and backpacks. Columbine was a big school, with close to two thousand students and one hundred fifty teachers and members of staff. [1]

One of the people who saw Eric arrive and get out of his car was his friend Brooks Brown, who’d gone outside after fourth period to have a smoke. Friend, however, is a deceptive term – Brooks and Eric had been friends, but had only resolved their two-year feud (which had seen demolitions, death threats, and even the involvement of law enforcement) earlier that January.

When Brooks saw Eric, he was surprised. It was weird that Eric hadn’t parked in his usual spot, and on the wrong parking lot at that. Moreover, Eric hadn’t even been in school that morning; Brooks hadn’t seen him during the hours they shared, philosophy in third, and creative writing in fourth. The truancy wasn’t anything special; Eric played truant all the time. Just like their mutual friend Dylan Klebold. And just like Brooks himself, as a matter of fact. That Eric and Dylan both hadn’t shown up for creative writing was almost normal; those two were inseparable – if one played truant, the other would as well.

But skipping school for two hours and then showing up after all? That was really strange. And it hadn’t just been skipping class, either. They’d had a pretty important test about Chinese philosophy back in their philosophy class that morning. Despite his frequent truancy, Eric was a good student who liked to get good marks on assignments and tests – and this particular test counted heavily toward your final grade in the class. Missing out on that one was akin to throwing away everything you’d ever done for the subject before. And all that in senior year, too.

Brooks walked up to Eric as soon as he saw him.

“What the hell is wrong with you, man?” he asked. “You weren’t in third hour today. You missed the test!”

He had said this in a teasing-reproachful, friendly sort of tone, and he was rather surprised at the look Eric gave him in turn. It wasn’t the look Brooks could’ve expected from him, which would convey an equally friendly 'mind your own business’. Eric laughed a derisive smile instead, as though Brooks was insane for even bringing something like that up.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” said Eric.

They stood facing each other for a brief moment. Eric grabbed a light blue gym bag from the backseat and set it on the ground. Brooks didn’t know what to say.

Eric looked straight at him for a moment. “Brooks, I like you now,” he said. “Get out of here. Go home.” It sounded insinuating, but there was a chuckling sort of malicious pleasure in his tone as well. Brooks had never heard Eric use this tone of voice before. Eric was a weirdo, no doubt, but this was different. Brooks noticed he wasn’t wearing his cap – and he always wore it, backwards; a cap of his favourite band, the German rockband KMFDM. He wore black fatigue-style pants with a lot of pockets, and a white T-shirt.

Eric already wasn’t paying him any attention anymore and grabbed another gym bag off the backseat. Brooks stood there for a moment, taken aback. There was something inside of Eric that scared him. He wasn’t the type of boy to be trifled with. Brooks knew he made bombs; Eric often said he couldn’t wait until he was eighteen so he could purchase firearms legally. And he’d turned eighteen a few days before.

“Uh, okay, whatever,” said Brooks. He had the feeling that something was really, really wrong – and that the wisest thing to do would indeed be to get the hell out of there. And he walked away, off school grounds, onto the broad South Pierce Street the school bordered on.

Just after Eric, Dylan Klebold had driven his old black BMW onto school grounds as well – driven very hard, according to someone else. A good friend, Chad Laughlin, who’d just wanted to drive off, had to brake for Dylan and back his car up a bit to avoid a collision. He stuck his middle finger into the air in reply, then saw it was Dylan and made an apologetic gesture. Dylan looked back at him with a kind of look Chad later interpreted as: good that you’re leaving.

Dylan drove to the senior year parking lot where he, like Eric, had his very own parking spot. He, too, parked his car in someone else’s spot instead. Dylan parked on the side of the commons, some hundred metres away from Eric’s car.

Dylan was dressed all in black; black duster that hit his ankles, black cargo pants with the legs tucked into his combat boots, and as always he wore his cap of the Boston Red Sox, his favourite baseball team – backward, with the big B-logo at the front. It was a cap without an adjustment strap, so it looked almost like a black bathing cap, from which his long straggly reddish-blonde hair extended into every direction possible.

As soon as Brooks left him alone, Eric seated himself back in his car. He did then what he’d practiced a few times before: he girdled himself with a self-made harness for his carbine and ammo, put a backpack on, and then pulled on his own duster so it covered his get-up. He had worn the long black duster frequently in the past few months; he’d been dressed inconspicuously before. Those heavy, long dusters could have looked strange in the warm weather, but they were the badge of recognition for the group called the Trenchcoat Mafia with which Eric and Dylan were associated slightly. Dylan almost always wore the duster, even if he almost suffocated in it from the heat. People were used to seeing it in school.

Eric and Dylan walked from their cars into the direction of the south entrance. Eric carried a black bag that looked full and heavy; someone saw him walk slightly askew, another saw him hold the bag with both hands. When he crossed the entrance way to the parking lots, Autumn Hettinger had to brake for him to avoid running him over with her car. She recognised him, smiled, and gestured: hey, Eric, go ahead. She was surprised to see him the same way Brooks had been; she, too, had missed him during the philosophy test in third period. She saw a big lump on his back, as though he was wearing a backpack underneath his duster.

Dylan’s duster, too, looked rather lumpy. It appeared as if they both wore three layers of clothes, or had big belt bags or other bags hidden underneath their dusters. Dylan walked with his hands in his pockets, arms pressed to his sides, as though he wanted to hold his duster closed tightly that way.

They joined each other at the entrance. They entered the school, walked through the short hallway into the noisy commons, and set down one bag each there. On the other side of the commons, near the teacher’s lounge, they went back outside again, Eric first. [2]

In both of the bags, that now stood near two pillars inside the commons, there was a twenty-pound propane tank, bags with shards of glass and nails, bottles of gas, a pipebomb, fireworks, and an alarm clock set to go off within a few minutes. It’d be the busiest time in the commons then, or so Eric had determined during extensive observations. They trusted that the bags wouldn’t stand out among all the hundreds of other bags and backpacks that lay around there.

