SPECIAL REPORT/THE LITTLETON MASSACRE

MAY 3, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 17

What Can The Schools

Do?

Metal detectors, mesh book bags,

armed police--should kids have to

attend prisons? Here's what some

schools have done to prevent

violence

BY JOHN CLOUD

As the country watched Littleton last week, we

seemed to be hurtling toward a National Moment,

a late-'90s version of, say, the sinking of the

Maine, or the Kent State shootings during

Vietnam, or Rock Hudson's death. These

moments can be dangerous, as such soul

searching quickly turns into lawmaking. History

may remember last week because of what

happens in the next few weeks, so let's try to get

it right.

We might go ahead and dismiss a few of the too

tiny suggestions (those mesh backpacks you

keep hearing about still carry guns--just stinky

ones wrapped in gym clothes) as well as the too

big ones (Ohio Representative James Traficant

used Littleton to try to revive the idea of prayer in

schools, which the Supreme Court has ruled

illegal about 38 times). But what about New

Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman's proposal to

spend $10 million turning schools into little

fortresses, with security better than that at the

nuclear lab in his state? Or more gun control, as

New York Senator Charles Schumer urged when

he reminded us that "a teenager can only do so

much damage with his fists"?

By week's end, a sense of panic had crept from

the 24-hr. "Terror in the Rockies" broadcasts into

the statehouses as well. Some were more

panicked than others: California Governor Gray

Davis spoke of the importance of guidance

counselors, but, reflecting the differences in the

men and their states, Virginia Governor Jim

Gilmore ordered superintendents to report any

potentially dangerous student to police

immediately. School districts are alarmed by the

governmental consternation. Just last week, 150

calls were directed to Russ Ebersole, who runs a

small but suddenly lucrative Bethesda, Md., firm

that takes $500 from schools to bring in Labrador

retrievers that sniff out bombs and gunpowder.

Even so, after the worst school massacre in this

country's history, there must be something we

can do. Right?

If crime in the classroom is an epidemic, it's like

tuberculosis--one we basically control, with a few

flare-ups every once in a while that beat the

inoculation. Overall, school violence is not going

up. Just 10 of every 1,000 students were the

victims of serious violent crime at school in 1996.

And while that's 10 too many, more than twice

that number (26) were victims off campus. After

the shootings that occurred in the 1997-98

school year, many districts tightened security.

It's having an effect, according to the National

School Safety Center: there were 42 deaths in

the 1997-98 academic year, and just nine--before

last Tuesday--this school year, which ends soon.

What has increased over the past five years is

the multiple-victim, video-game-like rampages

that led up to the Littleton abomination. They are

the Ebola virus of schools--horrifyingly bloody,

yes, but perhaps so determined that we can't

devise general means to stop them. On

Saturday, authorities in Texas announced that

five 14-year-old boys had been charged with

plotting a murderous assault on their junior high

school. Since Littleton, dozens of copycat

threats have popped up around the country There

are two categories of dealing with them: first,

nurture more; second, crack down. The latter is

embraced by security experts and frightened

school employees. For these folks, even zero

tolerance is somehow too much; they want

lock-downs and detector dogs and strapped

rent-a-cops to be a regular feature of school life.

(President Clinton also said the Federal

Government would provide more money for

schools to hire police. For the record, however,

Columbine High School's armed cop couldn't do

much to stop the shooters.)

Most schools blend the two approaches, to the

extent that they can afford it. Trumbull High

School in tony Trumbull, Conn., can afford a lot.

The school has an armed, uniformed police

officer at the entrance, and an 11-member team

of counselors watches for warning signs and

deals with problem kids. There are two guards

inside, these in plainclothes; one of them, John

Kichinko, wears Winnie-the-Pooh ties to keep

kids at ease.

These measures put Trumbull on the cutting

edge of safety, but even there, one gets the

sense that prevention is as much a matter of luck

as of planning. Last year a teacher happened to

notice a student photocopying material about

bombmaking. The teacher spread the word, and

kids stepped forward to say the boy had

downloaded the info from the Web and was

building a device. Police found a

ready-to-detonate bomb in his locker. He was

expelled.

Across the nation, the most common

violence-prevention measures are the

cheapest--and the easiest for a couple of

well-armed outcasts to blast past. According to a

study published last year in the journal Urban

Education, the direct-prevention plan most

commonly reported by school administrators is

to place teachers in hallways. Next come

alternative schools, which lump the troubled kids

together under one (ideally sturdy) roof; and

finally, visitor registration.

The stark limits of such measures became clear

after Jonesboro and Springfield and the rest, and

many schools have added paranoia to their

prevention plans. All bomb threats, at one time

sifted for credibility, are taken seriously at most

schools. After East Montpelier, Vt., canceled

school seven times because of bomb threats,

officials instituted a new policy: classes move

outside when threats are called in, and trucks

haul in lunch and Porta Potties. MORE>>

PAGE 1 | 2
 
 

COPYRIGHT © 1999 TIME INC. NEW MEDIA

SPECIAL REPORT/THE LITTLETON MASSACRE

MAY 3, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 17

Where Were the

Parents?

Could they not notice their kids'

rage? Could you?

BY AMY DICKINSON

As much as we've read and heard about Eric

Harris and Dylan Klebold, we know very little

about their family life. We know even less about

their parents. But we do know that these two

high school boys sent up flares advertising their

anger and alienation, but these signs were either

ignored or dismissed.

Since last Tuesday, an army of experts has

marched through our living rooms to educate us

on the signals our children send before they fly

off the rails. Does your child show an unusual

interest in guns? Is he a bully? Does he have

violent fantasies? Does your child seem sad or

depressed? If so, he may be in trouble, and a

parent should intervene immediately. When I hear

this I think: Well, duh. And I wonder: Where were

these kids' parents?

Maybe Eric and Dylan suffered from some

organic psychosis that even the most loving and

attentive parents couldn't cure. Maybe the signs

that seem so obvious to us now, in retrospect,

were well obscured in the Harris and Klebold

homes. Teenagers are good at hiding their true

selves--or the selves they're trying out this

month--behind the "grandma face" they wear

when they're trotted out to see the relatives.

Behind that pleasant mask there can be volumes

of bad poetry, body piercings and tattoos.

But is it possible for parents to miss homicidal

rage? I can't help asking: Where were the

Harrises and Klebolds when their sons were

watching Natural Born Killers over and over? Have

the parents seen that movie? Have they ever

played Doom and the other blood-soaked

computer games that occupied their children?

Did these "educated professionals" take a look at

the hate-filled website their kids created?

Were the Harrises aware of the pipe-bomb

factory that was in their two-car garage? The kid

down the street was aware of it, and he's 10

years old.

So I wonder: Where the hell were the parents?

And then, like most parents I know, I wonder:

Where are the rest of us? Are we vigilant

enough?

Most teenagers exist in a state of near constant

mortification at the prospect of supervision by

their parents. But surely a parent can risk his

child's embarrassment, and his own discomfort,

to get in his or her face a little bit. Surely we can

manage to love them a little louder. To find the

time to read their school papers, listen to their

music, watch what they watch and get to know

their friends. I have a memory of my mother,

bless her, sitting at our dining-room table and

reading the liner notes to Thick as a Brick the

year my brother was 16 and deeply into Jethro

Tull.

Every parent knows that raising children requires

bicycle helmets, Beanie Babies, notebook paper,

prayers, skill, the grace of God and plain dumb

luck. But what many of us don't ever come to

grips with is this: we must take responsibility for

the world our children inhabit. We make the world

for them. We give it to them. And if we fail them,

they will break our hearts 10 different ways.

So far, the only people assuming any kind of

recognizable parental responsibility for the

shootings in Colorado are some of the parents of

the victims. In his anguish, Michael Shoels,

father of 18-year-old Isaiah, wonders aloud if

there is anything he might have done to get

between his son and the killers. But, no, Mr.

Shoels, it's not your fault. You did your job. You

knew him well. Your son knew that life isn't a

video game. He was in the library working on a

research paper when he was killed.

Dickinson is a new TIME contributor. She also

writes a column for America Online END

A Curse Of Cliques

There are good reasons to form

tight-knit groups. But in America's

high schools, they can be harsh

BY ADAM COHEN

When the shooting finally stopped at Columbine

High School, and students ran out of their hiding

places to safety, some of the most hulking male

students had stripped off their shirts. They

weren't posing for the cameras. Word had spread

through the school that the "Trench Coat Mafia"

was hunting for athletes, and at Columbine a polo

shirt--and a white baseball cap--marked the

wearer as a jock.

It was the first day in Columbine history that it

was dangerous to be a jock--and that kind of

humiliation may have been just what the killers

had in mind. Video games and the easy

availability of guns may have contributed to the

Littleton horror. But what role did the ingrained

cliquishness of American high schools play? Part

of the story is old: the embittered outcasts

against the popular kids on campus. But what

kind of new conflagrations should we expect if

the Revenge of the Nerds can now be played out

to the firing of semiautomatics?

In the movie version of the 1950s, schools split

into two camps: the fresh-scrubbed kids (frats,

preppies) and the leather-clad rebels (hoods,

greasers). It's more complicated these days.

Columbine's 1,935 students look a lot

alike--mostly white, well off and primed for

success. But students have no trouble ticking off

a startling number of cliques--jocks, hockey kids

(a separate group), preppies, stoners,

gangbangers (gang-member wannabes), skaters

(as in skateboarders) and, as they say, nerds.

Other high schools have variations on these

themes. California has its surfer cliques, and

Austin High School in Texas has the hicks--or

kickers--who show up at school in cowboy boots,

big hats and oversize belt buckles.

It's a cliche that jocks and cheerleaders rule, but

it is largely true. While others plod through high

school, they glide: their exploits celebrated in

pep rallies and recorded in the school paper and

in trophy cases. "The jocks and the

cheerleaders, yes, have the most clout," says

Blake McConnell, a student at Sprayberry High

School near Atlanta. "They get out of

punishment--even with the police. Joe Blow has a

wreck and has been drinking, and he gets the

book thrown at him. The quarterback gets

busted, and he gets a lighter sentence."

At the other extreme are the Trench Coat Mafias

of the world--the kids on the margins. Each

school has its own brand of outsiders with their

own names--nerds, freaks, punks, ravers. And

each group has its own way of standing out. At

Atlanta's Sprayberry, says sophomore Shawn

Cotter, "the outcasts are mainly people who

dress up differently, guys who wear makeup and

dress in feminine ways, people who wear black

leather and chains."

But high school outcasts have moved beyond the

chess club and the audio-visual squad. Now they

are wearing black T shirts, trench coats and

hard-kicking Doc Martens. Many are also

wearing face powder and black eyeliner. "A lot of

it is just a front--a mass cry for attention," says

McConnell. "Mostly there's nothing behind it."

Still, the worst of high school fringe groups do

seem more disturbed than in the past. The

awkward kids aren't just smiling inappropriately

during science-lab frog dissections. Some high

schools have white supremacist cliques. Then

there are groups like the Straight Edge, a

presence at schools like Salt Lake City's Kearns

High School. They are puritanical punkers who

are anti-drug, anti-alcohol, and anti-tobacco--and

they are violent. If you smoke or drink in their

presence, some Straight Edgers will attack you

with a baseball bat.

The so-called good cliques can do just as much

as the outsiders to foment trouble. There really is

a Lord of the Flies dynamic at work among kids.

Even nice kids seem to spend a lot of time being

cruel to their less socially prominent peers.

Social science literature is filled with the gritty

details--categorized under headings like "the

spiral of rejection." Patti and Peter Adler,

sociologists who do field research on cliques,

found that a 17-year-old girl in one group they

observed could raise her status by getting a boy

to spend money on her and break up with

another girl for her--and then dump him. Another

clique member told a researcher that "one of the

main things to do is to keep picking on unpopular

kids because it's just fun to do."

The dynamics between cliques are often very

raw, particularly for the groups at the extremes of

the social spectrum: jocks and outcasts. Even at

the relatively well-integrated Liberty High School

in Bethlehem, Pa., it is not unheard of for the

punks--who often sport black clothing, tattoos

and spiky hair--to be taunted in the hallways.

"They call 'em dirty, say stuff like 'Why don't you

bathe?'" says a student. Often it is the athletes

who dish out the abuse. Haakon Espeland, 14,

switched out of Brooklyn's Fort Hamilton High,

where he was one of the "freaks." The reason he

fled: a stream of abuse, starting on his first day

at school, when "all these huge people beat on

me, basically for being there."

Adolescents are psychologically fragile, and

mistreatment from schoolmates leaves deep

wounds. Sometimes, says Augustana University

education professor Larry Brendtro, "kids who

feel powerless and rejected are capable of doing

horrible things." Jason Sanchez, 15, a student at

Phoenix's Mountain Pointe High School,

understands why Harris and Klebold snapped: "If

you go to school, and people make fun of you

every day, and you don't have friends, it drives

you to insanity."

There is probably no way to stop high schools

from breaking down into cliques. We may be

hardwired for it. As early as preschool,

researchers have found, kids begin rejecting

other kids. And even in kindergarten, children

have a good idea which of their classmates are

popular and which are not. But schools can take

the edge off the situation through inclusiveness.

"I can't remember ever going to a pep rally and

having the skaters show off their talents," says

Curtis Cook, a parent at Phoenix's Desert Vista

High School. Says New York City psychoanalyst

Leon Hoffman: "All kids need to belong, and if

they can't belong in a positive way at the school,

they'll find a way to belong to a marginal group

like a cult or a gang."

The Columbine High shootings seem to have

given at least some cliques around the country

pause. At Trumbull High School in Connecticut,

the Goths have stopped wearing their trademark

trench coats. And students in more mainstream

cliques may be a little more cautious about

taunting students who don't fit in--if only out of an

instinct for self-preservation. "I'm not going to talk

about them anymore," says Nathalie Kirnon, a

Trumbull freshman. "They might do it here."

--REPORTED BY HARRIET BAROVICK, DESA

PHILADELPHIA AND ELAINE RIVERA/NEW YORK, LAURA

LAUGHLIN/PHOENIX, JODIE MORSE/TRUMBULL AND

DAVID NORDAN/ATLANTA

PECIAL REPORT/THE LITTLETON MASSACRE

MAY 3, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 17

We're Goths and Not

Monsters

BY CHRIS TAYLOR

In any other week, the disclaimer on the door of

Inkubus Haberdashery, a Gothic fashion store in

Miami's Coconut Grove district, would have

seemed as out of place as the boutique itself.

THE GOTHIC COMMUNITY IN NO WAY

CONDONES THE USE OF VIOLENCE, it read.

WE ARE APPALLED BY THE KILLINGS AND

BY THE INFERENCE THAT THE MURDERERS

BELONGED TO OUR CULTURE. Inside, owner

Malaise Graves lamented the spotlight the

Littleton killings had suddenly thrown on Goth

culture. "I'm afraid this violent stereotyping of us

is only going to get worse now," she sighed.