The intention was to not only have a couple of hundred people die due to the explosions of the propane, but also to have the pillars give way to the point where the school library (above the commons) would come down into the sea of flames and kill even more people. The survivors would flee the remains of the commons, onto the parking lots – where, one minute after the first explosions, timed bombs would go off in the cars of Eric and Dylan.

They would venture into the top layer of the school after the explosions and start shooting people there. If the cops showed up, they would have a fire fight and die in the process. If that didn’t happen, they’d kill themselves with the use of their firearms or bombs.

Separate from one another – first Eric, then Dylan – they ascended the outside stairs toward the west entrance.

The school had been built against a hill and consisted of two layers. A field of grass sloped upwards from the senior parking lot. Alongside the commons was a concrete path that led to a stone stairwell close to the teacher’s lounge that led past the library on the top layer. The path split in two at the top of the stairs: left lay the baseball and soccer fields where some kids were kicking ball; right, between two scanty strips of grass, lay a short end toward the double doors of the west entrance where a boy and a girl were eating and talking.

Eric came to a halt near a small tree a few metres away from them. He set down a gym bag, pulled a fingerless glove on his right hand and waited for Dylan while leaning against the chain of a fence. Dylan was there moments later; he, too, put a bag on the ground. On his left hand (he was left-handed), he wore the other glove that also was fingerless.

The pockets of Eric’s fatigue-style pants were filled with ammo and small bombs; except the carbine in his harness he also had a sawed-off shotgun and explosives in the gym bag. In his backpack were even more explosives. Dylan wore a shoulder belt underneath his duster with a semi-automatic handgun. He, too, carried ammo and explosives in his backpack and pockets. In his bag, he carried a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun and small bombs. [3]

In total, they carried eighty-nine homemade explosives – various sizes of pipe bombs with bullets and nails for shrapnel, molotov cocktails, and little carbon acid bombs they called 'crickets’. Besides that, they had four combat knives between them. They both had attached a striking surface for the matches that formed the fuse for some of their pipe bombs to their forearms with tape. (Eric to his left, Dylan to his right.)

For a moment, they stood next to one another. Unkempt and unshaven Dylan, standing tall at around 6'2", and short-haired Eric who (with his 5'9"-frame) was at least half a head shorter than his friend. Both clad entirely in black. They stood on the highest point of the school grounds. Beneath them were the senior parking lot, the stone stairwell, and the path alongside the commons. To their right were the grassy hill and the sports fields. To their left, very close to where they were standing, there was the west entrance to the school.

They waited until the commons exploded – but nothing happened. The bombs didn’t go off. And also the bombs in their cars, which should have exploded a minute later, didn’t explode.

Two girls, Janice Roberts and Patrice Doyle, walked through the glass doors and stepped outside. They saw the boy and girl who were sitting on the grass next to the path, and saw Eric and Dylan beside the small tree a little further away. They knew them vaguely; the girls smiled and said 'hi’, and Eric and Dylan greeted them in return.

While Janice and Patrice descended the staircase, Eric and Dylan nodded at one another. They unzipped their bags. Eric grabbed his shotgun and Dylan grabbed his double-barrel. It was a little after twenty past eleven.

“Go go!” cried Eric.

They threw a bomb and started shooting, first in the direction of the football field, then toward the glass doors. They were laughing.

The boy and girl near those doors, Rich Castaldo and Rachel Scott, were both hit. Rich had seen Eric and Dylan stand near the little tree out of the corner of his eye; suddenly something was thrown from that direction that shot off sparks and made noises as if it was a firework. He heard shots, felt himself get hit and fell backwards. He heard Rachel cry, asked if she was okay, and he wasn’t aware of anything that happened after that. Rachel had been shot by Eric four times, including one shot in the head; she was dead almost instantly. Rich had been shot five times, but survived heavily-wounded.

Dylan threw a pipe bomb down at the parking lot, Eric continued to shoot. At the bottom of the stairs, Janice and Patrice heard the shots but thought they were paintball guns and kept walking. Almost everyone thought of something other than real shots and explosions at first: fireworks, recordings for a school video, the exhaust pipe of an old car, a senior prank. Graduation was only three weeks away and it was customary for the seniors to pull pranks in those last weeks. Only the week before, they’d closed off the junior year parking lot so the juniors had been unable to go home. People didn’t realise that someone was really shooting until the earth began to flare up from bullet impacts and children were falling down claiming to have been hurt or paralysed.

Eric and Dylan fired into every direction imaginable, down the stairwell, toward the parking lot, at the grassy hill, toward the sports fields. They were laughing; inbetween the shooting they were grabbing bombs and hurtling them at the roof of the school, onto the grass, at the cars below. They cheered during the explosions.

“This is great!” they cried. “This is what we always wanted to do!”

Three boys (Danny Rohrbough, Lance Kirklin, and Sean Graves) who’d walked out of the commons and now ascended the stairs also thought it was a joke when they saw those two black-clad boys with real-looking guns stand at the very top of the stairs. They kept walking, were all shot by Eric, and fell. Sean, who thought he’d been hit in the back with a paintball capsule, stumbled toward the door of the teacher’s lounge, got hit a few more times, and stayed sprawled right in the doorway. He couldn’t feel his legs anymore, and now thought that an injection from a tranq gun was lodged inside his back.

Eric took off his duster and threw it onto the ground; the words NATURAL SELECTION became visible on his white shirt. Dylan opened his duster and drew his TEC-9 machinegun. Eric reloaded; Dylan went back downstairs again. Eric fired at two girls and a boy who’d been sitting on a low wall; among them was Anne-Marie Hochhalter, who’d also thought of a joke before, but when she saw Dan, Lance and Sean fall, she and the others wanted to flee into the commons through the sidedoors. She got a bullet in her back as she ran, fell and couldn’t get up anymore. “You hit her, she’s bleeding!” shouted someone. Her friends who’d already made it indoors safely went back, pulled her toward a safer place near the wall, and rushed back into the commons. A bomb exploded nearby. Anne-Marie pretended to be dead and survived, heavily-wounded.

On the grass hill, about ten metres away from Eric, five boys hadn’t believed what they were seeing at first either – when they wanted to run, they were shot at. Mike Johnson was hit thrice but was able to keep on running; Mark Taylor got a few bullets in his back, fell, and pretended to be dead. Both survived, although Mark was heavily wounded. The other three boys escaped unharmed.

Dylan shot Danny Rohrbough, who was on the floor, in chest and stomach at close range. Lance Kirklin, who’d been injured from shots to his chest and leg, was lying next to the stairwell and saw a shape loom over him. He had no idea who it was, and asked for help.

It was Dylan, who said: “Help you? Sure, I’ll help you.” He fired; Lance felt something warm near his jaw, heard Dan Rohrbough blow out his final breath, and lost consciousness.

“Look at that dick’s head!” jeered Dylan.

“This is awesome!” called Eric.

Lance survived, with half of his face blown off.

Dylan walked around near the commons laughing, casually set another pipebomb off that caused some windows to break, fired into the direction of the soccer field, and then stepped over Sean Graves to go inside.

In the commons, too, people had finally begun to realise that the shots they heard were real. The children had first followed the directions of one of their teachers, Dave Sanders, who’d told them to hide under the tables. A little while later, Sanders had shouted at all of them to get out and now everyone was trying to get onto the staircase and into the upper layer of the school. Dylan entered while they were in the process of flight. He didn’t shoot, and he didn’t really venture further into the commons – he walked up and down in the portal near the teacher’s lounge with a grin on his face. Soon, stepping back over Sean Graves, he went back outside.

Eric was still shooting away at the top of the stairs; Dylan went back toward him and fired as well, but mostly kept throwing bombs. Both were laughing and jeering and crying how awesome all of it was. Screams and moans now sounded everywhere.

Behind the west entrance’s glass doors, a thirty-five-year-old arts teacher called Patti Nielson appeared. She was on hall patrol duty at the time. She’d heard the noises outside, came to take a look, and had seen a boy with a real-looking firearm. A student called Brian Anderson had also wanted to go outside and seen the same boy. He recognised Eric; they were both in video production class – he assumed he was recording a video for school and that the gun was just a prop. He told Patti as much. But they kept looking for the cameraman who should’ve been there but wasn’t, so maybe it was a prank or something instead. Patti wanted to go up to Eric to tell him that it looked too realistic and that he should stop.

When Patti and Brian were standing in the space between the first and second doors, Eric saw them too. He smiled and fired at them. The outer doors fell down in shards, and Patti and Brian were hit by glass splinters and metal fragments. Both ran away, through the inner doors, to the right into the hallway, and then immediately into the library. Patti wanted to call 911; she knew there was a phone in there.

Eric and Dylan ventured into the school through the broken doors.

The hallways were abandoned. Fifth period was in session, and whoever didn’t have classes had gone into the commons, outside, or into the library. In front of Eric and Dylan lay the long and broad northern hallway that led to the school’s main entrance on the east side; to their right was the short hallway that led past the library. At the very end of that, toward the left, lay the south hallway with in its corner the staircase that led downward into the commons.

People were still fleeing the commons and children were running through the hallway into the library – Eric and Dylan fired at them, without hitting anyone; the children ran back to where they’d come from.

Dylan threw a bomb, Eric went back to the entrance doors. There he saw, at the edge of the senior parking lot, the car of school officer Neil Gardner. Gardner had received a report about the shooting and had arrived with flashing lights and loud sirens. Eric fired at him; Gardner dived behind a parked car and returned the shots – a fire fight ensued that hit nobody. Eric’s weapon jammed and he retreated, cursing, into the school.

Now Dylan and he walked into the north hallway together, shooting, laughing, and crying 'woohoo’. Bullets ricocheted past the lockers, hit the ceilings; a window of the main entrance’s double doors was shot to pieces. Children who’d heard noises in their classrooms or who’d fled the commons now ventured out of classrooms and adjacent hallways. Eric and Dylan fired at them – only one girl who’d just reached the main entrance was shot in her ankle; she escaped and went outside.

They attempted to open a door to the auditorium, but it was locked. Eric went back again; Dylan chased a group of students while laughing and shooting, all the way into the lobby and the office area of the east side of the school. He didn’t hit anyone. While he was running back, he came to a screeching halt near a phone cubicle where one girl was talking on the phone. She saw a surprised smile appear on his face – but he was distracted again by other children running toward the main entrance. He fired at them, again without hitting anyone, and walked back through the north hallway. He joined Eric at the corner of the library hallway again; Dave Sanders and a group of kids he’d shepherded out of the commons were just walking there. He saw Eric and Dylan, and turned back with the kids, but before he reached the corner Eric hit him in back and neck, and Sanders collapsed.

Dylan ran past Sanders and threw a pipebomb into the commons; Eric went back to the west entrance and used the cover the remainder of the doors gave him to shoot at Gardner again. A new fire fight ensued that hit nobody, and Eric went back inside.

Dylan walked back; he stopped in his tracks near Sanders.

“Reb!” he called – Eric’s nickname. “We really hit this one, look at all the blood!”

Sanders was helped into a classroom in the south hallway moments later by computer teacher Rich Long, but would die there of blood loss hours later.

Eric and Dylan walked up and down in the hallway of the library. They laughed and cheered, looked into classrooms through the windows, fired and threw bombs in the hallway itself and into the commons. There were thunderous explosions, the hallway was filled with the sulphuric smell of the gunpowder, the firealarm began to blare, alarm lights were flickering. They ventured into the south hallway a few times, and also looked through the hallway windows into the classrooms. In some of them, children were clearly visible. Yet, they didn’t try to enter any room and kept returning to the hallway of the library.

A boy called Evan Todd had hidden himself behind a pillar near the circulation desk with a nearby chair functioning as his weapon. He saw Eric at the entrance, holding a sawed-off shotgun in one hand, and holding a pipebomb with a burning fuse in the other hand. A moment later, Eric was gone and a bright flash of light filled the hallway along with a loud boom – the library floor shook, children screamed, books fell out of their cases, pieces of plaster came down from the ceiling. There was another explosion, and when Evan looked up again he saw Eric appear once more at the entrance. An empty trophy case was between them. Eric now saw him, too, and fired, but missed. Evan dived behind the copy machine and Eric fired again; now Evan was hit by flying splinters.