The initial assumption that Eric Harris and Dylan

Klebold were Goths--simply because they wore

black trench coats, painted their fingernails black

and listened to Marilyn Manson music--got real

Goths everywhere hot under the black leather

collar. "Teenagers tend to go after the most

powerful images they can," explains Seth Baker,

a Los Angeles Goth. "They put together a lot of

images." Real Goths have nothing to do with

violence.

Still, if Klebold and Harris were wolves in Goth's

clothing, there was plenty to identify with. "We

romanticize the darkness of humanity," says

Peter Stover, 21, a photography major at

Chicago's Columbia College, who has midnight

blue hair and regulation pale skin. "We're

creatures of the night."

The current manifestation of Gothic culture began

with the British punk scene in the early '80s.

Bands like Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the

Banshees, and Joy Division created the

atmospheric doom-rock sound. A clothing style

evolved that was part Johnny Rotten, part Anne

Rice and all black. Acolytes sometimes took an

interest (purely academic) in subjects such as

Satanism and blood drinking, which ensured this

was one rebellion that would never enter the

mainstream. In the '90s shock rockers like

Manson appropriated the image and blurred the

lines--until any shaggy-haired,

trench-coat-wearing teen could be considered a

Goth by his peers.

--WITH REPORTING BY WENDY COLE/CHICAGO AND TIM

PADGETT/MIAMI

Coming to Clarity About

Guns

Are we witnessing a cultural shift that

says gunmakers are to blame?

BY LANCE MORROW

An item neglected in the rush of the week's

news: it was revealed that Russell Eugene

Weston Jr., who stormed the U.S. Capitol last

summer, killing two police officers, did it because

he feared being contaminated by "Black Heva," a

blight that he considered "the deadliest disease

known to mankind." Black Heva (which exists

only in Weston's mind) spreads by way of the

rotting flesh of cannibals' victims; Weston shot

the policemen because they were cannibals

preventing him from getting to the "ruby satellite,"

a device that is the key to halting Heva-breeding

cannibalism.

Evil on paper looks impressive (one of mankind's

most important words, invested with the dignity of

mystery and theology). But evil in actuality, when

it touches down on earth like a tornado for a

moment--as it did in Weston's visit to the Capitol,

or last week in Littleton--may have a style so

tacky, so moronic or so indelibly crazy that it

gives off a radiant tabloid weirdness. This almost

novelistic sheen of the loony makes the tragedies

curiously hard to evaluate. The evil effect is

evident--innocent blood everywhere; the cause, in

the case of Littleton anyway, remains obscure.

Evil is, after all, a mystery. The uniqueness of

individual evils owes something to chaos theory.

Perhaps we should not try to explain something

like the shootings but should sit very still, and

pray, and await the arrival of clarity.

Nah. We all begin chattering at once: American

society in the late '90s is a busy chat room set

up for just this kind of thing (Oklahoma City,

O.J.), with noisy experts on tap, interrupting one

another from different quadrants of the screen.

We round up the usual suspects--in the current

case, our cretinous popular culture; the Internet,

with its rancid cul-de-sacs; violent movies; idiot

television; vicious rap; ubiquitous sex. One high

school counselor cast a wide net on MSNBC:

"It's all those things, ekcedra, ekcedra, ekcedra."

The "ekcedra" includes adolescence itself, a form

of temporary insanity that in America is rendered

even crazier by all of the above.

But the massacre in Colorado did raise a serious

issue, yet again: gun control. Newspapers all

over the world published sanctimonious editorials

about the "American gun culture." The National

Rifle Association went on sensitivity alert; in a

rare moment of self-effacement it canceled the

festive public events and gun show planned

around its annual meeting, but not the meeting

itself, which by coincidence is scheduled for this

week in Denver.

The anti-gun forces took some energy from public

outrage over the shootings. California's assembly

approved a bill designed to limit handgun sales.

The gun lobby in Colorado had been expecting to

get passage of three bills (to loosen restrictions

on concealed-weapons permits, to ban local

lawsuits against manufacturers and to pre-empt

local ordinances on firearms). State legislators

quickly withdrew two of them, and Governor Bill

Owens promised to veto the third. Earlier in April,

Missouri voters defeated a referendum to lift a

constitutional ban on concealed weapons. So far

this year, New Mexico, Kansas and Nebraska

have defeated bills that would allow concealed

weapons. The struggle goes on, state by state.

We may be witnessing the beginning of one of

those tectonic shifts in our culture and morality:

the terror haunting the gun industry is the

precedent of tobacco. At some point in the last

couple of generations, smoking became

disreputable in American life--a sort of moral

consensus formed. If juries were to start

awarding damages to cities, or to individual

gunshot victims, extracting millions from gun

manufacturers, or at least forcing them to mount

expensive defenses in hundreds of suits, then it

is possible that the N.R.A. and other defenders of

the gun might abandon their cold-dead-hand

absolutism and begin to compromise a little. At

least one Brooklyn jury has already issued a

warning: last February it ordered three gun

companies to pay a young gunshot victim

$500,000 after finding that they had engaged in

the "negligent distribution" of their product.

If N.R.A. president Charlton Heston had a cannier

sense of public relations, he would knock himself

out campaigning to stop the sale of

semiautomatic weapons, ban armor-piercing

bullets and do all possible to keep firearms away

from criminals, children and psychotics. He

would legitimize his own case by pre-empting the

best ideas of the other side.

I live on a farm and own four long guns. I learned

to shoot when I was 10 years old, under the

tutelage of the N.R.A. It was not a flawless

education: when I was 13, I nearly blew a friend's

head off, by accident, with his father's .38

revolver. (I was lucky enough to be permitted to

learn a lesson the hard way; my friend was plain

lucky.) I find that I sympathize with both the gun

culture and the anti-gun culture. I do wish the gun

culture were a lot more intelligent. END

MAY 3, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 17

Bang, You're Dead

Revenge fantasies are proliferating in

movies and on TV. But should they

be blamed for Littleton?

BY RICHARD CORLISS

The young and the

older always eye one

another across a

gaping chasm. Gray

heads shake in

perplexity, even in a

week of mourning,

even over the mildest

expressions of teen

taste. Fashion, for

example. Here are

these nice kids from

suburban Denver,

heroically

documenting the

tragedy for TV, and they all seem to belong to

the Church of Wearing Your Cap Backward. A

day later, as the teens grieve en masse, oldsters

ask, "When we were kids, would we have worn

sweats and jeans to a memorial service for our

friends?" And of course the trench-coat killers

had their own distinctive clothing: Johnny Cash

by way of Quentin Tarantino. Should we blame

the Columbine massacre on haberdashery?

No, but many Americans want to pin the blame

for this and other agonizing splatter fests on pop

culture. Adults look at the revenge fantasies their

kids see in the 'plexes, listen (finally) to the more

extreme music, glance over their kids' shoulders

at Druid websites and think, "Seems repulsive to

me. Maybe pop culture pulled the trigger."

Who wouldn't want to blame self-proclaimed

Antichrist superstar Marilyn Manson? Listen to

Lunchbox, and get the creeps: "The big bully try

to stick his finger in my chest/ Try to tell me, tell

me he's the best/ But I don't really give a good

goddamn cause/ I got my lunchbox and I'm

armed real well.../ Next motherf_____ gonna get

my metal/... Pow pow pow." Not quite Stardust.

Sift through teen movies of the past 10 years,

and you could create a hindsight game plan for

Littleton. Peruse Heathers (1989), in which a

charming sociopath engineers the death of jocks

and princesses. Study carefully, as one of the

Columbine murderers reportedly did, Natural Born

Killers (1994), in which two crazy kids cut a

carnage swath through the Southwest as the

media ferociously dog their trail. Sample The

Basketball Diaries (1995), in which druggy high

schooler Leonardo DiCaprio daydreams of

strutting into his homeroom in a long black coat

and gunning down his hated teacher and half the

kids. The Rage: Carrie 2 (now in theaters) has

jocks viciously taunting outsiders until one girl

kills herself by jumping off the high school roof

and another wreaks righteous revenge by using

her telekinetic powers to pulverize a couple

dozen kids.

Grownups can act out revenge fantasies too. In

Payback, Mel Gibson dishes it out (pulls a ring

out of a punk's nose, shoots his rival's face off

through a pillow) and takes it (gets punched,

switch-bladed, shot and, ick, toe-hammered).

The Matrix, the first 1999 film to hit $100 million

at the box office, has more kung fu than gun fu

but still brandishes an arsenal of firepower in its

tale of outsiders against the Internet droids.

In Littleton's wake, the culture industry has gone

cautious. CBS pulled an episode of Promised

Land because of a plot about a shooting in front

of a Denver school. The WB has postponed a

Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode with a

schoolyard-massacre motif. Movie-studio

honchos, who furiously resist labeling some

serious adult films FOR ADULTS ONLY, went

mum last week when asked to comment on any

connection between violent movies and violent

teen behavior. That leaves us to explain things.

Revenge dramas are as old as Medea (she tore

her sons to pieces), as hallowed as Hamlet

(seven murders), as familiar as The Godfather.

High drama is about the conflict between shades

of good and evil, often within the same person.

But it's easier to dream up a scenario of slavering

evil and imperishable good. This is the moral and

commercial equation of melodrama: the greater

the outrage suffered, the greater the justification

for revenge. You grind me down at first; I grind

you up at last. This time it's personal.

Fifty years ago, movies were homogenous,

meant to appeal to the whole family. Now pop

culture has been Balkanized; it is full of niches,

with different groups watching and playing their

own things. And big movies, the ones that grab

$20 million on their first weekend, are guy stuff.

Young males consume violent movies, in part, for

the same reason they groove to outlaw music:

because their parents can't understand it--or

stand it. To kids, an R rating for violence is like

the Parental Advisory on CDs: a Good

Housebreaking Seal of Approval.

The cultural gap, though, is not just between old

and young. It is between the haves and the

self-perceived have-nots of teen America. Recent

teen films, whether romance or horror, are really

about class warfare. In each movie, the cafeteria

is like a tiny former Yugoslavia, with each clique

its own faction: the Serbian jocks, Bosnian

bikers, Kosovar rebels, etc. And the horror

movies are a microcosm of ethnic cleansing.

Movies may glamorize mayhem while serving as

a fantasy safety valve. A steady diet of

megaviolence may coarsen the young

psyche--but some films may instruct it. Heathers

and Natural Born Killers are crystal-clear satires

on psychopathy, and The Basketball Diaries is a

mordant portrait of drug addiction. Payback is a

grimly synoptic parody of all gangster films. In

three weeks, 15 million people have seen The

Matrix and not gone berserk. And Carrie 2 is a

crappy remake of a 1976 hit that led to no

murders.
 
 

Flash: movies don't kill people. Guns kill people.

"What's more troubling," asks Steve Tisch,

producer of Forrest Gump and American History

X, "a kid with a sawed-off shotgun or a kid with a

cassette of The Basketball Diaries? It's not just

movies. Lots of other wires have to short before a

kid goes out and does something like this. It's a

piece of a much bigger, more complex puzzle."

Some images in recent films are both repellent

and (the tricky part) exciting. Some song lyrics

express a rage that's not easy to take as irony.

And, yes, a movie or song or TV show may

inspire some sick twist to earn satanic stardom

with a gun. But most kids deserve the respect

their parents wanted when they were kids: to be

able to consume bits of pop culture and decide

on their own whether it's poetry, entertainment or

junk.

There is a lapse in parental logic that goes from

"I don't get it" to "It must be evil," and from that to

"It makes kids evil." Today, moms and dads

gaze at the withdrawn souls across the

kitchen-table chasm. They see what their kids

wear; they may know what their kids see. But, in

another Manson lyric, they "fail to see the

anguish in my eyes." Parents should try looking

into their kids' eyes. If they do, and do more,

they might even "see the tragic/ Turnin' into

magic."

--WITH REPORTING BY DAVID E. THIGPEN/NEW YORK

Digital Dungeons

Gory fantasy beckons to kids from

websites and video games. It can be

playful. But often it's hateful

BY CHRIS TAYLOR

It's late 1998--long before the phrase Columbine

school shooting enters your lexicon--and you're a

researcher at a hate-group-monitoring center.

Your job is to trawl the Web, surf literally

thousands of "anarchy" links and make a note of

the really nasty ones. One day you stumble

across a high school student's website that

contains a lot of hateful teen posturing and some

plug-ins for a best-selling violent computer game.

Do you bookmark it?

The answer is no--at least, not for researchers at

the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles,

who came across Eric Harris' home page on

America Online some six months ago but didn't

include it on their CD-ROM directory of hate

sites. "It didn't have explicit threats against any

individual or institution," explains the center's

associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper. "We

see very, very ominous websites regularly--by the

hundreds."

AOL yanked Harris' site within hours of last

week's shooting, preserving its contents for an

FBI investigation. But copies were already

circulating across cyberspace--along with a few

sick hoaxes--and their contents made many folks

eager to blame the Internet for this tragedy.

Others pointed to violent video games,

particularly Doom and Quake, Harris' favorites. In

these seminal works, players wander through

claustrophobic corridors in a terrifyingly real

first-person perspective, blasting the guts out of

their enemies with a blistering array of weaponry.

"You can actually set the gore level on some of

[these games]," notes Jeff Inman, a specialist in

youth intervention in Cobb County, Ga. "How

much blood do you want to see splattered? It's

sickening. It gives kids a lack of respect for life."

Even more ominous is when the games go

beyond serving up generic gore and start

trafficking in fantasies of bias crimes. There are

video games out there that make Doom look like

an art-house flick. For example, white

supremacists can stage virtual lynchings with a

game called Hang Leroy, clandestinely available

on Klan sites. Racist versions of Doom also

exist, with a plug-in that changes the color of the

victims. "Hate is available in many flavors on the

Internet," says Raymond Franklin, a Maryland

police executive and publisher of the Hate

Directory. He says that neo-Nazis could take

advantage of what was until recently a largely

young white male audience online--a fertile

recruiting ground. Rabbi Cooper too is worried

about such groups' having "unassailable full-time

access to America's young people in the most

powerful cultural medium ever created."

And yet there is no way of calculating how much

of a role was played by propaganda and video

games in Harris and Dylan Klebold's killing

spree. Quake and its ilk may have helped

desensitize a generation--but you're blasting

cyborgs, not classmates, and you're certainly not

constructing pipe bombs. Harris' online essay on

how to make these devices suggests that he

made most of his discoveries through trial and

error, not on the Net. The computer age may be

giving kids a new outlet for their dark fantasies,

but that hardly means it is turning them into

killers.

--WITH REPORTING BY DAVID NORDAN/ATLANTA,

ELAINE SHANNON/WASHINGTON AND JAMES

WILLWERTH/LOS ANGELES

What Politicians Can't

Do

They chose soul searching over easy

fixes. But should they do the

parenting?

BY ANDREW FERGUSON

There are moments when politics seems a grand

calling, but the eruption of evil among

schoolchildren isn't one of them, and so a

curious and altogether appropriate quiet settled

over American politicians in the wake of the

nightmare at Columbine High. Not absolute

silence, mind you--there's only so much we can

expect of our politicians--but quiet: a kind of

humility that suggested they knew they had

come up against the limits of their trade.