Dylan went into the library, followed by Eric – weapons in their hands. It was one minute before half past eleven; eight or nine minutes after they’d first opened fire.

The library was a more-or-less square chamber, with at its front from east to west the entranceway, the circulation desk and a smaller desk and, adjacent to the wall-sized windows, two long computer tables. At its north side were some smaller rooms: a little kitchen, a room for magazines, the studio for school TV, a couple of meeting rooms, and a little hallway that led toward an emergency exit. The actual library, on the south side, consisted of three sections with twenty tables in total, separated by double rows of bookcases.

Eric and Dylan couldn’t see anyone; everybody was hiding from them. Most people were hidden underneath the tables, some were in the magazine room – fifty-six people in total: four female staff members and fifty-two students from all different years; twenty-four boys and twenty-eight girls. Underneath the circulation desk sat Patti Nielson who’d called 911 and, in a panicky whisper, was trying to explain to the operator what was happening.

“Get up!” called Eric and Dylan. “Stand up right now or we’ll blow your fucking heads off!”

Laughing, repeating their threats, they walked further into the library. Here, too, the fire alarm began to blare and the alarm lights started to flicker.

While Eric kept walking toward the windows, Dylan called “get up!” once more. Then, when nobody responded: “Fine, I’ll start shooting then”. He fired straight at the head of Kyle Velasquez, a sixteen-year-old boy who’d seated himself below the northern computertable; he was one of a few mentally disabled students following a special program at Columbine. He died instantly. [4]

“Woohoo!” cried Dylan. “Look at those brains! And the blood!”

He, too, walked over to the windows; Eric and he broke a few of them with their shots and led more bombs explode. A boy, underneath a desk at the front, called out with panic in his voice: “Don’t do that! You’re going to blow up the library.”

“Hey boy!” returned Eric. “Assume as much, yeah. Don’t worry, you’ll all be dead within a couple of minutes.”

“All jocks get up!” they both called. “Everyone in white hats get up! You’ll die first!” – white hats in Columbine were the trademarks of the jocks, the sports guys. A couple of boys underneath the tables took their hats off and tried to hide them as best they could.

“This is our revenge!” shouted Eric and Dylan. “For the four fucked-up years you put us through. For four years of bullying and giving us shit. Hey, jocks, this is our revenge for making us outcasts. This is what we’ve been waiting for all our lives. We’re gonna blow this library up!”

Inbetween the angry cries they were laughing and shouting what fun they were having, and then they said again that all the scared assholes should get out from under the tables right now.

They put their bags on a computertable and fired indiscrimininately; Patti Nielson was too scared to talk and dropped the phone’s receiver. But the line remained open and the rest of the events in the library could, partially understandable, be heard on the tape that recorded the 911 call.

Eric pointed outside: “Look, pigs are here”. There were a few police cars outside now behind which a few officers ducked for cover.

“Come on, let’s kill some cops,” they said. Eric got down on one knee near the broken windows and fired; Dylan got down on his knees next to him and also fired. Shots were exchanged – nobody got hit.

Eric and Dylan went back to their bags and reloaded; they warned each other to be careful that they wouldn’t get jumped. Dylan took his duster off and threw it on the floor; he was wearing a black T-shirt with red lettering spelling the word WRATH – rage, ire, anger. They fired shots and threw bombs, and kept yelling that this was revenge, that the white hats needed to get up, that the library was going to explode. The children beneath the tables didn’t see much more than black pants and combat boots; Dylan made tinkling noises when he walked, because his pockets were so stuffed with items made of metal. Strapped to Eric’s ankle with tape was some kind of box; a sheath with a knife.

Underneath a table in the back on the west side, Dan Steepleton thought they’d seen him because they kept shouting about white hats and he was wearing one. He wanted to get up for that reason – a boy next to him, Makai Hall, stopped him in time. But Dylan had seen Dan; he grinned, called “yahoo!”, and fired at the table. Dan, Makai, and Patrick Ireland who was also seated there were hit; one girl remained unharmed.

Eric went to the southern computertable. In the footwells beneath the tables sat three kids: Steve Curnow and two girls, Kacey Ruegsegger and Amanda Stair. Eric sat down on one knee, and killed fourteen-year-old Steve.

“Die! Motherfucker!” he yelled.

“Woo!” called Dylan.

Eric got back up and then knelt down again in front of Kacey, who screamed at him that he shouldn’t shoot her. Eric told her to shut up and fired at her – she was hit in the shoulder and thought her arm was going to come off; she cried out in pain.

“Quit your bitching, it’s merely a flesh wound,” said Eric, and Dylan could not stop laughing hysterically, but they both left her alone after that. Kacey dropped down onto the floor and pretended to be dead; she survived. They left Amanda alone; perhaps they didn’t see her because she was wearing a black shirt.

They threw bombs and shouted; the floor shook, the gravel on the roof jumped up and came back down again. Eric went to a table near the windows where two girls, Cassie Bernall and Emily Wyant, were hiding. Cassie was praying and kept saying she wanted to go, her hands pressed against the sides of her head as though this would render her invisible.

Eric slammed his hand down onto the table and yelled: “Peek-a-boo!” He crouched down, looked at the girls for a second and shot Cassie through the head. Emily saw smoke come out of Cassie’s head, blood flowing over her blouse; Cassie died instantly.

Pat Ireland, who lay hurt underneath the table in the back with Dan and Makai, had pretended to be dead for a moment, but when he heard Makai moan in pain and saw that his friend’s knee was bleeding, he crawled toward Makai to help him staunch the bleeding. He rose a little above the tabletop in doing so – Dylan fired at him, and hit Pat in the head twice.

“Die! Down on the floor!” called Dylan.

Pat fell down unconscious, but he would survive. Dan and Makai played dead, but moments later something with a burning fuse landed on Dan’s leg. He didn’t dare move but Makai grabbed the thing and threw it back where nobody was sitting; it exploded in mid-air.

Eric went to a nearby table. Near the low bookcases in front of the windows, lay three children (Bree Pasquale, Aaron Cohn, and Byron Kirkland) whose bodies weren’t protected by a tabletop. Bree was one of the last people who’d wanted to believe that something was really happening, and she’d been standing near the windows until right before Eric and Dylan first walked in. When she’d wanted to hide after all, the tables near her had no more room to hide underneath. She’d dropped down onto the floor instead and hidden behind a few chairs she and the others had pulled up in front of them. Half next to her, half on top of her, was Aaron, who’d been out in the hallway moments before and had been too late to hide anywhere for that reason as well.

Bree had seen Cassie get killed, and when Eric walked up to her she knew it was her turn now.

Eric crouched down near her and looked at her. His sawed-off shotgun lay on his thighs. Blood was pouring out of his nose, saw Bree, it covered his mouth as though he’d just drunk blood – the recoil of his gun had broken his nose when he shot Cassie.

He noticed it, too. “I hit my own nose,” he said, laughing, to Dylan – but he kept looking at Bree.

“What did you go and do that for, man,” said Dylan, laughing as well.

Eric pointed his gun at Bree, then at the others lying there, then back at her again. Bree heard a shot, but it was Dylan firing at something else.

“Do you want to die?” asked Eric.

“No,” replied Bree.

“Really? You really don’t wanna die?”

“No,” she shouted, “please, don’t kill me, I have parents and I’m engaged.”

Dylan shouted something about a boy’s dick, screams sounded, Eric asked Bree a few more times if she wanted to die. She kept saying no, but she knew it didn’t matter.

“Everyone’s gonna die,” said Eric with a smile.

Dylan was next to them again. “Just shoot her, man,” he said.

“Nah, we’re gonna blow up the entire school anyway,” replied Eric while still pointing his gun at Bree. [5]

“How about you, fatty,” said Dylan to Aaron Cohn. “Don’t you want to get shot today? Get up man, why don’t you get up?”

Aaron looked into the barrel of Dylan’s gun, but said nothing and stayed down, and Dylan didn’t fire, and walked away.

Eric was still looking at Bree, pointing his gun at her, but Dylan, near another table now, called out to him: “REB! Hey man, there’s a n***** over here!”

“Shoot him,” replied Eric.

“SHIT YEAH!” yelled Dylan. “N*****s, we don’t like them, they don’t deserve to live.”

“Get that black fucking n*****!” shouted Eric. “I hate n*****s!”

Three boys were hiding under the table where Dylan stood: Craig Scott (one of the younger brothers of Rachel Scott, who’d been killed outside), Matt Kechter, and Isaiah Shoels. Isaiah was one of the few black students in Columbine.

Isaiah mumbled: “No, no”, something about his mother and that he was scared and wanted to go home.

“You’re gonna die, n*****!” cried Dylan, “get up, I don’t like those black fucking n*****s.” He tried to pull Isaiah out from under the table, but Isaiah put up a fight and he didn’t succeed.

“Hey, goddamn n*****, stop!” called Dylan, but now Eric had joined him. Eric fired under the table a few times. One bullet was the fatal shot for Isaiah; his body fell over Matt, who then was killed with a single shot from Dylan. Craig wasn’t hit; he dropped down to the floor and pretended to be dead.

“Woohoo! Yippee!” cried Eric and Dylan. They let one of their carbon dioxide bombs explode.

“Did you see me do that?” they asked each other.

“I don’t believe it.”

“But is he really dead? I want to know if that n*****’s really dead.”

“Yeah, he’s dead.”

“I think he was still moving.”

“Then shoot him again.”

Another few shots were fired under that table, but those didn’t hit anyone. They jeered: “Look at his brains!” [6]

“Haven’t you done enough?” someone else called. “He’s dead!”

“Whose turn is it now?” called Eric and Dylan. “Whose turn is it to die now, who will we shoot next?”

Eric jumped onto a low shelf of a bookcase, shook the case and tried to topple it – books fell out, onto legs that came out from under the tables. But he couldn’t topple the case and he fired at the fallen books and kicked them instead.

A loud noise kept on going constantly: shots, explosions, screaming, the jeers and shouts of Eric and Dylan, the fire alarm; children stuffed their fingers into their ears because the noise hurt them. Eric and Dylan had shouted that they wanted to get the jocks, but it was clear now that they were shooting at random; girls, nerds, boys who couldn’t possibly be jocks. They moved from table to table with a spring in their step, shouting about how much fun this was, the best day of their lives – and their fun, witnesses later would agree, sounded genuine, not mean or nasty, or insane: perhaps similar to the fun of lanky youths who had decided to ride on a children’s caroussel for kicks and giggles.

There was a set pattern within the fun they were having: they rejoiced over the sight of a visibly terrified child that saw them coming, made fun of them over their glasses, their weight, their cowardice for hiding under the table, and then there were gunshots, often multiple at once, followed by screams or moans, and then there were the cheerful voices of Eric and Dylan saying 'okay!’ or 'alright!’ as if they were congratulating each other with a successful move in a game – and if the moans continued, they shouted at the person to quit their bitching, and sometimes one more gunshot would follow, after which the moaning would indeed stop.

After the murders on Isaiah and Matt and the failed attempt to topple the bookcase, Eric and Dylan returned to the library’s east side. Dylan fired at the empty trophy case while standing near the detection gate at the entrance, after which he fired at a boy (Mark Kintgen) seated under a table by himself – he was hit in his head and neck, but survived.

“Look at all the blood!” shouted Dylan.

Underneath the table next to Mark sat and lay a group of five screaming, feverishly praying girls. Dylan fired at them; with the first shot he hit both Lisa Kreutz and Valeen Schnurr; with a couple other shots, at closer range, he hit Lauren Townsend. The impact of the shots forced Lauren’s body backward outside of the safety of the table and up against the wall; Dylan went up to her and shot her in the back at close range with a volley of his semi-automatic.

“Oh my God, how could you do that?” shouted Valeen. “Oh God, Lauren! You’ve killed her!”

Dylan reloaded his double-barrel; while he was doing this, Valeen crawled out from underneath the table where the other girls were still huddled together. Sitting on her hands and knees, she cried: “Look at me, I’m bleeding. Oh my God, help me, help me, I don’t want to die, oh God, help me!”