The response of Richard Gephardt was typical.

As ranking Democrat in the House of

Representatives, Gephardt felt compelled to

release a statement, but there was about his

words something wan and attenuated.

"Ultimately," he said, "the answer will not be

found in state legislatures or in the halls of

Congress. The answer lies somewhere in the

hopelessness and the hateful hearts of the

children who have lost their way." Gephardt is an

activist liberal, a voluptuary of governmental

solutions, so his concession carries an

interesting significance. You saw it from the

political right too. "There's not a magic wand you

can wave," said Gary Bauer, a conservative

activist who coincidentally launched his

presidential campaign the day after the Littleton

murders. Even Pat Buchanan, after firing off a few

half-hearted rounds at the "poison of our popular

culture," could offer little more than a shake of

the head. "There was something sick and wrong

inside those boys," he said. "I don't know how to

stop it."

As always, it was President Clinton, the most

finely tuned politician of the age and the bully

pulpit's current occupant, who best captured the

prevailing political tone. From global warming to

lagging test scores, from car safety seats to

unmet alimony payments, the President is quick

to launch a program for any problem, no matter

how obscure, with three points or five points or

seven--the more points the better. And, yes, he

did urge school boards to apply for federal grants

that would put armed police officers in schools.

But in the face of the carnage, he mostly dropped

the wonkery and assumed the role of National

Grief Counselor. "It is very important to explain to

children, all over America, what has happened,"

he said, "and to reassure our own children that

they are safe." If anyone thought it odd that the

government's chief executive officer was advising

parents on what to whisper to their children as

they tucked them in at night, nobody said so.

Under the circumstances, the President's words

seemed tasteful and well chosen.

This is something new in American politics, but it

didn't start with Littleton. It has been in train for

many months or maybe longer, and it crosses

party lines. A bipartisan consensus--that holy

grail of establishmentarians everywhere--has

been reached that politicians can no longer

concern themselves merely, even primarily, with

the workaday stuff of politics: marginal tax rates,

crime control, defense expenditures,

environmental and labor laws, the international

balance of power. Our politicians are

transcending politics. They are turning their

attention, for better or for worse, to matters of the

human heart.

Consider, if you can force yourself to do so 19

months before the election, the current roster of

presidential candidates. When they lapse into

the hortatory mode, their language is drawn more

often from the lexicon of pop psychology than

from traditional politics. In announcing his

candidacy, Dan Quayle said, "You know, even

though we are No. 1, we know that something is

missing. Something fundamentally isn't quite

there." And where is there? Bill Bradley has an

answer: "For starters we can look deeper into the

soul of America," he said last week, "to peel

back the layers of denial and defense" that

obscure our national dialogue. And Republican

candidate John Kasich too speaks frankly of

"saving the soul of America."

This is more than platitude, or, more accurately,

it is a new kind of platitude. It represents at once

a new humility and a new hubris on the part of

pols: a recognition on the one hand that some

difficulties are not susceptible to the manipulation

of public policy and, on the other, a determination

that they will come to our rescue anyway. With

so much going so right in the U.S.--with the

creation of fabulous wealth, with falling rates of

divorce and crime and abortion--politicians are

aching to stay in the game. You are well advised

not to dwell on the many contradictions--how it

is, for example, that politicians who for years

promised to keep government out of our

bedrooms now see fit to invite their way into our

souls. They have cast themselves as empaths;

soul fixing is their job.

Nearly 25 years ago, Jimmy Carter got elected

by promising to create a government as good and

decent as the American people. Our current

candidates seem to be promising the reverse: to

make the American people as good and decent

as the political class that tries to lead them. I am

not sure this is an improvement. But politics is a

market-tested enterprise, and politicians respond

to the demands of their consumers. Their bet is

that America today wants a Therapist in Chief.

Another horror like Littleton, and they may be

right. END

In Sorrow And Disbelief

On March 4, Eric Harris and Dylan

Klebold sat for a class picture. On April

17, they both went to the prom. What

they did next left their school...

BY NANCY GIBBS
 
 

SPRING SNOW: "Before, it was like a dream, like a movie,"

said one survivor after a memorial service. "Now, I'm angry"
 
 
 
 

High school is a haunted house in April, when

seniors act up because the end is near. Even those

who hate school sometimes cling to the devil they

know. And for the kids who love it, the goodbyes

are hard to think about. Two weeks ago, Sara

Martin was chosen to be a graduation speaker for

Columbine High, and she was struggling. She

wanted to write about all the people she loved, in

the choir and the Bible club and even the ones who

turn left out of the right-hand lane in the parking lot.

"I have loved oysters at 7 in the morning in the

teachers' lounge with Mme. Lutz and the halls that

smelled like rotting Easter eggs," she wrote. "I have

loved fire drills and Tai Chi on the lawn with Mr.

Kritzer's philosophy class. I have loved you and our

moments of folly together... We're all looking for

passion, for something, anything, in our lives." And

she wondered how to capture the spirit, "the

humanity and integrity that walk the halls of our

very own Columbine."

She was in the choir room last Tuesday when

something very different was walking the halls. By

the end of that gruesome day, by the time 15

people had died, her friends among them, she had

her yearbook of humanity and integrity signed in

blood. As Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris prowled the

school with their guns and bombs, this is what the

children did: a boy draped himself over his sister

and her friend, so that he would be the one shot. A

boy with 10 bullet wounds in his leg picked up an

explosive that landed by him and hurled it away

from the other wounded kids. Others didn't want to

leave their dying teacher when the SWAT team

finally came: Can't we carry him out on a folded-up

table? A girl was asked by the gunman if she

believed in God, knowing full well the safe answer.

"There is a God," she said quietly, "and you need

to follow along God's path." The shooter looked

down at her. "There is no God," he said, and he

shot her in the head.

Before we inventory the evil we cannot fathom,

consider the reflexes at work among these happy,

lucky kids, born to a generation that is thought to

know nothing about sacrifice. They had no way of

knowing what would be asked of them, what they

were capable of. Among the kids who died and the

ones who were prepared to die were the students

who stayed behind to open a door, or save a friend,

or build an escape route or barricade a closet or

guide the descending SWAT teams into the

darkness.

The story of the slaughter at Columbine High

School opened a sad national conversation about

what turned two boys' souls into poison. It promises

to be a long, hard talk, in public and in private,

about why smart, privileged kids rot inside. Do we

blame the parents, blame the savage music they

listened to, blame the ease of stockpiling an

arsenal, blame the chemistry of cruelty and cliques

that has always been a part of high school life but

has never been so deadly? Among the many things

that did not survive the week was the hymn all

parents unconsciously sing as they send their

children out in the morning, past the headlines, to

their schools: It can't happen here, Lord, no, it

could never happen here.

Sure it can. It can even happen in Littleton, a town

of 35,000 near the dusty-tan foothills of the

Rockies, just southwest of Denver. It was once a

small prairie town of gold rushers and traders,

where the biggest scare was getting hit by a prairie

dog. Now it's a stretched finger of the big city, with

aspiring families who don't lock their doors,

enclaves with names like Coventry and Raccoon

Creek and Bel Flower, scrubland turned into golf

courses, houses than run anywhere from $75,000

to $5 million or so. There's an arch over a hallway in

the high school engraved with a motto: "The finest

kids in America pass through these halls."

The day began with an omen. On the classroom

video monitors, the "phrase of the day" was not

exactly Ralph Waldo Emerson. Instead, noticed a

student, it was something to the effect, "You don't

want to be here." Below that was the date, not

spelled out April 20, as was the custom, but written

4/20 in bold type, a pulsing message easily

decoded. "It's weed-smoking day," one student

said, referring to the shorthand for going out and

getting stoned: marijuana is supposed to contain

420 different chemicals: the Los Angeles police

department's code for a drug bust is 420.

And it was also, as we now know too well, Adolf

Hitler's birthday. In the handwritten diary of one of

the suspects, the anniversary, say the police, was

clearly marked as a time to "rock and roll." Some

members of Harris' and Klebold's clique, tagged in

derision a few years before as the Trench Coat

Mafia, had embraced enough Nazi mythology to

spook their classmates. They reportedly wore

swastikas on black shirts, spoke German in the

halls, re-enacted World War II battles, played the

most vicious video games, talked about whom they

hated, whom they would like to kill. Harris and

Klebold liked to bowl: when Harris made a good

shot, he would throw his arm up, "Heil Hitler!"

But they were not really dangerous, right? Every

school has its rebels, its Goths in black nail polish

and lipstick, its stoners and deadbeats,

sometimes, as in this case, the very brightest

techie kids who found solidarity in exclusion. "We

hung out. We listened to music," says Alejandra

Marsh, 16. "We went over to someone's house and

watched cartoons. We loved Pinky and the Brain

and Animaniacs." Fellow students described them

as discarded, unwanted "stereotype geeks," who,

like the jocks and preppies, had their own table in

the cafeteria, their group picture in the yearbook

with the caption, "'Who says we're different?

Insanity's healthy. Stay alive, stay different, stay

crazy."

"They do it for the attention," says Greg

Montgomery, 19. "It's kind of like a rivalry with us,"

pipes in hockey player Chip Dunleavy, 17. "They

hate us because we're like the social elite of the

school."

That rivalry had been smoldering for months. Some

students say even the teachers picked on the

Trench Coats, blaming them for things they hadn't

done and letting the jocks get away with anything

because they were the crown princes. One athlete

in particular liked to taunt them. "Dirtbag," he'd say,

or maybe, "Nice dress." Others called them

"faggots," inbreeds, harassing them to the point of

throwing rocks and bottles at them from moving

cars. "You have to understand that there were as

many lies, rumors and intrigue as in Washington

this past year," says Marsh. "It's almost the

definition of a teenager to be cruel to those who are

not like you. They don't like to admit it," she says,

but "the ones who are the worst at spreading

rumors and lies would be the jocks and the

cheerleaders. There was one rumor we went around

killing small animals. Another rumor that we had

orgies."

Some of the Trench Coats tried to ignore the

hazing, but some snarled back, and one reportedly

flashed a shotgun at his abusers in the park. They

made a video for class, a tale of kids in trench

coats hunting down their enemies with shotguns.

The graffiti in the boys' bathroom warned:

COLUMBINE WILL EXPLODE ONE DAY. KILL ALL

ATHLETES. ALL JOCKS MUST DIE.

It was all out in the open, all the needles and

threats, but in a school of nearly 2,000 busy,

ambitious kids, that quiet hissing sound was just

background noise, drowned out by the gossip about

who went to the prom with whom on Saturday night;

the humming of the seniors' theme song, The Way

You Look Tonight; and finally the normal sounds of

a Tuesday morning, when the biology class was

worrying about its test on the digestive system, the

choir was rehearsing for its afternoon concert and it

was warm enough outside to wear shorts, at last.

It was Free Cookie Day in the cafeteria, and there

were hundreds of students draped around the tables

and waiting in lines at the 11:30 lunch hour when

the sounds of the firing erupted outside. Students

saw two boys in trench coats and masks firing at

kids; one tossed something up onto the roof of the

school, and it exploded in a flash. Some kids

thought it was the long-awaited senior prank; they

had been expecting balloons filled with shaving

cream. Surely those are firecrackers, they thought.

Surely those guns are fake. Is the blood fake? Can

a fake bomb make walls shake? Then they were

screaming and running. One boy could feel the rush

of a bullet past his head.

"Get down!" the janitor yelled. "Get under a table!"

They dove for cover, then began crawling--under

furniture, over backpacks, slithering toward the

stairs. Then they ran as the shots came again. "We

heard boom after boom," says sophomore Jody

Clouse. "The floor was shaking from the

explosions." Bullets clanged as they bounced off

metal lockers. Some tried to run upstairs, to the

safety of the library. But there was smoke

everywhere, the fire alarms had gone off, and the

sprinkler system was turning the school into a

blinding, misty jungle. So they retreated back

downstairs, away from the library, which, by the

time the mayhem ended, had turned into a tomb.

Cafeteria worker Karen Nielsen had rushed to help

the bleeding students when she spotted the

shooters. As she heard the shots blowing through

the room, she shoved the kids into a bathroom. She

pulled a phone along with her to call the police. But

then she worried, "They'll see the cord. And then

we'll be trapped."

Sheriff's deputy Neil Gardner, posted at the school

for security, heard the shots and ran toward the

cafeteria. When he spotted one gunman, he

exchanged fire, then ducked for cover and called for

backup. By this time the 911 calls were already

coming in, and the SWAT cars were on the scene

within 20 minutes. But the bombs were still going

off, and the officers had no idea how many shooters

there were--or which ones were killers and which

were targets. "They didn't want to go in there with

guns blazing," says Cathy Scott, mother of two

students who escaped, "and kill the wrong kids."

And so the police hunkered down, as the bombs

kept exploding all around.

Upstairs in the science wing, science teacher

Dick Will thought, "There go those chemistry

people blowing things up again." But when the

fire alarm rang, Will knew it was more than

students at work. A group of his kids went down

the hall to investigate and came back yelling and

screaming, "They're shooting!" He herded his

charges back to the corner of the room, shut off

the lights and started turning over chairs and

desks and piling them up against the doors.

Other teachers had the same instincts. Business

teacher Dave Sanders was in the faculty lounge

when he heard the trouble, raced toward the

cafeteria and went to war. "He screamed for us to

get down and shut up," says freshman Kathy

Carlston. "We crawled on the floor and made it to

the stairs." When the firing began again, they got

up and started to run. Sanders, on the ground,

propped himself on his elbows, directing kids to

safety as the killers moved in. Too terrified to

look back, Kathy never saw the shooters, but

she could tell they were close, very close. She

stands over 6 ft.; she knew she made a

promising target. So while other kids raced down

a first-floor hallway, she leaped up the stairs

toward the second floor. She tried the door to one

science room, but it was already locked.

Furiously she worked her way down the hall,

finally to Science Room 3, into which two

teachers were herding other kids.

The class had been taking a long, nasty biology

test when the explosions came. Lexis

Coffey-Berg, 16, saw Sanders running toward

them, saw him shot twice in the back, with a jolt

and spasm. "You could see the impact," she

says. "You could see it go through his body. He

was spitting up blood." He stumbled into the

room, blood streaming from his chest, and

collapsed over the desk, knocking out his teeth.

A teacher got the paramedics on the phone, and

the classroom turned into a trauma ward. Aaron

Hancey, a junior, had had some first-aid training,

and the paramedics tried to talk the kids through

the basic lifesaving treatment. Boys stripped off

their shirts to make pillows for Sanders' head and

bandages for the bloody holes in his torso. They

found some emergency blankets stashed with

the fire gear in that room and wrapped him up as

his temperature started to fall. They could tell

they were losing him.

"I can't breathe," he murmured. "I've got to go."

But they kept talking to him, pulled his wallet out

of his pocket and held up the pictures of his

daughters. Tell us about them, they said. "He

was breathing and awake the whole time," says

Jody Clouse. "I'm sure the pain was great." They

made a sign with the dry-erase board and held it

up in the window for the rescuers to see: Help,

Bleeding To Death. As the students prayed,

Sanders every now and then managed to cough

and spit out some blood to clear his lungs. But

the time kept passing, and no one came. Said

Sanders: "I don't think I'm going to make it."