She heard a long series of gunshots, and a voice behind her that asked: “Do you believe in God?”

Valeen didn’t respond, and the voice asked again: “Do you believe in God?”

“No,” she said, and then right after that: “I don’t know”, and then: “Yes”.

She looked around and saw Dylan busy handling his gun. She recognised him, they’d been in economics class together, she’d spoken with him a few times.

“Why do you believe in God?” asked Dylan and Eric, too, asked: “Why?”

“That’s the way my parents raised me. And because I believe.”

“God is gay,” replied Dylan.

But Dylan got distracted and Valeen dropped down, shoved herself back under the table, and pretended to be dead. She didn’t get shot at anymore and survived, heavily-wounded.

Eric said something about blowing up the library; Dylan peered under another table, where two girls sat by themselves. “Pathetic,” was all he said, and he left them alone.

John Tomlin and Nicole Nowlen had hidden themselves in the back of the library’s east side. Eric fired at them under their table; Nicole felt a hit that slammed her out from underneath the table and up against the wall. She suspected she’d been hit in her stomach; later this suspicion would be confirmed when they found five bullets lodged in there. John, who was mildly injured, had tried to duck out of the line of fire, and had landed on his belly outside of the shelter the table provided.

“Don’t!” he shouted. “Haven’t you done enough?”

Dylan went up to him. “You think we’ve done enough?” he asked laughing, and he shot him four times in the back and head; Eric fired at him as well.

Nicole played dead, felt spasms in one of John’s leg, and felt the spasms cease. “Are you still breathing?” she heard someone ask – it was Dylan. She wondered if the question was meant for her right when she lost consciousness – she survived.

Eric returned to the table of the five girls; nearby, he now saw Kelly Fleming hide underneath another table. He shot her in the back. He fired at the five girls again as well and hit Lisa, Lauren who was probably already dead at this stage, and Jeanna Park. Lisa, heavily-wounded, and Jeanna survived; Kelly would die moments later.

They threw bombs again, and went over to the windows on the south side. There were a bunch of police vehicles present now – the SWAT team had arrived as well. Eric shouted something about killing cops, and they ripped the blinds off the windows, but they didn’t shoot, and went back to the middle section of the library.

In the back, they put their guns and bombs on a table and reloaded; Eric stood astride a girl’s protruding leg. They counseled over their ammo; exact about the amount of bullets and clips of every kind they still had left, what they were going to use, a clip they’d lost, a backpack that should still be somewhere else – Eric walked over to the computertable to retrieve the backpack and returned with it. They spoke in a chuckling manner about the way the children’s faces looked when they knew they were going to get shot, when they knew they were going to die.

“You know what I’ve always wanted to do?” asked Dylan.

“Yeah, use your knife,” replied Eric.

“Yeah, maybe we should start knifing people. You’d get more blood that way, it’d be fun.” They laughed. Dylan gestured as though he wanted to grab one of his knives but didn’t pull one; their knives remained unused.

After the reload they set a bomb on a table and let it explode.

Underneath a nearby table, Eric saw a boy called John Savage sitting there by himself. He crouched down and aimed his carbine at him. John leaned away, Eric repositioned the barrel to point back at John’s face, John leaned away again.

Eric got up. “Who is this?” he asked. “Identify yourself!”

“It’s me, John,” replied John Savage.

Now Dylan walked over to this table as well. “John Savage?” he asked.

“Y-y-yes,” said John, he was a stutterer. He knew both Eric and Dylan; he’d been on the outskirts of the Trenchcoat Mafia some two years back, and had shared classes with both boys. He’d done the same philosophy test Eric had missed that very morning. He knew Dylan better through all the drama plays they did together.

“Hi,” said Dylan.

“Hi, Dylan,” replied John. “What are you doing?”

Dylan shrugged. “Oh, you know, just shooting people.”

“Are you gonna shoot me, too?” asked John.

Dylan looked at him for a minute, and then said: “Nah, man, you’re cool. We know you. We like you. You never did anything to us. We’ll let you live. Get out of here. We’re gonna blow up the school. Let him go,” he said to Eric.

“Oh, okay,” said John. “Then I’ll go.” But he remained seated.

Dylan grew impatient: “If you value your life, get out of here!”

John still remained seated.

“Get out!” said Dylan.

Eric didn’t seem to agree that John was allowed to leave. But Dylan again repeated: “Let him go”. A girl hidden under a nearby table got the impression that discord arose between the two over this.

“Get out of here,” said Dylan with a laugh in his voice. “Get out!”

“Thanks,” said John. He pushed some chairs out of the way and sprinted out of the library.

Next to John Savage’s table, a fifteen-year-old boy called Dan Mauser had hidden underneath another table by himself.

Eric went up to him and kicked him. “Hey, geek,” he called, “nice glasses! Do you think they’re nice glasses?”

Dan didn’t respond, which caused Dylan to pull a chair out of the way and fire at Dan without hitting him. Dan said something or made a sound; Eric or Dylan asked him what was so funny. Dan pushed a chair against Dylan and dove straight at him, but Dylan stepped aside and Eric killed Dan with two gunshots to the head.

“Was he trying to jump you?” asked Eric. [7]

“Yeah, he dove straight at me, can you believe it?” replied Dylan. They laughed about it. They went to a table in the back of the middle section where Dylan pulled a chair out of the way and fired; Eric, too, fired under that table. Corey DePooter, hit by one shot from Dylan and three from Eric, was dead instantly. The other three under the table, including two light-wounded people, played dead.

They went back to the front of the library and fired at the fire alarm; Dylan attempted to enter the magazine room where six more people were hiding, but they had locked the door. They again yelled for everyone to get up and leave because they were going to blow up the library; Eric threw a molotov cocktail that, just as some of their other bombs, failed to go off. Dylan fired at random into the small kitchen that had an open door but nobody hiding out inside; one of the televisions was hit. The previously hit trophy case collapsed even though nobody had fired at it again. Behind the circulation desk Dylan pulled away another chair and saw Evan Todd, the boy who’d stood behind the pillar when they had first arrived in the library – he had crawled under the desk just as Patti Nielson had.