On the classroom TVs, the barricaded students

could see the SWAT teams assembling, the

news choppers hovering and eventually the

parents beginning to gather, as they and the rest

of the country watched the siege take hold of the

school. "[The police] didn't know where the

shooters were, or where the bombs were," says

Lexis, "so they couldn't get us right away." Her

friends began writing notes to their parents,

saying that they loved them, that they thought

they were going to die. Everyone was praying. "In

a world where there are so many religions," says

Lexis, "everyone was praying the same way."

One friend made a vow. "If I ever get out, I'm

going to be nice to my little brother."

Elsewhere up and down the halls, students

locked themselves in closets and classrooms,

also calling out on their cell phones. They called

police; they called parents; they called for

anyone who could come and help get them out.

Some could hear sounds of laughing in the

hallways, as the shooters prowled through the

smoke. They heard the jeering. "Oh, you f__ing

nerd. Tonight's a good night to die." Senior Nick

Foss and a friend ducked into a bathroom,

punched through a ceiling panel and shimmied

along the ventilation shaft. Suddenly one of the

vents broke, and Foss fell 15 ft. down onto a

table in the teachers' lounge. Somehow

uninjured, he picked himself up and sprinted out

a door to freedom as the shooting continued

behind him. "They were shooting everywhere; it

seemed like they wanted to kill everything in

sight," he says. "I've never been so frightened in

my life. It was run for your life or die."

His twin brother Adam, meanwhile, was in trouble

down the hall. He had been in choir practice,

preparing for a concert that afternoon at an

elementary school. When the shooting started,

Adam and about 60 others crammed into the

choir-room office as the explosions seemed to

come closer and closer. They pushed a filing

cabinet and two upended desks against the door.

In the hot, stagnant air, several kids began to gag

and cough. Shhh, quiet, the others said, fearing

any sound would lure the killers, who for all they

knew were right outside. The choir room lay near

the top of the stairs, close to where the carnage

began, and very close to the library where it

would finally end.
 
 

Someone in the choir room whispered, "Who's

religious? Anybody in here religious?" The

huddled students started to pray, very, very

quietly. "I was terrified on the outside," says

Craig Nason, a junior. "But on the inside, God

gave me peace. I felt like many others outside

the school were praying for us." The walls of the

office kept shuddering with each shot and

explosion, for an agonizing 20 minutes or so.

Then things fell quiet, and they waited. When

they reached the police by phone, pleading for

rescue, they were told that the police had to

move slowly because of possible booby traps.

Some students with asthma started having

trouble breathing, so others climbed up and

pulled out some ceiling tiles, then lifted the

students up to where the air was fresher. The

quiet was cut when the office phone rang. It was

the elementary school calling, wondering why the

concert was being delayed.

Many of the kids who made it out the exits ran

into the parking lots. Police had heard rumors

that the gunmen were exchanging clothes with

the students, so everyone had to be checked,

patted down, in order for the cops to be sure

these were the victims escaping and not the

killers. Neighbors arrived with blankets, bandages

and gauze and brought kids into their homes. A

nurse passing through the area found herself

doing triage on a front lawn. The ambulances

began shuttling the wounded--the ones who had

been able to get out of the building on their own

power--to area hospitals. Senior SWAT team

agent Donn Kraemer spotted a boy in a window,

limp, bleeding, desperate to get out. "He looked

at us but was oblivious," Kraemer said. "He was

going to come out headfirst." Kraemer and

another agent grabbed him and pulled him to

safety. The boy, with gunshot wounds in the

head and foot, was so much in shock that he

could barely say his name. Rick or Rich, they

thought he said. His name was Patrick Ireland.

He had taken two bullets to the head. Last week

the 17-year-old was in serious condition, suffering

from impaired speech and damaged motor skills

to his right side.

Among the countless offers of help that came in

during the siege was one the police did not

accept. Well before any potential suspects had

been named publicly, Klebold's father contacted

police, saying he thought his son might be

involved and offering to help negotiate a

surrender. The SWAT team leaders decided they

didn't think he could be of any use.

All the while the killers were still inside, going

about their business. And in the end, they did

their deadliest work in the school's quiet place,

the best place to find people in a school when

finals are looming and everyone worries about

getting term papers done on time.

A teacher, identified by police only as Peggy,

made it into the library a few steps ahead of the

killers. First she called the police. Then, over the

phone, she could be overheard desperately trying

to warn the kids. "There's a guy with a gun!" she

yelled, bleeding. "Kids, under the table! Kids,

stay on the floor! Oh, God. Oh, God--kids, just

stay down!" At first, Craig Scott thought it was all

a prank, maybe the teacher was in on it. But the

noise was real, and the fear was real, and he

ducked under a table with his friend Matt Kechter

and one of Columbine's few black students, a

senior named Isaiah Shoels. And they heard the

gunmen come in.

They were laughing, excited. "Who's next?" they

said, "Who's ready to die?" The two moved

through the room, calling out: "All the jocks

stand up. We're going to kill every one of you."

Seth Houy had come to the library to hang out

with his sister and a friend; they ducked under a

table and he lay on top of them so he would be

the one to be hit. "Honestly, I think that God

made us invisible," he told the Denver Post. "We

prayed the hardest we'd ever prayed, and God

put an invisible shield around us."

The killers went round the room, asking people

why they should let them live. Students heard

one girl pleading for her life, then a shot, and

quiet. They told wounded kids to quit crying; it

will all be over soon, you'll all be dead. They

approached another girl, cowering under a table,

yelled "Peekaboo!" and shot her in the neck.

Anyone who cried or moaned was shot again.

The murderers were utterly without pity. Survivors

said they treated it like a video game. "We've

waited to do this a long time," they said. At one

point one of the gunmen recognized a student

and said, "Oh, I know you--you can go." And

then, "We're out of ammo.. gotta reload. We'll

come back to get you three."

Craig took off his white baseball hat and hid it.

When the killers walked by, they saw Isaiah and

called him a "nigger." He pleaded with them not

to shoot, just let him go home, he wanted his

mom, and they pulled the trigger. Then they shot

Matt. Craig, covered in his friends' blood, lay

very, very still. As he told Katie Couric two

mornings later, in an account almost unbearable

to watch, Craig began praying for courage. "God

told me to get out of there," he said. So he got

up and started to run, yelling to others to come

with him. One girl pleaded for help. "She had a

chunk of her shoulder blown off with a shotgun,"

Craig said. "And I helped her get out. She was

bleeding all over the place, and her--her bone was

showing." They got out of the library, out to an

exit, down to the cops, where Craig told them

what the shooters looked like, where they were.

And then he asked the other kids if they had any

brothers or sisters in the school, and they started

praying for them. As the minutes passed, "All

these people that I was praying for, 30 minutes

later, their brothers and sisters were showing

up." And he said to the others, "See, I told you, I

told you prayer worked. I told you your sister was

going to come out of this, I said--and they

thanked me. And they kept praying for my

sister." But something told him that all was not

right for Rachel. Only the next morning did he

learn, officially, that she had died. But he already

knew.

Meanwhile, in the science room, Mr. Sanders

was dying. Students kept giving the police

specific directions to the room, but there was so

much confusion, and the time just kept passing.

Via phone, Sanders was told it would be another

10 to 15 minutes before help would arrive. "It's

too long," he responded. "Tell my girls that I love

them...my wife..."

In all it was 3 1/2 hours before the second-floor

class was rescued. Students asked if they could

please help carry Sanders out on a table. No,

said the SWAT team, and they herded the

students through the halls, now filled with 6 in. of

water from the sprinklers, past the bodies and

the blood sprayed everywhere. In the cafeteria

the half-eaten lunches lay soaking on the tables.

"Everything was left in place," says Lexis, "like it

was a normal day." She recalls the police yelling,

"If any of you take your hands away from your

head, we're going to pull you away immediately.

Get up and put your hands on your head. Run!

RUN!"

It was too late for Sanders. Gradually his

breathing weakened, his face turned blue and

pale. He died just minutes after paramedics

reached him. "The wait for help was so long,"

says Jody Clouse. "Everything that happened

just didn't seem real."

All the while, the terrified parents were watching

it unfold in real time. They streamed toward the

campus as the news spread, some abandoning

their cars as they came. They approached

anyone who looked official, begging for news of

their children. Why were the police waiting so

long? Their kids were in there, some were

running out in gushes, but so many were still

missing. Where are they? Who is helping them?

In time the parents were told that everyone would

be reunited at nearby Leawood Elementary

School, and so the vigil moved there. The parents

waited as the yellow buses pulled in one at a

time, dispensing 40 or so kids into joyful

reunions with family and friends, like some kind

of awful lottery.

There were so many lists circulating, like the

dreaded lists of the war dead, except these were

survivor lists, and parents were desperate to see,

hear anything, called out names, searched for

their kids' friends to find out if they knew

anything. They called homes, called hospitals,

called anywhere they could think. Some of the

kids who fled the school early on had gone into

hiding at their friends' houses, in such shock that

it was hours before they made contact with their

parents.

"I'm so very happy," said Cathy Scott, mother of

two, "and so very sad. My kids aren't going back

to school anytime soon."

Bruce Beck searched each face coming out,

looking for his stepdaughter Lauren Townsend.

"You see all the kids run out of the building," he

told the Rocky Mountain News. "You're just sure

one of the kids is going to be yours." Lauren's

mother waited by the phone, waiting for word.

And it didn't come. As the afternoon turned to

evening, the crowd finally became smaller and

more desperate. At one point there were far more

pastors and counselors than parents left. Over a

basketball hoop was a pink sign--PRAYER

CORNER: PLEASE JOIN US. Though by this

time the police had secured the high school,

officials from the sheriff's office explained that

there were bombs stashed among the bodies and

it was too dangerous to go in and move them.

And then they asked parents to come back in

the morning--with dental records. Two mothers

fled the building and threw up outside.

It took hours to catalog the carnage. "There were

SWAT team people who were in Vietnam," said

district attorney Dave Thomas, "who were crying

and weeping over what they saw." But only on

Thursday did officials truly appreciate the level of

mayhem the killers had in mind. In the school

kitchen, in a duffel bag, they found the sinister

parcel containing a propane tank, gasoline can

and nails and BBs and glass that would have

taken dozens of lives in the busy cafeteria. The

killers, Sheriff John Stone said, "were going to

destroy the school."

Before they fired their last two shots into their

own heads, the killers fired off an estimated 900

rounds, using two sawed-off shotguns, a 9-mm

semiautomatic carbine and a TEC-DC 9

semiautomatic handgun. And as the smoke

cleared, police discovered more than 30 bombs

in all: several pipe bombs in the school and

others outside in cars in the parking lot, an

arsenal so large that suspicions immediately

arose about whether Harris and Klebold could

possibly have acted alone.

The hardest thing about the search for an

explanation was the growing fear there might not

be one. There would be lots of talk about the

venomous culture that these boys soaked in--but

many kids drink those waters without turning into

mass murderers. There would be talk of deep

family dysfunction, something in their past or

their present, but nothing in the first days of

archaeology turned up anything tidy that

explained something so massively wrong. These

were parents who came to all the Little League

and soccer games. They even came to practices.

Dylan Klebold was said to be the weaker spirit of

the two: quiet, reserved, looking for a leader,

which he found in Eric Harris when the Harrises

moved to Littleton from Plattsburgh, N.Y.

Klebold's father Thomas is a former geophysicist

who launched a mortgage-management business

from his home. His mother Susan worked with

blind and disabled kids at the local community

college. They lived in a modern wood-and-glass

home tucked under a stunning outcropping of red

rocks in an area called Deer Creek Canyon. On

the day before the shooting, neighbors of the

Harrises saw Klebold's black BMW parked

outside Eric's house. Harris' father Wayne was a

decorated Air Force pilot. One neighbor heard

one of them ask the other if he had a metal

baseball bat. From the garage came sounds of

hammering and breaking glass. "He was always

in there with the door closed," said a fifth-grader

who lived nearby. Police say it would be possible

to build 30 bombs in a single afternoon, with less

than $200 worth of materials, all easily found at

hardware and sporting-goods stores.

As for the recipes, those are even easier to find

for a kid with that much cyberskill. Harris'

personal website, since taken down by AOL,

detailed advice on building pipe bombs. "I will rig

up explosives all over town," he wrote. "I don't

care if I live or die." Elsewhere on the website he

writes that a pipe bomb is "the easiest and

deadliest way to kill a group of people," and he

offers advice on shrapnel: "You can use screws,

BBs, nails of all kinds..." According to an internal

information memo in the possession of district

attorney Thomas, Harris had spoken to a

psychiatrist sometime before the shooting, and

the doctor recommended that he begin taking

antidepressants. The doctor said Harris had

expressed anger about the world.

Klebold and Harris had charmed their way

through the legal system. They were convicted of

a felony in January 1998 after breaking into a van

and stealing about $400 worth of electronic

equipment. They entered a juvenile-court

rehabilitation program that allowed them to clear

their records by participating in

community-service programs and an

anger-management seminar. Last Feb. 3 both

were allowed to finish the program early, having

been such model participants. "Eric is a very

bright young man who is likely to succeed in

life," said the termination report on Harris. As for

Klebold, he too was "intelligent enough to make

any dream a reality, but he needs to understand

hard work is part of it."

If the professionals did not spot the warning

signs, neither did the people who saw the boys

every day. The owner of the pizza parlor where

they worked says they were model employees.

For all the talk of fierce racism, Harris was well

liked back in Plattsburgh, where his best friends,

according to the local Press-Republican, were

black and Asian. As for the neo-Nazi Klebold, his

great-grandfather was a prominent Jewish

philanthropist back in Ohio.

Yet the police disclosed that the handwritten

diary they had found was drenched in Nazi-philia:

phrases in German punctuating a year's worth of

meticulous planning for the attack on Hitler's

110th birthday. There were also annotated maps

of the school showing the best places to hide

and where and when the most students gathered.

Again and again, hatred for the jocks emerged in

the writings. Said Sheriff Stone: "They wanted to

do as much damage as they could possibly do,

destroy as many children as they could and go

out in flames." The remains of their preparations

were evident, he says: the barrel of a gun was

clearly visible on the dresser of one suspect

when investigators entered his room at home.

Whatever the threats and intentions, the killings

were, in the end, blindly indiscriminate. They

shot at the math whiz and the actress, the

wrestler, the debater, jocks, brains, band

members, freshmen, seniors. They shot at the

head football coach; they shot at the science

teacher. "They shot at everybody," says senior

Nick Zupancic, "including the preps, the jocks

and the people who wore Abercrombie & Fitch

clothes. But it would be hard to say they singled

them out, because everybody here looks like

that. I mean, we're in white suburbia. Our

school's wealthy. Go into the parking lot and see

the cars. These kids have money. But I never

thought they'd do this."

By the time the memorial services had been held

and the flowers piled up in the soft spring snow in

the parking lot, the recriminations were well

under way. How could parents not know their

garage was a bomb-making factory? How could a

school not know the hatred in its halls was more

than routine teenage alienation? Why had the

SWAT team members been so cautious when

people were trapped and bleeding to death?

What if their kids had been inside?

There was nothing the school could have done

differently, insisted Columbine's principal Frank

DeAngelis. "We could have had the National

Guard on alert, and it wouldn't have stopped

this," he said. Metal detectors would not have

stopped the rampage at the door, and he doesn't

think the killers stashed their arsenal ahead of

time, an argument that became harder to defend

when it was reported that as a member of the

audio-visual program, Harris may have had a key

to the school. Maybe it would help to search

routinely every car in the lot, the principal said,

but that "is just not practical." DeAngelis passed

the job back to students. "It's students'

responsibility to report even idle threats. They

must tell adults, and then it's our job to check

them out." So how could glaring omens like

Harris' website pages, on which he reportedly

threatened another kid's life, or his violent fantasy

stories and videos be missed? DeAngelis has no

answer.

In the meantime, the Columbine survivors are left

with their fear and grief. The grocery stores are

out of cellophane cones of flowers. Prom pictures

have become obituary shots. A bunch of kids

went out to dinner at Applebee's Thursday night.

Everyone stared. "They knew we were kids from

Columbine," says junior Scott Schulte. "No one

said anything. Then a waitress dropped a booster

chair. We all jumped."

Sara Martin has come to her own conclusions.

The graduation speaker now hopes she won't

have to speak at all. "When those guys walked

into the hallways in their trench coats, with their

guns and their bombs, they brought in fear and

hate and pushed out everything else--every ounce

of life."

In its place, students planted crosses: four pink

ones for the girls, nine blue ones for the

boys--and two black ones, set apart, for the

killers.

--REPORTED BY JULIE GRACE, S.C. GWYNNE, MAUREEN

HARRINGTON, DAVID S. JACKSON, JEFFREY SHAPIRO

AND RICHARD WOODBURY/LITTLETON

May 10

Portrait Of A Deadly Bond

One was a leader, the other a follower.

One prone to fits of venomous temper,

the other shy and awkward. TIME

investigates what led Eric Harris and

Dylan Klebold to turn Columbine High

School into a killing field

BY ERIC POOLEY/LITTLETON
 
 

REMEMBERING: The father of a victim destroyed the

memorials for the two killers last weekend
 
 
 
 

"You're not going to believe who's turning out to be

a nice guy at school," Brooks Brown told his

parents one evening in mid-April. They were at the

dinner table in their ranch-style house in Columbine

Knolls, a modest subdivision in Littleton, Colo., and

the tall, angular 18-year-old knew the comment

would stir up some dust. His mother and father,

Judy and Randy Brown, leaned forward and asked,

"Who?"

"Eric Harris."

Randy almost choked on his fork. "I can't believe

you're even talking to him after what he did." Judy

put a hand to her heart. "You could say any other

name at that high school and it would be O.K.," she

said. "But not that one."

Last year, Eric Harris had thrown a chunk of ice at

Brooks' car, cracking its windshield. Soon after, the

Browns had discovered the spewings on Harris'

website, geysers of hate like the one saying Harris

longed to "blow up and shoot everything I can. Feel

no remorse, no sense of shame...I don't care if I live

or die in the shootout, all I want to do is kill and

injure as many of you [expletive] as I can,

especially a few people. Like Brooks Brown." Harris

claimed to have the weaponry to carry out his threat

against Brown.

His website offered bomb-building instructions and

boasted that he and a friend, code-named "VoDka,"

had made four pipe bombs and detonated one

("Flipping thing was heart-pounding gut-wrenching

brain-twitching ground-moving insanely cool!"). And

if all that weren't enough, Brooks knew that

"VoDka" was his old best friend, Dylan Klebold,

who had become Harris' new best friend but had

tipped Brooks to the hateful website. Terrified, the

Browns searched their property for bombs and filed

complaints with the sheriff's department and

America Online, which was host of the site. They

say they got no response from either. (The sheriff's

department says it didn't pursue Harris because no

crime had been committed and the Browns wished

to remain anonymous.) But in April 1998, Harris

took his site offline, and life in the neighborhood

seemed to quiet down.

Now, a year later, Brown was sitting at dinner

telling his mother and father that Harris was a good

guy after all. Brown was taking philosophy and

creative-writing classes with Harris and Klebold,

and the three hung out together--bright, maladjusted

kids united in their intelligence and disdain for the

jock culture of Columbine High. "At dinner I made a

big case for Eric," Brown told TIME last week. "I

said he had grown up. He was a real scary kid last

year; everyone was afraid of him. But six months

ago we buried the hatchet, and I really thought he

had changed. I thought he was a new Eric."

Brown says he realized how wrong he was five days

later, when Harris and Klebold launched the

Columbine massacre, murdering 13 and wounding

23 before killing themselves in circumstances

(Double suicide? Murder-suicide?) that the

authorities have not yet clarified. Brown had been

spending a good deal of time with these deadly

friends, and he understands them as well as

anyone now alive. But he insists he never had a

clue to what they were up to. And though his

association with Harris and Klebold has drawn

suspicion--"I don't know what he is," says District

Attorney Dave Thomas, "and we are not ruling

anyone out"--the friendship may also have saved his

life. Brown chanced upon Harris in the school

parking lot just minutes before the shooting began.

Harris was pulling a duffel bag of materiel from his

car; Brown says he didn't know what was in it. He

mentioned a philosophy test Harris had missed that

morning. "Doesn't matter anymore," said Harris.

Brown says he didn't know what that meant--nor

what Harris was planning when he told Brown to get

away from the school, saying, "Brooks, I like you.

Now get out of here. Go home." Others who know

Harris believe sentiment had nothing to do with

Harris' decision to spare Brown. They think Brown

was simply too far away from the cafeteria for Harris

to kill, because doing so would have given those

inside a chance to get away, spoiling his carefully

polished game plan. Says Brown: "I hate what they

did, but they were my friends. Not many people will

say that about them. Not many people really know

them."

Littleton buried its young last week, and the sky

had the good sense to cry. When 5,000 gathered to

celebrate the short life of Isaiah Shoels, a

warm-hearted young man slain because he was

African American, Columbine survivors walking in

the rain to the Heritage Christian Center didn't

bother to open their umbrellas; if they could feel the

rain on their faces, they must be alive. Inside the

vast modern sanctuary, the explanations tended to

be straightforward: Satan had taken control of

Harris and Klebold.

Throughout the week, police searched for

accomplices (no arrests were made, but authorities

at week's end said they still had 10 to 15 potential

suspects) and responded to accusations that they

failed to heed warning signs of the plot. Many

students were searching for secular explanations

as well. They got together in houses to talk and

weep and speculate; sometimes the boys

fantasized about what commando tactics they

might have used to halt the killing spree--the next

logical but sad step for a tragedy fueled from the

start by violent, cartoonish fantasies. And like so

many other people across the country, they groped

for answers that would not come.

Though there's always something unknowable

about the motives of these student mass

murderers, Harris' role in the massacre was no

surprise to some Columbine students: they

assumed it was Harris as soon as they realized

someone was shooting. The son of a retired Air

Force officer and a caterer--decent,

well-intentioned people who seem to have been

wholly outmatched by their cold, manipulative

son--Harris was not an unlikely candidate for

suburban mayhem. In his childhood, moving with

his family from Air Force bases in Ohio and

Michigan and upstate New York, he was

remembered fondly. "He was just a quiet boy

trying to fit in," says Plattsburgh, N.Y., Little

League coach Terry Condo. But at Columbine he

preferred to stand apart from the crowd. Though

the antidepressant Luvox was prescribed to keep

his brain chemistry more or less in balance, he

was capable of violent outbursts, slow-boil

intimidation and murderous rage. He had just

been rejected by both the Marine Corps and

reportedly several colleges. His class was

moving ahead, but despite his intelligence, he

was not.

Klebold was the bigger mystery. Shy and a little

sad, with a where's-the-floor gaze and a sullen

streak, he moved faster when he was in Harris'

wake, drawing energy and confidence from him.

Yet he seemed to be looking forward to a future

that didn't involve guns and bombs. He told

people that Harris' pseudo-Nazisms bothered

him. At the school prom he giggled and

slow-danced with his date, and even held

hands--a big move for a too-tall kid who had not

yet had his first girlfriend. He and his father Tom,

a geophysicist who had moved into the

mortgage-services business, had just spent five

days visiting the University of Arizona, where

Dylan was to attend in the fall. His mother Sue,

who worked in job placement for the disabled,

was worried about him, but never glimpsed the

scope of the problem. She thought getting him

out of Columbine would do the trick, and Dylan

seemed to agree. Just a few days before the

shooting, Dylan told his friend Terra Oglesbee

that he "couldn't wait to graduate." He was

playing in his beloved fantasy baseball league

until the night before the siege, making plans to

trade players on the day he killed so many and

then died. Was this a masterful cover, or did his

mind fail to process what the killing spree would

mean? Why would he follow Harris into hell on

earth, laughing as they slaughtered or maimed

people he knew, people he in some cases truly

cared about?

People like Rachel Scott, a beatific presence at

the high school who hoped to become a

missionary. After she had been buried, some of

Scott's classmates recalled a talent show last

year in which she did a mime dance portraying

Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus' cross along

part of the Via Dolorosa. Midway through her

performance the music cut out, leaving her

stranded. The guy in the sound booth, who

obviously liked her, scrambled to hook up a

reserve tape deck in time to save her

performance. The sound guy was Klebold. How

does the same boy have fun carrying out the

massacre that took her life?

"If Dylan can do this, who isn't capable of it?"

asks Brooks Brown's father Randy, a longtime

friend of Tom and Sue Klebold. "At some point

Dylan cracked, and no one knew. His mom is

rippin' herself up, trying to find out why. But

Dylan's gone and there is no why." Klebold can't

explain what came over him, but Brooks and

some others can try. "Dylan was a follower, but

he wouldn't follow just anyone," says Brooks.

"He was as much of an individual as a follower

can be."

It's almost two o'clock in the morning, and

Brown, who shaved off all his hair and his beard

last week because he needed a "fresh start," is

stretched out on the carpet in his family's living

room, trying to explain the inexplicable: What

made Klebold latch on to Harris? "Eric was an

incredible individualist," he begins slowly.

"Charismatic, an eloquent speaker, well read, the

kind of guy who could bulls___ for hours about

anything and be witty and brilliant." There was no

sign of this erudition on Harris' website, but

maybe he was role playing in those days. It's

clear that Brown still feels Eric's pull as well. He

knows he'll miss sitting around in the afternoon

with him, eating and talking about ideas like Ayn

Rand's objectivism, which sees man as a "heroic

being" whose happiness is the purpose of his life.

He'll miss their disturbed fiction (in one

creative-writing class, Brown read aloud Harris'

violent memoir about leaping over logs and

battling aliens in his backyard at age five; Dylan

wrote something about Satan opening a day-care

center in hell). And he'll miss the reverse-snob

solidarity that develops among people who feel

both shunned by and more intelligent than the

majority.

What Harris and Klebold shared, says Terra

Oglesbee, who was in their creative-writing class

too, was a poetic sensibility, "dark and sad. Their

poems were always about plants dying and the

sun burning out. Whenever I heard them, I would

just plug my ears because I can't stand stuff like

that." Dylan rarely read his work aloud, she says,

but Eric "was very talkative. He was a really good

writer. He would help me cheat sometimes, pass

me answers in tests and stuff." Though she is

African American, she never sensed the racism

that spilled out against Isaiah Shoels during the

massacre. Maybe that day they were role playing

again.

Though Columbine students tagged Harris' group

the Trench Coat Mafia, a name that suggests

some level of organization when there was none,

every high school has its intellectual outsiders.

There are those who stand proudly (if at times

longingly) apart from the pep rallies and the

dating rituals of the cool kids, and those who are

just hanging on until college delivers them from

the tyranny of the good-looking and athletically

gifted.

At Columbine, which has won 32 statewide

sports championships in this decade, athletes

and cheerleaders don't bother hiding that they are

the elite. "It's the greatest school with the

greatest kids," says golden-boy track and

football star Scott Schulte. "We are perfect, and

the atmosphere is perfect." Those who are

imperfect tend to disagree. Columbine athletes,

many of the non-athletes say, receive favorable

treatment from school officials and often harass

those on whom they look down. A number of

Columbine students, who don't want to be named

because they fear reprisals, described athletes

routinely shoving, cursing and throwing rocks and

bottles at Harris, Klebold and others. The school

denies playing favorites, and jocks deny

harassing anybody. The press, says Schulte,

"believe anything these kids say. They tell you

that the jocks picked on them, and you print it.

It's ridiculous." Seven months ago, the sheriff's

department warned the Jefferson County Board of

Commissioners about growing violence in the

Columbine area, including fighting by ganglike

groups of athletes. School officials at the time

called the report exaggerated.

Double standards and badgering, a number of

Harris and Klebold friends say, helped drive them

to bombs and bullets. No one is suggesting that

getting picked on is an excuse for committing

mass murder, but they call it the context for

Harris and Klebold's rage. "Did they snap? I think

they snapped a bunch of times," says Brooks

Brown. "Every time someone slammed them

against a locker and threw a bottle at them, I

think they'd go back to Eric or Dylan's house and

plot a little more--at first as a goof, but more and

more seriously over time. It's a theory, but it

makes sense to everyone who knew them."

The plotting seems to have begun in April 1998,

but no one has yet been able to pinpoint what set

it off. It was a tense time at Columbine, with

fights brewing between jocks and skateboarders,

jocks and Goths, and nearly everyone picking on

the guys in the trench coats. Whatever the

catalyst, the spring of that year marked a last

turning point for Harris. The rage he had

displayed on his website didn't abate, but it did

go underground, as he honed his ability to fool

authority figures, especially parents. "I'd say his

parents were in denial, but the truth is, this kid

was good," says Randy Brown. "He had a

strong, manipulative personality. He could

convince his dad of anything." After Harris

cracked Brooks' car windshield with that ice ball

last winter, for instance, Harris told his father that

he thought he was throwing a harmless snowball.

His dad believed him, but Judy Brown didn't.

"You can pull the wool over your father's eyes,"

she told Eric, "but you can't pull it over mine." He

pretended to be offended. "You calling me a liar?"

he demanded. "Yes, I suppose I am," she said.

Harris stomped away.

In March, according to Harris' website, he and

Klebold were busy making their first pipe bombs.

But they gave few clues to the people around

them. Appearing before Jefferson County

magistrate John DeVita on March 25, after being

arrested for breaking into a car and stealing

electronics equipment, Harris and Klebold made

like latter-day Eddie Haskells: "Yes, Your

Honor...No, Your Honor." That persuaded DeVita

(who knew nothing of Harris' website) to agree to

put them in a juvenile diversion program, and

charges were dropped in return for their

performing community service and enrolling in

"anger management" classes.