Dylan stuck the barrel of his semi-automatic in Evan’s face. “Hey, Reb, come here,” he called. “Look what we have here!”

“What?” replied Eric.

“Just some fat fuck..”

Eric came over; Evan saw blood around his chin and mouth and on his T-shirt. His nose was a little crooked, he seemed to be dizzy.

“Do whatever you want with him, I don’t care,” said Eric and he walked away again, toward the exit.

“Hey, jock boy,” said Dylan to Evan, “are you a jock?” He kept his gun aimed at Evan.

“No,” replied Evan.

“Well, that’s good, because we don’t like jocks. Let me take a good look at your face.”

Evan removed his cap and looked up at Dylan.

Dylan stared straight at him and said: “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you.”

“I don’t want to get into trouble,” replied Evan.

This answer seemed to anger Dylan. He leaned toward Evan.

“Trouble? You fat piece of shit, you don’t fucking know what trouble is!”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Evan, “I meant, I don’t have a problem with you guys. Never had it and won’t ever get it either.”

Dylan looked at him, still pointing his gun at him, and then looked at Eric, and said: “I’m going to let this fat fuck live.. little fat fucking piece of shit.. you can have at him if you want.” [8]

Eric didn’t seem to hear him, didn’t even seem to be paying any attention. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go to the commons. Make the bombs explode.” He was getting ready to leave and Dylan lowered his weapon and turned away from Evan. Patti Nielson, next to Evan, remained unnoticed by him.

“Wait,” said Dylan, “there’s one more thing I always wanted to do.” He grabbed a chair and threw it onto the computer on the desk, right above Patti’s head. “Reb, ya ready?” he asked.

They yelled one more time that they were going to blow the library up, and Eric went out, followed by Dylan. At the library entrance they let two bombs explode; after that they walked through the hallway. It was six minutes after half past twelve. They had been inside the library for seven-and-a-half minutes – a quarter of an hour had passed since they first opened fire.

They had said that they wanted to go down to the commons to let the bombs explode, but they didn’t go there right away. They threw some pipebombs over the banister in the corner, but walked past the staircase into the south hallway where the science classrooms were located.

Some classrooms were empty, in others children and teachers were hiding, and people had locked the doors and barricaded the doorways with desks and chairs. Eric and Dylan peered inside, and sometimes there was eye contact, but they didn’t shoot. They cursed when they found out a door was locked, kicked against it, fumbled with doorknobs, pounded on them, called “hello!”, demanded of people to let them in – but real attempts to actually get in, through shooting at locks, weren’t made. They did shoot through windows and doors a few times, and then splinters flew around, and one time a bullet went through a desk blocking the door, but didn’t hit anyone.

They threw bombs, fired into empty classrooms, turned on the gas in a science lab, cheered that it was so much fun and that everyone was going to die, but however threatening their shouts were, they kept being followed up with laughter.

“Today is the day I’m gonna die!” screamed Dylan in front of a janitor’s closet packed with students and teachers, and he followed up on the statement with more gunfire and a chilling, mocking laugh – but he didn’t shoot at the lock. [9]

They threw another bomb into the commons, looked through the windows of the classroom where heavily-wounded Sanders and quite a few kids were staying, fumbled with the doorknob and pounded on the door, but didn’t shoot at the lock. They attached a bomb to the wall near this classroom, but when it went off it just produced a lot of sparks and smoke. They threw a molotov cocktail into a chem shed that started a small fire, but when they had left again one of the teachers extinguished it with a fire extinguisher.

And finally, after walking through the south hallway for about ten minutes, they descended the staircase into the commons. Eric knelt down on the lowest landing and fired at one of the propane bombs – perhaps to let the beginning and ending of their original plan, exploding the school, and killing themselves, come together. But the bomb didn’t go off now, either.

The commons appeared to be abandoned; most of the five-hundred kids who’d been there at the start of the shooting had left already. Yet there were still people present, hiding in the kitchen, the bathrooms, the teacher’s lounge, underneath tables in the commons itself.

Eric gave the orders; Dylan had to cover him and keep the windows and stairs at gunpoint. They walked around between the tables, the fallen chairs, abandoned bags and books, lost shoes. Dylan walked up to the bomb Eric had taken the shot at and tinkered with it, but nothing happened. They drank from the cups still left on the tables, laughed, yelled about how they were going to blow this fucking school up and how much fun they were having. “Today is the end of the world, today is the day I’m gonna die!” yelled Dylan. They fired off a few bullets, but didn’t hit anyone; they didn’t look under any of the tables.

They attempted to get into an office and broom cupboard in the back of the cafeteria, but both of these had locked and barricaded doors. “We know you’re in there, come out, it’s your day to die,” they called, and they pounded on the door and fired again – but not at the lock.

Dylan went into the teacher’s lounge, and saw a hole in the ceiling. He climbed on a chair, put his head through the hole, and saw a boy trying to crawl away in the space above. He aimed a gun at him, but didn’t shoot and went away again – possibly because he’d recognised a good friend called Tim Kastle.

Back in the commons, he slowly threw what’s likely to have been a molotov cocktail at the propane bomb. Half a minute later, an explosion finally occurred. It wasn’t from the actual bomb. The bottle of gasoline inside the bag caught fire, and a big orange ball of fire occurred; windows were blown out and a fire started that turned on both the sprinklers and the fire alarm – but both of the propane tanks remained whole.

They ran off, into the hallways of the lower layer of the school. “Did you see me set that thing on fire?” yelled Dylan.

Moments later they were back in the upper layer of the school and walked, shooting at ceilings, windows and lockers, to the other end of it, the office area and the lobby near the main entrance on the east side. There, too, doors had been locked and barricaded. They didn’t make a serious attempt at gaining access to a room there, either. Near a bathroom they yelled: “We know you’re in there! We’re going to shoot all of you!” But they did no such thing. In an abandoned office, they found a computer with a screensaver of the Broncos (Denver’s footballteam). “Oh, football, we love football!” they said, and threw the screen onto the floor with a cheer and fired at it.