A week after Harris yanked his venomous

website offline, he had replaced it with an equally

venomous secret diary--the one in which,

authorities say, he plotted his campaign to take

out Columbine High. The diary hasn't been made

public. But in the months of late 1998 and early

1999, there were many preparations: guns to

acquire, bombs to make, locations to scout,

timing to perfect. In the fall of 1998, Klebold and

Harris made a video for a class project--a video in

which they dress in trench coats, carry guns and

blow away jocks, a murderous fantasy stoking a

murderous reality. For Klebold, the planning and

prep may have taken on an abstract quality:

something he and Harris talked about only to

each other, something that fueled their

relationship, something they would plan forever

but that would never actually happen. Until it did

happen.

When Harris was turned down by the Marines on

April 15, it was because of his antidepressants.

A day before, Brandi Tinklenberg had turned

down his invitation to the prom. Did these failures

set him off? It's impossible to say. But five days

later, he and Klebold started shooting. Fittingly,

they had already computer-modeled their crime.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which tracks

Internet hate groups, discovered last week in its

archives a copy of Harris' website with a version

of the bloody shoot-'em-up video game Doom he

had customized. In Harris' version there are two

shooters, each with extra weapons and unlimited

ammunition, and the people they encounter can't

fight back. When Harris and Klebold went into

Columbine on April 20, says an Internet

investigator associated with the Wiesenthal

Center, "they were playing out their game in God

mode."

Brooks Brown makes much the same point.

"What they did wasn't about anger or hate," he

says. "It was about them living in the moment,

like they were inside a video game." As long as

they were rolling with the plan, Brown argues, the

slaughter didn't seem real to them. But that

explanation absolves the killers too easily: Is it

really possible that the flesh and blood of the

maimed and dying was no more real to them

than pixels on a video monitor? Brown thinks so.

"Then they can't get out of the library, and they

have a moment of overwhelming remorse," he

surmises. "Or maybe one does, while the other

is still lost inside the game."

Harris' customized Doom game was programmed

so that the shooter who runs out of ammunition

dies first. Inside Columbine, that was never an

issue. But maybe one of them ran out of fantasy

first. "I think Dylan would have snapped out of it,

while Eric was still in the moment," says Brown.

"Maybe that's when they get into their own

gunfight." Rumors are swirling among the

students that the end did not come with a double

suicide. "I keep hearing that Eric's bullets were

found in Dylan's body," says Terra Oglesbee.

Another version has Harris and Klebold counting

to three, then executing each other; some

law-enforcement sources say it could even be

true. Though ballistics results have not been

released, District Attorney Dave Thomas told

TIME that the forensics suggest double suicide.

But given the location of one wound and the fact

that the bullet that passed through Klebold's

head has not been recovered, he doesn't dismiss

the possibility of a murder-suicide. Says

Thomas: "We may never know." Game Over.

--WITH REPORTING BY JOHN CLOUD, S.C. GWYNNE,

MAUREEN HARRINGTON AND JEFFREY

SHAPIRO/LITTLETON; ELAINE RIVERA/PLATTSBURGH;

AND RICHARD WOODBURY/DENVER

Drop the Stigma

To keep kids from lashing out,

parents must urge them to accept

help

BY TIPPER GORE

The alarm that sounded in Littleton should wake

up all Americans to the special needs of our

children. This nightmare is ours because of this

hard truth: the toxic culture of guns and screen

violence that kids have to navigate has been

created by adults who are supposed to offer

protection and guidance.

We must ask ourselves, What are we, as the

adult community, going to do? Yes, the

entertainment industry needs to stop selling

mayhem to children. Yes, the gun industry needs

to stop fighting to put a gun within everyone's

reach. Yes, politicians need to look at these

issues in a sincere and bipartisan effort and not

just as divisive tools in campaigns. And yes, the

media need to do more than use tragedies for

headlines. But what responsibility are we as

individuals going to accept?

Just days after the Columbine shootings, I visited

a high school and listened to teenagers discuss

their fears and reactions. All of them said they

knew kids who were troubled. Most knew kids

who were depressed or had attempted suicide.

Some knew kids who were openly discussing

violence--to the point that the speakers were

frightened of them. One student told me, "My

friends know they need help, and we know they

need help, but they are ashamed to come

forward because they fear being labeled."

If we are serious about stopping the violence and

helping our children, we as adults need to erase

the stigma that prevents our kids from getting the

help they need for their mental health. If we knew

a child had a broken arm, we would take that

child to an emergency room. And if we know a

child is depressed or alienated, we need to take

emergency action and stay involved with the

problem. One of the young killers in Colorado is

reported to have once been prescribed an

antidepressant, but we don't know if he had

stopped taking it or what other kind of treatment

he might have been receiving.

Our children also need us to help them develop

good judgment in picking their way through the

minefields in today's society. We need to stop

treating them as miniature adults. It is better to

give children a rule to break than to give them no

rules at all. But parents need the support of the

entire community. They need leaders and

business owners to help them enforce the

protections already in place, from theaters

turning away kids from adult-rated movies to

networks promoting the V chip. Parents need the

community to come up with new protections,

especially on the Internet.

Last Sunday, as my husband and I grieved with

the people of Littleton, a parent of one of the

victims said to him, "You have got to tell me that

these children did not die in vain. We've got to

make changes. Promise me that you will." Our

country needs to make this promise in every

house, on every street, in every community. And

then we need to keep it.

The Vice President's wife is a longtime advocate

of mental-health reform END

After the Grief: The

Lawyers

BY ADAM COHEN

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross has delineated five stages

of reaction to death, from denial to acceptance,

but in America there is a sixth: litigation. Just

days after the Columbine shootings, the father of

Isaiah Shoels, a slain 18-year-old, made a call to

attorney Geoffrey Fieger, famous for defending

Jack Kevorkian, about representing his family. No

suits have been filed yet, and Colorado bars

lawyers from soliciting clients for 30 days after an

incident. But it is probable that a wave of lawsuits

is coming from the victims' families and from

those injured in the shootings. What is less

certain is what good they will do.

Who could be sued? The killers' parents are

obvious targets. Many find it hard to believe the

Harrises and Klebolds didn't have a clue that their

kids were buying guns, making bombs and

spending a year plotting the rampage. Still, the

law makes it difficult to prevail in suits against

parents for the acts of children. And even if the

plaintiffs beat the odds, the families' assets and

homeowner's insurance wouldn't go far. The

school district is another possibility, if it is shown

that Columbine High officials ignored signs that

Harris and Klebold were a threat. Among those

warning signals: a videotape the two boys made

simulating a school bloodbath; and some verbal

threats made by Harris. Yet even if the school

blundered, Colorado gives the government

immunity except in rare cases.

Then there are the police. The Jefferson County

sheriff has been faulted for failing to follow up on

complaints by the parents of Brooks Brown that

Harris had threatened their son. Police have also

been criticized for not acting faster on April 20 to

storm the school and stop the shootings. The

strongest claim could come from the family of

Dave Sanders, the teacher who bled to death

while waiting three hours for help. Yet any suit

against the police would again run into immunity

problems, as well as the reluctance of courts to

second-guess police on tactics. "It's not like

Waco, where law enforcement's own action

produced the death," says Denver trial lawyer Bill

Keating.

A few individuals could be liable: the gun seller

whom police are investigating for selling a

semiautomatic that may have been used in the

killing; a pizza-parlor co-worker of Harris and

Klebold who may have been the middleman in

the gun sale; and Robyn Anderson, Klebold's

prom date, who police say bought three guns

used in the massacre. But probably none of them

have enough money to justify the time and effort

of a suit. The victims might turn to bigger culprits.

Victims of the Jonesboro, Ark., school killings

have sued gunmakers, and victims of the

Paducah, Ky., shooting are suing Time Warner

and PolyGram, the maker of The Basketball

Diaries, a movie in which a student imagines

shooting his classmates.

Ironically, it is the survivors of the Columbine

massacre, rather than the families of the dead,

who may stand the best chance of collecting.

The grimmest TV footage out of Littleton was of a

badly injured boy dangling out of a window until

he could be rescued by a SWAT team. Patrick

Ireland, 17, was shot in the brain and is partially

paralyzed on his right side. He is likely to have

enormous medical bills for years. If victims like

him were to seek redress in court, it would take a

jury with a heart of stone to send them home

empty-handed.

--WITH REPORTING BY RICHARD

WOODBURY/LITTLETON

Battling the Columbine

Copycats

BY TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND

Sporting a three-quarter-length parka, the

14-year-old boy sauntered toward the doors of

W.R. Myers High School in Taber, a small town

in the Canadian province of Alberta. Someone

smirked, "Do you have a gun under there?" He

did. Moments later, the ninth-grade dropout

whipped out a .22-cal. rifle, killing a 17-year-old

boy and critically wounding another.

On its own, the crime would have been horrible

enough. But coming just eight days after the

Littleton massacre, it was the centerpiece of a

fevered week of copycat incidents at schools

across the continent. Authorities rounded up

scores of kids for allegedly plotting to blow up

their schools, sneaking guns onto campus or

threatening to off their enemies. Some schools

hired guards; others canceled classes altogether.

There is no telling exactly how many of these

threats were serious. But it's clear that Littleton,

at the very least, has given troubled and

misguided kids a new way to garner attention.

"Most kids aren't interested in this stuff," says

Elissa Benedek, a professor of clinical psychiatry

at the University of Michigan. "But there are lots

of unhappy ones who want their moment in the

sun, and this is one way to do it."

One threat that was almost surely serious took

place in Wimberley, Texas, where four

14-year-old boys were arrested April 23 for

allegedly plotting to blow up Danforth Junior High

School. Though the plot was initiated well before

the Colorado massacre, Littleton was probably

what spurred fellow students to report the boys

after overhearing them bragging. Authorities who

searched their homes said they found gunpowder

and bomb-building instructions downloaded from

the Internet. The eighth-graders were charged

with conspiracy to manufacture explosives and

commit murder and arson.

Other incidents were more ambiguous. Five

teens at William McKinley Junior High School in

Brooklyn, N.Y., were arrested after boasting

about plans to blow up their school on graduation

day. The students insisted they were just joking.

Authorities slapped them with conspiracy

charges nevertheless. Schools in Hillsborough,

N.J., were shut down for a day when students

received e-mail warnings, "If you think what

happened in Colorado was bad, wait until you

see what happens in Hillsborough Middle School

on Friday." In Bakersfield, Calif., authorities

yanked a 13-year-old boy out of school after his

classmates spotted him loading a .40-cal.

handgun. He had a hit list of 30 names with "they

deserved to die" scrawled at the bottom. The

epidemic has put school administrators in a

tough position. "Now everyone has to be serious

about everything," says Paul Houston, executive

director of the American Association of

Administrators in Arlington, Va., "because they're

afraid if they aren't, they might be jeopardizing

children." At the same time, the American Civil

Liberties Union has been deluged with

complaints from parents whose children were

suspended for wearing black or making

provocative statements on their web page. "There

is a danger that schools are interpreting being

different as being dangerous," says ACLU

attorney Ann Beeson. "Any nonconformist kid fits

some sort of profile of a killer."

--WITH REPORTING BY HILARY HYLTON/AUSTIN AND

ANDREW PURVIS/TORONTO

An Outrage That Will

Last

The public has had its fill of

politicians who won't touch the gun

problem

BY MARGARET CARLSON

If Senator John McCain has shown what he is

made of by becoming shadow Commander in

Chief during the war in Kosovo, Al Gore may do

the same during the war in the schools. Unlike

so many others, he didn't single out culture or

guns for blame, but immediately addressed both.

He and Tipper were for values before it was cool.

If his below-radar efforts last week are

successful, the man who clumsily claimed to

have created the Internet may be the one to

clean it up, getting the biggest players to

voluntarily keep the worst sites from children.

Gore came out squarely for gun control, even as

the President initially hung back. While the

Republicans pandered to the powerful gun lobby,

which targets heretics for defeat, Gore spoke

eloquently at the memorial service in Littleton

(even if he does mistake shouting and arm chops

for animation). The raw sadness of burying

children had temporarily alleviated his stiffness,

and he plaintively asked, "What say we into the

open muzzle of this tragedy, cocked and aimed

at our hearts?"

At a campaign stop in the living room of a

turn-of-the-century house in Dubuque, Iowa, he

told how the father of a dead child had asked him

in a whisper to promise that his child and the

other had not died in vain. Gore did.

If his words rang true, it may have been because

Republicans hit so many false notes. Dan

Quayle led the clanging chorus, warning that the

massacre should not be used "as an excuse to

go and take away guns." He sounded like gun

lobbyist Neal Knox, who fretted that "fresh

victims" bring out the "anti-gun" fanatics. The

other Republican presidential contenders avoided

blaming weapons in favor of blaming the culture,

except McCain, who flicked at the gun problem in

a joint letter with Democrats asking for a White

House summit on the entertainment industry.

Texas Governor George W. Bush found himself

doing another waffle. Responding to Littleton, he

said he supported background checks for people

buying weapons at Texas gun shows or flea

markets, but a bill to that effect had just died in

committee without his support. Asked if he

planned to revive it, he said no because it was

"flawed." Then the candidate of small government

said maybe Congress should take up the issue.

In Congress, while Democrats were pushing

stringent legislation, the boldest move by

Republicans was to call for a "national dialogue"

by religious and other leaders that would "inform

the nation about modern culture and its impact

on youth." Senate majority leader Trent Lott

seemed intent on keeping his earlier vow that gun

control legislation would never pass on his watch.

He called the renewed push for gun control a

typical "knee-jerk reaction" to the shootings and

staved off for at least two weeks an effort to have

a vote, in the hope that emotions will cool. The

House, heavily mortgaged to the gun lobby, has

scheduled no bills. House Republican whip Tom

DeLay, whose office was the site of the murder of

one of the two Capitol guards slain by a crazed

gunman last summer, accused Clinton of

exploiting tragedy for political benefits.

Republicans are betting that this too will pass,

that as with Jonesboro and Paducah, Pearl and

Springfield, once the white coffins are in the

ground and the cameras gone, the outrage will

subside. But maybe not this time. In town

meetings and talk radio, the public has had its fill

of politicians talking resignedly about our gun

culture, as if there's nothing to be done about a

subgroup that finds schoolyard massacres an

acceptable cost for its right to be armed to the

teeth. But if the Constitution speaks of a

"well-regulated militia," why don't we regulate it?

Surely the sanest teenager isn't militia material.

Gun ownership should not start until age 21, and

it should require a background check at every

purchase point, and a waiting period. Just as no

one has a right to a machine gun, no one should

have a right to a semiautomatic weapon, or a gun

that can be altered to become one. Of course

guns should have safety locks.

Just a year ago in Jonesboro, teacher Shannon

Wright, mother of a two-year-old, stopped a bullet

for another mother's child. Two week ago, Dave

Sanders bled to death after directing kids to

safety. And we're supposed to think gun buyers

can't endure a little red tape, a little delayed

gratification in making their purchase? Without

guns, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were

menacing misfits in trench coats feasting on

Internet swill. With guns, they became merciless

mass murderers. We're hungry for a politician

who can stand up to the gun lobby and convince

it that burying Isaiah Shoels last Thursday in the

graduation gown he would have worn to his

commencement this month is unacceptable in a

civilized society.

--WITH REPORTING BY KAREN TUMULTY/DUBUQUE
 
 
 
 
 
 

MEDICINE

MAY 17, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 19

Beyond Depression

What do those "mood drugs" really do?

BY MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

A brand-new drug can be like a license to print money. It certainly worked that

way for Eli Lilly. When the company launched the antidepressant Prozac in

1987, nobody else had anything quite like it, and Lilly cleaned up. But then other

pharmaceutical firms rushed in with their own versions, including Zoloft, Paxil,

Celexa and the recently newsworthy Luvox, found in the blood of Columbine High

School shooter Eric Harris. The competition has already eaten into Lilly's market

share, and things can only go downhill from here.

That's true, if you're talking about Prozac simply as an antidepressant. But if a

drug turns out to be good for something new, that presents a fresh marketing

opportunity. And while the search for new ills to conquer is part of any drug's life

cycle, the scramble is especially furious with mood drugs like Prozac and its kin.

Prozac has been approved for bulimia and obsessive-compulsive disorder in

addition to depression, while Zoloft can be used for OCD, and Paxil for both OCD

and panic disorder.

Now Paxil and its manufacturer, SmithKline Beecham, are upping the ante. If the

FDA agrees, and it probably will, SmithKline will soon be pushing Paxil as the

first-ever formally sanctioned treatment for, of all things, shyness. This isn't as

bizarre as it sounds. FDA approval would actually be for the treatment of "acute

social phobia," a pathological form of shyness that's more akin to panic. For

doctors, at least, it's no surprise that phobia and depression might be treated

with the same drugs. "The big secret," says Dr. Brian Doyle, director of the

anxiety disorders program at Georgetown Medical School, "is that we tend to use

them all for the whole spectrum of depression and anxiety disorders."

The reason is that Paxil, Prozac, Luvox and the others all target the same brain

chemical, called serotonin, which seems to govern mood. Too little serotonin,

and patients tend to feel negative about themselves and the world around them in

one way or another. How that dissatisfaction manifests itself--clinical depression,

anxiety, phobias, obsessions, even eating disorders--depends on a complex web

of factors that researchers have yet to unravel. But they do know that drugs that

keep serotonin from being reabsorbed too quickly into the nerve cells--the

so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs--tend to alleviate these

symptoms.

It was only by educated trial and error, not from reading drug labels, that doctors

learned how broadly useful SSRIs like Prozac, Paxil, Luvox and Celexa can be in

treating not just depression, OCD, bulimia and panic disorder but also migraines,

anxiety disorders, attention-deficit disorder, kleptomania, post-traumatic stress

and even premenstrual mood swings. (Despite earlier claims about Prozac and

attempts to link Luvox to the Colorado school shootings, there is no evidence

that SSRIs themselves cause violent behavior.) Although the FDA hasn't

approved all these uses for all the drugs, doctors are free to prescribe them for

anything they like.

Still, once a firm finds a new use for a drug, it makes sense to get formal

approval. That's the only way the company can legally start pushing the

treatment in ads and in marketing pitches to physicians. Paxil may be the latest

example of an SSRI expanding its franchise. But it's not the first, and it won't be

the last.

Take One For...

DEPRESSION

BULIMIA

OBSESSION

PANIC

SHYNESS

Prozac

APPROVED

APPROVED

APPROVED

Zoloft

APPROVED

APPROVED

APPROVED

Paxil

APPROVED

APPROVED

APPROVED

PENDING

Luvox

APPROVED

Celexa

APPROVED
 
 

--REPORTED BY ALICE PARK/NEW YORK

Noon in the Garden of

Good and Evil

The tragedy at Columbine began as a

crime story but is becoming a parable

BY NANCY GIBBS

America decided 200 years ago to keep her

church and state separate, out of respect for

both. But Columbine confounds the Constitution;

everyone is coloring outside the lines, between

what is sacred, what is secular. Ministers call on

lawmakers to pass gun-control laws, lawmakers

call for religious revival, and Al Gore appears on

Larry King Live, not just to talk about his

three-point plan to make the Internet less toxic

but also to recall his days as a divinity student

and cite parables and argue that Littleton is "a

spiritual signal," a chance to ask questions that

aren't for church or state, but both.

The Columbine tragedy didn't start out as a

front-page story about the battle between good

and evil. But it has been moving there, as the

trauma overflowed the argument about guns and

culture and spilled into other realms. With each

passing day of shock and grief you could almost

hear the church bells tolling in the background,

calling the country to a different debate, a careful

conversation in which even Presidents and

anchormen behave as though they are in the

presence of something bigger than they are, and

maybe should lower their voices a little and

speak with less authority.

The Closure Industry has not been able to sweep

up and move on, for all the round-the-clock

coverage. In the past our public pageants have

concluded with the funeral, the cortege carrying

the body of the beloved President or princess. In

the case of Columbine, when the funerals were

over, the service seemed to be just beginning.

This owes in part to the fact that the massacre

occurred square in the heart of America's

evangelical community--Colorado is home to the

Promise Keepers, James Dobson's Focus on the

Family and vast and growing megachurches--and

so from the beginning the reflex was to look not

for reasons but for meaning.

All eyes fell first on the killers, and the questions

we can neither avoid nor answer. The talk-show

rituals of absolution--blame the culture, the

parents, the guns, the video games--left too

much unresolved for those inclined to declare

that the boys were simply, deeply wicked. But for

those with an eye toward larger battles, the

killers were not themselves evil; they were

instruments of it, of the dark force we met in

Narnia and try not to think about once we grow

up, until the day we have no choice. Hence the

15 crosses planted up on the hill, and the

argument about whether the killers deserved to

have their crosses alongside those of the victims,

whether they needed them most of all.

If the killers gave evil a face, the victims lent

theirs to grace. In ever widening circles the story

that lingers is the tale of Cassie Bernall, the girl

who when asked "Do you believe in God?" was

murdered when she said yes. We expect our

martyrs to be etched in stained glass, not

carrying a backpack and worrying about their

weight and their finals. Hers is a mystery story,

the tale of a girl lost to bad friends and drugs and

witchcraft and all the dark places of teenage

rebellion. Even a youth minister who had some

experience turning poisoned kids around had

little hope for her. "I remember thinking when I

met her," says church volunteer Vali Wilson,

"that nothing was going to penetrate that shell."

Her parents were advised to take her out of

school, get her away from her friends, let her go

out only to church and hope for a miracle.

Her friends would say the prayers were

answered. Converted at a Christian summer

camp, Cassie was soon working with inner-city

gang members, attending Bible study and

wearing a WHAT WOULD JESUS DO bracelet;

she thought about cutting off her long blond hair,

so she could give it to a charity that makes wigs

for kids undergoing cancer treatment. The day

after she died, her brother found a poem that

suggested she was already on her journey "to

find out what it really means to suffer and to die

with Him." Her mother was in the shower a few

days later, says a family friend, and received a

message, so clearly: "For this reason, Cassie

was born."

And so Cassie's church friends now talk about

kids who were once awkward about the whole

subject of faith coming up to them in the halls

and asking them about it. The youth ministries

are flooded with calls and new visitors. At a

Denver prayer lunch last week, faith and practice

sat down together: everyone attending was asked

to agree to mentor an "at risk" kid. "That would

change the city," said organizer Don Reeverts.

"Let's put some shoe leather on our prayers."

Conservatives have argued that liberals are

unwilling to acknowledge the possibility of evil,

which is another way of saying that they resist

even engaging in the religious conversation that

Littleton invites. But if we imagine how the

talk-show version would go--a Crossfire shouting

match on the nature of Satan--we may be grateful

that the conversation is flourishing in private, at

the dinner table, walking to work. If we wander a

while now through more haunting places, if we

read the news of the latest massacre in Kosovo

and see more than geopolitics at work, if we

suspect that saints may sit beside us in the

library and devils may drive BMWs and work in

the pizza parlor and leave no telltale trail of ash

as they go about their work, if we just find

ourselves asking questions we haven't had

occasion to ask before, we will know more than

we did three weeks ago, and be wiser for it. END

May24

On the Defensive

Sensing disaster, a Littleton-addled

G.O.P. tries to fix its fumble on gun

control

BY JAMES CARNEY AND JOHN F.

DICKERSON/WASHINGTON

In the post-Littleton debate about guns in

America, Republicans learned last week that

self-inflicted wounds are often the most painful.

Which is why, hours after the Senate voted last

Wednesday to make background checks on

buyers at gun shows voluntary, some G.O.P.

Senators sensed a p.r. disaster. A majority of

Americans, including Republicans, favor tougher

gun-control laws. On Thursday half a dozen

Senators handed majority leader Trent Lott and

the National Rifle Association's Senate point

man, Larry Craig of Idaho, an amendment

requiring gun-show checks. "It was a fait

accompli," said a source familiar with the

meeting.

The measure passed, but rather than claim

victory, Democrats carped that even that G.O.P.

fix didn't go far enough. Relishing the chance to

exploit the Republicans' misstep, Clinton labeled

the G.O.P. effort a "phony proposal." On Capitol

Hill, Democrats accused Republicans of being

tools of the N.R.A., a charge Utah Senator Orrin

Hatch angrily denied. But one of Hatch's

Republican colleagues told TIME that the

G.O.P.'s initial gaffe "was an N.R.A.-orchestrated

vote."

Amid all the posturing, the Senate did pass

measures barring juveniles from possessing

semiautomatic "assault" weapons and prohibiting

the import of high-capacity ammunition clips. But

by week's end the partisan bickering had so

poisoned the chamber that the bill carrying all the

gun-control measures was in danger of being

pulled. That would leave some Republicans

fretting over Democratic plans to paint the G.O.P.

as gun-loving extremists in next year's elections.

As a G.O.P. aide lamented, "If we didn't have

guns, how else would Republicans shoot

themselves in the foot?" END
 
 

COPYRIGHT © 1999 TIME INC. NEW MEDIA
 
 
 
 
 
 

VIDEO GAMES

MAY 24, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 20

A Room Full of Doom

Did Columbine take the fire out of the

splatter-game business? Not judging

by last week's big expo

BY DAVID S. JACKSON/LOS ANGELES

Morgan Hildreth, 24, jerks back from the

keyboard as a loud burst of automatic gunfire

erupts on his computer screen. "I got

somebody!" shouts a nearby player, as a body

explodes in a red mist. Around them, a few

dozen spectators in baggy T shirts and oversize

shoes watch in a trance as grown men with

joysticks stalk one another through underground

mazes, firing guns and blowing one another to

bits. When chunks of bloody body parts thump to

the ground, some of the onlookers laugh out

loud. "This is gonna sell like hot cakes," chortles

one.

It was as if Columbine had never happened. I

came to the annual Electronic Entertainment

Expo--the first E3 since the Littleton, Colo.,

massacre--expecting to find the video- game

industry in a defensive crouch. After all,

everybody from my wife to the President has

made hay out of the fact that the boys who fired

600 rounds at their teachers and fellow students

had nurtured their violent revenge fantasies, at

least in part, playing splatter games like Doom

and Quake. But on the floor of the Los Angeles

Convention Center, where Quake III, the newest,

bloodiest version, was on display, the only

question on these guys' minds was "When can I

play?"

Officially, of course, the industry shares my

wife's concerns. But games that reward players

for shooting, maiming or running over anything

that moves represent a significant fraction of a

total revenue stream that could top $7 billion this

year--bigger even than the annual take from

movie box-office receipts--and nobody is going to

tighten that spigot without a fight. "Video games

don't teach people to hate," said Douglas

Lowenstein, president of the Interactive Digital

Software Association, last week. "The

entertainment-software industry has no reason to

run and hide."

Yet inside the clamorous convention hall, that's

just what the executives of the best-selling

splatter games were doing--especially from

pesky reporters. When I asked a designer for id,

which makes Doom and Quake, if he would

answer a few questions, he said sure. But when

he heard that they were about violence in video

games, he said I'd have to talk to his boss, id

president Todd Hollenshead. When I headed off

to find Hollenshead, I was intercepted by a public

relations official who said that nobody from id

would be available. Would I like to talk to

someone from Activision, the company that

distributes Quake, instead? O.K. But it turned

out Activision didn't want anyone interviewed

either.

If the gamemakers wouldn't defend their industry,

their customers were happy to try. Paul Good,

30, an artist from Maryland with long pink hair

and a half-shaved head, insisted that violent video

games defuse, not provoke, violence. "When the

world p_____ you off and you need a place to

vent," he explained, "Quake is a great place for

it. You can kill somebody and watch the blood

run down the walls, and it feels good. But when

it's done, you're rid of it."

Alexander Basile, 32, a California TV executive,

believes the politicians are just looking for a

scapegoat. "How many millions of people play

Doom and don't go out and kill people?" he

asked.

He's right. Most of them don't. But it's the

impressionable ones I worry about, and the

industry is getting better at getting across its

own impressions of reality. The pounding rock

music, the crashing sound effects, the shrieks

and grunts that poured out of loudspeakers onto

E3's crowded aisles could almost turn even a

middle-aged father like me into a Doomer.

Almost.

Meanwhile, over at the 4DRulers booth, president

Joel Huenink is cheerily touting the virtues of his

new game Gore, which revolves around a battle

for scarce energy resources in a post-apocalyptic

world. "There's kind of a bloodbath fighting over it,

so that's why we call it Gore," he explains

helpfully. Does it have a lot of, you know, gore?

"It will." He beams. Then he notices the press

badge.

"You're not one of those guys writing about what

a bad industry we are, are you?" he says with

alarm. I confess that I might be.

He laughs. "Well, then, let me show you this

nice family game we've got called Joey the

kangaroo." And with that he pulls out a brochure

for Joey's Count 10, a teaching game for

preschoolers.

In fairness, Gore isn't that gory--it'll probably get

the industry's equivalent of a PG-13 rating--but

Huenink, an affable Nebraskan with a breezy

sense of humor, admits to having second

thoughts about his game's title. "When we

started it in 1996," he says, "violence wasn't

such a big thing."

Violence has always been a big thing in the U.S.,

and there are good constitutional reasons why

we can't legislate that out of our entertainment

products. But the video-game industry makes

only what it can sell. And as long as gore is what

we're buying--for our kids and for ourselves--gore

is what they'll give us. END
 
 
 
 
 
 

SPECIAL REPORT: TROUBLED KIDS

MAY 31, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 21

Escaping From The

Darkness

Drugs like Prozac, Paxil and Luvox

can work wonders for clinically

depressed kids. But what about the

long-term consequences?