“Come on, let’s go,” they said to each other and they ran back off again, through the hallways to the arts classrooms, back to the commons. They were back there a little before twelve o'clock, ten minutes after they’d sprinted away because of the fire. It had been extinguished by the sprinklers in the meantime; a layer of water was on the floor.

They looked around again, went to the kitchen, fumbled at the same doorknobs to the same rooms, shouted the same orders to open up, yelled for people to come outside so they could be killed, and again settled for the fact that nothing happened. After a few minutes they went back up the staircase, into the library’s hallway, into the library once more.

“Are you still with me?” one asked the other. “We’re still gonna do this, right?” [10]

Nobody was left in the library, apart from the ten corpses of the children they had killed and two unconscious heavily-wounded kids, Pat Ireland and Lisa Kreutz, who hadn’t been able to join everyone else when they’d escaped through the emergency exit shortly after Eric and Dylan had originally left.

They walked up to the windows, and fired at the cops and paramedics. Shots were exchanged, nobody was hit. They walked past the offices toward the emergency exit, which had remained open after the children had fled the library. They fired, and threw a bomb at the people working to get paralysed Rich Castaldo into an ambulance. A piece of shrapnel hit a police officer’s cheek and shots were exchanged, but nobody was hit aside from this, and Eric and Dylan went back into the library.

At seven or eight minutes past twelve, they went to a table in the back near Pat Ireland. They set a molotov cocktail onto the table, ignited its fuse, and before it went off they shot themselves in the head – first Eric, then Dylan.

Footnotes:

[1] After the shooting, a rumour started saying that Eric and Dylan had something to do with this ominous sentence on school TV. Most of the students didn’t pay attention to the broadcasts of the Rebel News Network and remembered this sentence in many different forms. Eric Veik, a friend of the two, had changed the original sentence submitted to RNN (“quit your bitching”) to this sentence because it was the first nice day weather-wise and he thought everyone would rather be someplace else than inside the school.

[2] Concerning the placement of the bombs, there is no clarity. Krabbé choses to let both boys place the bombs in the commons that morning, because there are no clear witness statements stating anything else. He does state that it is possible for Dylan to have placed both bombs in the commons and for Eric to have waited for him outside with the bags holding their weapons and smaller bombs.

What is not possible is for Eric and Dylan to have gone back to their cars after placing the bombs in the commons, even though this is what the official police report says happened. Every witness who reported seeing the boys saw them walk from their cars toward the school, but no witness sees them walking from the school to their cars. No witness sees them waiting near their cars. They can’t have waited.

A common misconception is that the bombs were timed to go off at 11:17. There’s only one source for this time – the schedule Dylan had drawn up the day before. In the same schedule, the car bombs go off at 11:18. You cannot wait for the explosion of a cafeteria at 11:17 in a car scheduled to explode a minute later. (Krabbé notes 'cheap alarm clocks are not this accurate’.)

They were running late for their own schedule that morning. It is highly likely that they reset the timer for the bombs the minute they figured out they weren’t going to make it to the school in time. They didn’t arrive at the school until 11:13 at the earliest (no single witness saw them arrive before 11:14) and that did not give them enough time to place a bomb in the commons that was set to explode at 11:17.

They can’t have started shooting earlier than 11:21; at least two minutes later than in the official timeline.

[3] Quite a few witnesses noted seeing men in skimasks – and one was found in the pocket of Eric’s duster. Many more witnesses, however, did not mention the masks. There was no reason for Eric and Dylan to wear them – it would only have alarmed people. They didn’t have to hide their identities; they weren’t going to get out of the school alive anyway.

[4] Official reports state that Kyle was the only one who didn’t hide himself. It suggests that he had not understood the danger and had not even been capable of emulating others when they went to hide. The protests of Kyle’s father against this statement are justified: it is far more likely for Kyle to have hidden just like everyone else.

[5] Seventeen-year-old Bree was one of the witnesses whose statement was clear and detailed. She could put the events in the correct order better than most others could. She was the sole library witness who pointed out mistakes on the library diagrams. You can sense the officer’s misplaced annoyance when he writes “explained to Bree Pasquale once more that the diagram’s not drawn in scale”.

Bree’s the only one who saw Eric jump into the bookcase and attempt to bring it down – but if that’s what she says, that’s most likely to have happened.

[6] A few witnesses heard Dylan and Eric shout things like “look at that nigger’s brain”, but Isaiah had not been shot in the head. It doesn’t mean that they didn’t say it, to scare people or to act tough, and it also doesn’t mean that they didn’t mean to make derogatory remarks toward Isaiah at the time.

Isaiah’s murder, coupled with that much shouting and yelling, was the first realisation for many inside the library that they were really killing kids.

[7] Dan Mauser seems to have been the only one, small as his attempt was, who actually tried to fight against Eric and Dylan. He is still holding the chair he pushed against Dylan on the library diagram.

[8] Perhaps it was the verbal exchange that saved Evan’s life. Everyone they’d had a conversation with survived. It seemed to be harder for Eric and Dylan to kill people who’d become 'real’ to them. Perhaps something like this was also the reason why they didn’t use their knives; it would have been literally and figuratively too close for comfort.

[9] Nobody knows for sure who yelled this, but it has to be Dylan. He was the louder and more theatrical one of the two throughout, and Eric may have been less vocal due to his broken nose – he already gave people the impression that he was a little groggy back in the library.

[10] The only witness who heard them say this was Lisa Kreutz. She stated they’d said so upon their first entry. Nobody else heard it then, and it wasn’t caught on the 911 tape, which seems to make it more likely that they said it upon their second entrance. Lisa, heavily-wounded and no longer fully conscious, was the only one who could’ve heard them say it then.

They are interesting words; it could mean that one was doubting the other. Eric was still acting like a leader with his orders; he is the most likely to have said it. Perhaps he wanted Dylan’s confirmation that they were still going to commit suicide.

Why they chose the library isn’t clear; they could’ve killed themselves anywhere. Perhaps it was to take one final look at the carnage – if that’s true, then they did not show remorse at all. Or they thought the windows of the library were their best chance at suicide by cop.