BY HOWARD CHUA-EOAN

Megan Kellar is bubbly and bouncing and

lip-synching to the Backstreet Boys. Get down,

get down and move it all around! The sixth-grader

is dancing to the synthesized bubble-gum beat at

a talent show at the John Muir Elementary

School in Parma, Ohio. Get down, get down and

move it all around! There is nothing down about

Megan, even as she gets down in front of the

audience. Her mother remembers a similar

effervescence half a dozen years ago. "She'd be

singing to herself and making up songs all the

time," says Linda Kellar. And sure enough, that

part of her is still there. "Megan's such a happy

child," the mother of a girl on Megan's baseball

team remarked to Linda. Yes, Linda agreed, but

there's something you ought to know. Megan is

clinically depressed and on the antidepressant

Paxil. Says Linda: "She couldn't believe it."

Six years ago, Linda wouldn't have believed that

her daughter was clinically depressed either. But

shortly after her parents separated, Megan

stopped singing. When other kids came over to

play, she would lie down in the yard and just

watch. At Christmas she wouldn't decorate the

tree. Linda thought her daughter was simply

melancholy over her parents' split and took her to

see a counselor. That seemed to help for a while.

Then for about eight months, when Megan was

10, she cried constantly and wouldn't go to

school. She lost her appetite and got so weak

that at one point she couldn't get out of bed.

When a doctor recommended Paxil in

conjunction with therapy, Linda recoiled. "I did

not want to put my baby on an antidepressant,"

she says. Then she relented because, she says,

"Megan wasn't living her childhood." Linda

noticed changes in just two weeks. Soon Megan

was singing again. "She's not drugged or doped,"

says Linda. "She still cries when she sees Old

Yeller and still has moody days." But, as Megan

says, "I'm back to normal, like I used to be."

Megan Kellar shares her kind of normality with

hundreds of thousands of other American kids.

Each year an estimated 500,000 to 1 million

prescriptions for antidepressants are written for

children and teens. On the one hand, the benefits

are apparent and important. Experts estimate

that as many as 1 in 20 American preteens and

adolescents suffer from clinical depression. It is

something they cannot outgrow. Depression

cycles over and over again throughout a lifetime,

peaking during episodes of emotional distress,

subsiding only to well up again at the next crisis.

And as research increasingly shows, depression

is often a marker for other disorders, including

the syndrome that used to be called manic

depression and is now known as bipolar disorder.

If undetected and untreated in preteens,

depressive episodes can lead to severe anxiety

or manic outbursts not only in adulthood but as

early as adolescence.

On the other hand, come the questions. How do

we tell which kids are at risk? Has science fully

apprised us of the effects on kids of medication

designed for an adult brain? Have we set out on a

path that will produce a generation that escapes

the pain only to lose the character-building

properties of angst?

To medicate or not to medicate? The dilemma

can be traced back to 1987, when the FDA

approved Prozac as the first of a new class of

antidepressants known as selective serotonin

reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Prozac had none of

the more serious side effects and risks of the

earlier antidepressants and worked faster to

control depressive symptoms. Prozac and the

other SSRIs (they now include Zoloft, Paxil,

Luvox and Celexa) had one other advantage over

the older, tricyclic antidepressants: children

responded to them. One of the few recent studies

on the subject showed that among depressed

children ages 8 to 18, 56% improved while on

Prozac, in contrast to 33% on a placebo. Says

Dr. David Fassler, chair of the American

Psychiatric Association's Council on

Adolescents and Their Families: "Physicians

have a lot of experience using the medications

with adult patients with good results, and recent

research increases their general level of comfort

in using them with children and adolescents."

But which kids?

Not so long ago, many psychiatrists argued that

children and young teens could not get

depressed because they were not mature enough

to internalize their anger. Today, says Fassler,

"we realize that depression does occur in

childhood and adolescence and that it occurs

more often in children than we previously

realized."

Still, depression is slightly harder to diagnose in

adolescents than in adults, and not because

teens are expected to be moodier and more

withdrawn. They are less likely to realize that

they are depressed and thus less likely to seek

help. "Younger kids also have more difficulty

expressing their feelings in words," says Dr.

Boris Birmaher, a child psychiatrist at the

University of Pittsburgh. "When kids become

depressed, they become irritable, act out, have

temper tantrums and other behavioral problems.

It's hard to ascertain that these are the

symptoms of depression unless you ask them

questions in a language they can understand."

Furthermore, the very definition of being a

child--what makes him survive and grow--is being

able to move up and down emotionally, having a

basic elasticity. Says Dr. Peter Jensen, child

and adolescent psychiatrist at the National

Institute of Mental Health: "A child is more fluid

and plastic than an adult. A child may look

depressed one day because his dog died but

seem O.K. three days later."

But if parents live in a world of family mood

swings, that doesn't mean they are prepared to

put their own child on mind-altering drugs. That

prospect can lead to major soul searching: Will

they be thought less of as parents? And if they

do agree to antidepressants, will the child still be

the one they know?

Donna Mitchell was told her daughter,

eight-year-old Sawateos, had attention-deficit

hyperactivity disorder, but she also showed signs

of serious depression and anxiety, which are

often found in combination. Mitchell's first

reaction was, "I can pray this away. I thought,

Listen, nobody in my family is going on drugs.

That's an insult. I figured all we needed was

family talks." But two years after the diagnosis,

Mitchell has agreed to put her child on the ADHD

drug Ritalin. She still resists the idea of

antidepressants. It's her preteen daughter who's

making the case for doing it. "Mama, it's in our

genes," Sawateos tells her.

All this may help explain why it is so hard for the

people closest to children to detect that anything

is really wrong. Studies show that parents

consistently miss the signs of depression. In one

survey by researchers at Ball State and

Columbia universities, 57% of teens who had

attempted suicide were found to be suffering from

major depression. But only 13% of the parents of

suicides believed their child was depressed.

Diagnosis is critical because depressed children

tend to develop increasingly severe mental

disorders and in some cases psychosis as teens

and adults. Three studies on children who were

depressed before puberty show that as adults

they had a higher rate of antisocial behavior,

anxiety and major depression than those who

experienced their first depressive episode as

teens. "Prepubertal depression does occur, and

those who get it are more susceptible to [the]

mania [of bipolar disorder] later," says Dr. John

March, director of the program on pediatric

psychopharmacology at Duke University. "The

earlier you get it, the more likely you will develop

chronic depressive and anxiety symptoms."

So how do psychiatrists pick out kids who are

depressed from those who are simply moody? In

his book "Help Me, I'm Sad," Fassler lists a

number of physical symptoms in three age

groups--preschoolers, young school-age children

and adolescents. Among preschoolers, the signs

include frequent, unexplained stomachaches,

headaches and fatigue. Depressed school-age

children frequently weigh 10 lbs. less than their

peers, may have dramatic changes in sleep

patterns and may start speaking in an affectless

monotone. Adolescents go through eating

disorders, dramatic weight gains or losses,

promiscuity, drug abuse, excessive picking at

acne, and fingernail biting to the point of

bleeding.

Fassler cautions that none of these symptoms

may ever be present and a whole constellation of

more subjective manifestations must be

considered. Adults and adolescents share many

of the same warning signs--low self-esteem,

tearfulness, withdrawal and a morbid obsession

with death and dying. Among adolescents,

however, depression is often accompanied by

episodes of irritability that, unlike mood swings,

stretch for weeks rather than days.

Dr. Elizabeth Weller, professor of psychiatry and

pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, has

developed techniques for detecting depression in

kids. First she establishes a rapport with a child.

Then she asks, for example, whether he still has

fun playing softball or whether it is taking him

longer to finish his homework--both of which are

ways to figure out whether the child has lost

motivation and concentration. Crying is another

marker for depression, but Weller says boys

rarely admit to it. So she asks them how often

they feel like crying.

She then quizzes parents and teachers for other

signs. Parents can tell her if a child no longer

cares about his appearance and has lost interest

in bathing or getting new clothes. Teachers can

tell her whether a child who used to be alert and

active has turned to daydreaming or has lost a

certain verve. As Weller puts it, "Has the bubble

gone out of the face?"

There are several other complicating factors.

Some psychiatrists believe depression in

younger children often appears in conjunction

with other disorders. "Many depressed kids,"

notes Fassler, "are initially diagnosed with ADHD

or learning disabilities. We need to separate out

the conditions and treat both problems." But

there's a chicken-and-egg problem here:

antisocial behavior or a learning disability can

lead a child to become isolated and alienated

from peers and thus can trigger depression. And

depression can further interfere with learning or

bring on antisocial behavior.

But does a diagnosis of depression in a child

require medication? Consider Nancy Allee's

10-month journey with SSRIs and other drugs. At

12, she was as bubbly as Megan Kellar is now.

She soon developed "a five-month-long

headache" and started having nightmares. After

about a year in counseling, things seemed to be

going better and, her mother Judith says, "we

terminated it so as not to make it a way of life."

A few months later, Nancy became hostile and

rebellious but nothing that Judith considered "out

of the bounds for a normal teenager." Then,

"without any warning, she [took an] overdose" of

her migraine medication, was hospitalized and

depression was diagnosed. While Judith thought

the overdose was out of the blue, Nancy says,

"I'd had depression for a long time. If I'd had bad

thoughts, I'd always had them and kind of grew

up with them. I was always very bubbly, even

when I was depressed. A lot of people didn't

notice it. To me, suicide had always been an

option."

Nancy was put on Zoloft. When that didn't work,

the doctor added Paxil and then several other

drugs. But there was a panoply of side effects:

her hands would shake, she would bang her head

against the wall. A voracious reader, she became

too withdrawn and listless to pick up a book.

There were times she couldn't sleep, but on one

occasion she slept 72 hours straight.

"I was seeing five different doctors, and it was

overkill," says Nancy. "At one point, I was taking

15 pills in the morning and 15 in the evening. I

wound up burying my medication in the

backyard. I didn't want to take it anymore." Then

Nancy was tested for allergies, a process that

required her to be medication free. "It was like

the sky was blue again," says Nancy, who at 18

is still off drugs but sees a counselor

occasionally. "The colors came back. It was a

total change from the medication stupor.

Everything wasn't peachy, but I was able to

appreciate doing things again."

Most psychiatrists, despite their enthusiasm for

the new antidepressants, write prescriptions for

only six months to a year and taper the dosage

toward the end. Even Fassler admits, "We try to

use medication for the minimum amount of time

possible. And with a younger child, we're more

cautious about using medication because we

have less research concerning both the

effectiveness and the long-term consequences

and side effects." Says Michael Faenza,

president of the National Mental Health

Association: "I feel very strongly that no child

should be receiving medication without

counseling. Medication is just one spoke in the

wheel."

The lack of science about the effects of these

drugs on childhood development is the reason

the FDA has required all manufacturers of SSRIs

that treat depression to conduct studies on the

subject. Says Dr. Peter Kramer, professor of

psychiatry at Brown University and author of

Listening to Prozac: "Anyone who thinks about

this problem is worried about what it means to

substantially change neurotransmission in a

developing brain. We don't know if these kids

would compensate on their own over time and if

by giving them these medicines we are interfering

with that compensatory mechanism."

Until we know more, some argue, the risks of

such medication are just too great, if only

because of the message it sends to children.

Says Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public

Citizen's Health Research Group: "We are

moving into an era where any quirk of a

personality is fair game for a drug. On one hand,

we are telling kids to just say no to drugs, but on

the other hand, their pediatricians are saying,

'Take this. You'll feel good.'"

Teen rebellion can put a twist on even that,

however. One New York couple, becalmed by

antidepressants themselves and openly

concerned about the depression of their

18-year-old, were castigated by their son for their

"weakness" and dependence on Prozac. His

argument: your drugs change who you really are.

In place of their drugs, the young man argued for

his "natural" remedy: marijuana.

Indeed, pot and alcohol are common forms of

self-medication among depressed teens. Weller

estimates that about 30% of her teen patients

have used pot or alcohol after a depressive

episode, most of them at the urging of friends

who said smoking and drinking would make them

feel better. A high school social worker in

Minnesota decided to look into the case of a

troubled girl who was still a freshman at 17. The

girl admitted she smoked pot as a constant habit

but did not understand why she craved it so

much. A psychological evaluation found the girl

was suffering from clinical depression as well as

ADHD. She was prescribed an antidepressant,

which had striking results. It not only elevated her

mood and helped her focus but also reduced her

desire for pot and tobacco.

"It used to be said that adolescence is the most

common form of psychosis," says Kramer, the

man who helped make Prozac famous. Then he

turns serious. "But if a child has a prolonged

period of depressive moods, he needs to be

evaluated for depression." Even if little is known

about the long-term effects of SSRIs on young

bodies, most doctors in the field argue that the

drugs are a blessing to kids in pain. Says Duke's

March, who is doing a comparative study of the

benefits of Prozac and cognitive-behavior therapy:

"My clinical experience is that it's worse to risk a

major mental illness as a child than to be on

medication. If you weigh the risks against the

benefits, the benefits are probably going to win."

Susan Dubuque of Richmond, Va., is convinced

of the benefits. Her son Nick went through "seven

years of testing hell." At seven, ADHD was

diagnosed and he was put on Ritalin. "When he

was 10 years old, he didn't want a birthday party

because he just couldn't deal with it," she

recalls. Then, his mother says, Nick "bottomed

out and became suicidal, and one day I found

him in a closet with a toy gun pointed at his

head, and he said, 'If this was real, I'd use it.'"

The next day she saw a psychologist who had

recently evaluated Nick and was told, "If you

don't get him help, next time he'll be successful."

Nick was found to be suffering from clinical

depression and took a series of antidepressants.

"I was worried about my son's killing himself,"

says Susan, who was called by clinicians a

"histrionic mother" and a "therapy junkie," as she

spent $4,000 on drugs and therapy for her son. "I

would have sold my house if that was what it

would have taken."

Nick is better now, and has co-authored a book

with his mom: Kid Power Tactics for Dealing with

Depression. Susan is happy to have her son

back safe--even though there is some stress. "It's

so much fun to have an obnoxious 15-year-old,"

she says, "and I mean normal obnoxious."

--REPORTED BY JODIE MORSE/NEW YORK, ALICE

PARK/WASHINGTON AND JAMES WILLWERTH/LOS

ANGELES

How to Spot a

Depressed Child

The key thing to watch for is drastic changes in

teen behavior. Other red flags to consider:

--DIFFICULTY MAINTAINING RELATIONSHIPS

May become antisocial, reject friends or refuse to

take part in school and family events

--REDUCED PHYSICAL ACTIVITY

May suffer from lethargy or appear to drag self

around

--MORBID OR SUICIDAL THOUGHTS

May seek out games, music, art or books with

death-related themes

--LOW SELF-ESTEEM

May feel that they are worthless and that their

peers, teachers and family disapprove of them

--SELF-DESTRUCTIVE BEHAVIOR

May harm their body by, for example, biting

fingernails to the point of bleeding

--PROBLEMS AT SCHOOL

Grades may drop or classroom troublemaking

rise

--CHANGES IN SLEEP PATTERNS

May either have restless nights or sleep away

the day

Preschoolers

--Frequent unexplained stomachaches,

headaches or fatigue

--Overactivity or excessive restlessness

--A sad appearance

--Low tolerance for frustration

--Irritability

--Loss of pleasure in activities

--Tendency to portray the world as bleak

Source: Help Me, I'm Sad by Dr. David Fassler and Lynne

Dumas