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Harris certainly felt drawn to the Nazis' genocidal mania - at one point in his journal he quotes Himmler approvingly and comments, "Here was someone who got it!" Seung-Hui Cho including the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. She specializes in Texas features, consumer and business news and local crime coverage. What would initially start as a few hundred directly affected will become thousands, and, in 10 years, tens of thousands just from this one shooting, he said in 2018. For more than 10 hours they waited for information about their children, only to be told, in some cases, that they had been killed. Whats more, Harris and Klebold were meanwhile amassing a small arsenal of weapons. From there, they began to shoot anyone they encountered and deigned worth their time. Updated May 17, 2021 When the devout Christian teen allegedly declared her belief in God as she was shot in cold blood at the Columbine High School massacre, she became a sort of angel to the media. Eubanks knew the full weight of what each newly bereaved student would have to work through. How The Columbine Massacre Shaped Survivors' Lives 20 Years Later The baffling question never really went away. He had just been getting started. Richman appeared last year on ABC News' "10% Happier" podcast, telling host Dan Harris that losing Avielle was "infinite heartbreak. April 20, 1999. The county sheriff's department knew Harris and Klebold had been making pipe bombs and threatening their schoolmates. A staff writer for All Thats Interesting, Marco Margaritoff has also published work at outlets including People, VICE, and Complex, covering everything from film to finance to technology. Updated September 9, 2022 The motives for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to carry out the Columbine High School massacre had nothing to do with bullying or revenge and the real truth is even more disturbing. The Chicago Tribune reported that in the videos, Harris and Klebold had their friends pretend to be jocks, and they pretended to be gunmen shooting them. The production included practical effects for gunshot wounds. For one parent, Pam Grams, waiting to hear her 17-year-old son be pronounced as safe was indescribable. I beseech", "My son was a Columbine shooter. Two teenagers went on a shooting spree, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20 others, before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide. According to media reports, the deadliest mass shooting is the Las Vegas mass shooting in October 2017 in which 58 people were killed. He might have gotten caught for some petty crime, gotten help in the process, and conceivably could have gone on to live a normal life. Indeed, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold fostered an unhealthy interest in Hitler, Nazi iconography, and the violence of the Third Reich. Columbine High School Shootings Fast Facts | CNN We may be only beginning to reap the whirlwind that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold unleashed. It sounded like a plausible explanation at the time. The psychiatrists cant help speculating what might have happened if Columbine had never happened. As it was, their homemade bombs did not detonate, and they were forced to improvise. What the boy was really expressing was contempt. Our analysis found that about 80 percent of mass school shooters were suicidal, based on records we have gathered thus far. Eric Harris, as photographed for the Columbine yearbook. -- On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris walked into Columbine High School, carrying weapons and homemade bombs, and began slaughtering their classmates. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting the most deaths in U.S. history. Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. Though they were merely placed into a diversion program consisting of community service and counseling, the two were released a month early. At one point they joked about killing anyone in a white hat; one boy cowering beneath a desk quickly pulled a white cap off his head, and lived. Klebold and Harris were no longer mere fans of violent video games like Doom but had obtained three weapons that would later be used in the shooting from a female friend who was old enough to purchase guns in the state of Colorado. By many counts, Eubanks death would not be included as one of the casualties of the American gun violence epidemic. When I first saw the Web pages, I was utterly blown away, said Brown. School shootings didn't start in 1999 at Columbine. Here's why that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were radically different individuals, with vastly different motives and opposite mental conditions. How Columbine Victim Rachel Scott Became A Teen Martyr - All That's Over the last few months, Ive been opening up the old files of my interviews with Eubanks, and reading them again. He also expressed sincere sadness that he wasnt dating anyone and that anger was potentially boiling beneath the surface at all times, according to CNN. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 and online chat is also available. In this 25 April 1999 photo, Austin Eubanks hugs his girlfriend during a memorial service for Columbine high school shooting victims. As a boy, he was in the Boy Scouts and . Kevin Moloney/Getty Images Roger Kovacs and his wife Lesli in front of Rachel Scott's memorial. By the time the TV crews arrived, Harris and Klebold had in fact ended their rampage and turned their weapons on themselves. Fuselier was finally convinced of his diagnosis when he read Harris response to being punished after being caught breaking into a van. After every high-profile shooting, theres no shortage of commenters willing to embrace cynicism or despair, to re-share a British journalists tweet from 2015 that argued: Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate.Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over. It often seems to be the safest people, the ones who have not yet been touched by gun violence, who are the most willing to declare that nothing can be done, that the debate is already over. Harris pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and superiority read like the bullet points on Hares Psychopathy Checklist and convinced Fuselier and the other leading psychiatrists close to the case that Harris was a psychopath. All those stories were the product of hysteria, ignorance and flailing guesswork in the first few hours and days. Eubanks, 37, was found dead in his home in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, on Saturday morning. Trauma, as Eubanks said, keeps rippling outwards, one kind of damage turning into another. Heirloom Fine PortraitsDylan Klebold. Neither one chose to focus, as many American activists do, on gun access and gun control laws. On April 20, 1999, Eric Davis Harris (1981-1999) and Dylan Bennet Klebold (1981-1999) killed 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado before committing suicide. The boys had actually intended to bomb the school the day before, which was the anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. MINOR: Many Columbine survivors, not just Amy, are now raising families. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Their view of Harris is more reassuring, in a certain way. While the school shooting is largely remembered by most to have gone as the pair planned, this couldnt be further from the truth. He is a psychologist. Students and teachers were just convenient quarry, what Timothy McVeigh described as collateral damage.. So did John Tomlin, a sixteen-year-old who had recently gone to Mexico to help with a church project for the poor. He was the second child of Thomas and Susan and the brother of Byron, three years older. The story inspired dozens of sermons, spawned a best-selling book co-authored by Bernall's mother, and elevated Bernall to martyr status far beyond Columbine. How Columbine became a blueprint for school shooters - The Conversation Then, read about Brenda Ann Spencer, the woman who shot up a school because she didnt like Mondays. In other words, it wasn't meant to be a school shooting at all, but something much bigger. 20 Years Later, Sibling Columbine Survivors Reflect Columbine High School massacre - Wikipedia On April 20, 1999, the Columbine High School Massacre in Littleton, Colorado brought a violent end to a time of relative innocence in American society and culture. Harris quietly despised the people he took so much trouble to charm and could not wait to see them all die horrible deaths. It was a Tuesday one nobody in Littleton, Colorado would ever forget. Klebold allegedly shouted Were going to kill every one of you, and the Columbine shooters began shooting at people indiscriminately and tossing pipe bombs around without any notion of who exactly would be killed. These kinds of responses from a countrys elected leaders are an invitation to numbness. This article was amended on Friday 17 April 2009 to remove a reference to a supposed chatroom warning issued in advance by the teenager who killed 15 people at a high school in Winnenden, Germany, in March this year. Eric Harris was born on April 9, 1981, in Wichita, Kansas, which is where he spent his early childhood. I had long conversations with local teenagers, both in the park and in a local shopping mall, about the oppressiveness of jock culture and the enormous pressures of feeling out of place in a rigidly conformist, predominantly white middle class community. Klebold and Harris went so far as to record videos of themselves at target practice with their weapons, discussing the fame they would receive after their massacre. The sporadic shooting heard over the next three hours over the incessant wah-wah of the fire alarm came, in fact, from Swat teams pumping bullets into locked classroom doors in a painfully slow and clumsy effort to track down the killers. In order to crack the surface of why the Columbine shooters went to slaughter that day in April, we have to take a close and objective look at Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold beneath the headlines and beyond the mythologized facade. A Columbine survivor's tragic battle to reveal the 'ripple effect' of When I think of Eubanks, I also think of Darren Seals, a young activist from Ferguson who was deeply involved in the protests after the police killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. Hurt people often hurt other people: Eubanks saw this clearly in his own life. April 20, 1999. Austin Eubanks spoke publicly of becoming addicted to opioids after being shot. Gun violence in a place like that was treated as an aberration. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Eubanks recalled in a 2017 Tedx Mile High Talk. It's been 20 years since the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. But that was never asked, it was never talked about.. She was then spared. During the upheavals of 2020, the number of gun homicides across the United States increased, with an additional 5,000 people killed. All rights reserved. While theyd successfully managed to build them, the two then also decided to escalate things even further and consequently made two 20-pound propane bombs for the big event. The stories were repeated, too, by traumatised students who drifted towards the television cameras stationed in a park across the street from the school. Strangle them, squish their head, rip off their jaw, break their arms in half, show them who is God.. Jefferson County Sheriffs Department via Getty ImagesFrom left, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold examine a sawed-off shotgun at a makeshift shooting range. Seals had grown up with gun violence as a constant reality: St Louis has had one of the countrys highest homicide rates, and Seals himself had been shot two separate times. The Swat teams at Virginia Tech did not hesitate for an instant, almost certainly saving the lives of a dozen or more people. April 17, 2001 / 4:28 PM / CBS. In a 2016 interview with KMGH, Eubanks said he didn't seek help for his addiction until six years after the Columbine attack, and that it was another six years before he got sober. On April 20, 1999, Eubanks was in the library at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, with his best friend, Corey DePooter, waiting for other classmates to go to lunch, when teenage gunmen Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, launched what at the time was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history to occur at a high school. Cho killed 32 people and wounded 17 others with two semi-automatic pistols on April 16, 2007, at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.This killing is the deadliest school shooting in US history, and was at the time . He wrote an ingratiating letter to his victim offering empathy, rather than just apologies. This occurs in fall 1998, six months before the Columbine massacre. It was like they were having the time of their life.. A list of prevention resources can be found here. History.com notes while numerous theories about the teens motives for the shooting were raised -- from bullying to involvement in the Trenchcoat Mafia to violent video games -- investigators later pointed to journals which showed the pair wanted to create an Oklahoma City bombing-style disaster. People who have lost their children or parents, who are still dealing with gunshot injuries and have bullet fragments in their body, are more likely to ignore the odds, and keep working. A year before the attack, Joe Schallmoser and Howard Cornell were worried that Columbine was just the kind of place where a school shooting might happen. Amanda Cochran, Digital Special Projects Manager. And countless other ones.. If you need help with the Public File, call (713) 778-4745. Though April 20 was Adolf Hitlers birthday, it was actually only a coincidence that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried out their attack on that particular date. (The difference is so striking that Fuselier trains hostage negotiators to identify psychopaths during a standoff, and immediately reverse tactics if they think theyre facing one. The primary emotion for me these days is anger, Eubanks told me the evening of the Parkland shooting. After reading about Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, learn about the Trenchcoat Mafia and other Columbine myths that spread widely after the massacre. Circa 1998. Harris wore preppy clothes, played soccer well, and developed an interest in computers. It was the first of many disappointments for a pair of killers aiming for even greater infamy than they ultimately achieved. Seals, who was Black, had grown up in an area where violence was endemic and gunshots were common and young men like him had no expectation of being safe. There was blood everywhere and sprinkler systems set off by the pipe bombs only added to the chaos. As the son of an Air Force pilot, Harris had moved around fairly often as a child. Adults, and even some other kids, described him as nice. But Harris was cold, calculating, and homicidal. Its like flipping a switch between two alternate brain-mechanisms.). NATURAL SELECTION. We have this society that is filled with emotional pain and trauma, and we have people prescribing narcotics that are very effective with treating emotional pain and trauma, Eubanks had told me. There was a girl crouched beneath a desk in the library, and the guy came over and said, Peek a boo, and shot her in the neck, said Kirkland, recalling Klebolds vicious killing of Cassie Bernall. I have been thinking of Eubanks, and about those ripples of trauma, often in the past few months, as we marked the 10th anniversary of the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in December; and then the fifth anniversary of the Parkland shooting in February; as we covered three mass shootings in three days in California; and now as we are watching protests sparked by a new school shooting at the Covenant school in Nashville, Tennessee, and a new mass shooting at a bank in Louisville, Kentucky, that claimed the life of a close friend of Kentuckys governor. All contents "I want to grab some weak little freshman and just tear them apart like a fucking wolf. throw a Thanksgiving dinner for low-income families, mass shooting survivors can help each other heal. The two boys were in fact very different. Eubanks, then 17, was shot in the hand and leg in the rampage that claimed the lives of 12 students and a teacher, and ended with the gunmen taking their own lives. On April 20, 1999, Eubanks was in the library at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, with his best friend, Corey DePooter, waiting for other classmates to go to lunch, when teenage gunmen Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, launched what at the time was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history to occur at a high school. Harris married his deceitfulness with a total lack of remorse or empathyanother distinctive quality of the psychopath. Klebold and Harriss enthusiasm for violent video games was often cited as a direct link to and cause of the Columbine shooting. It has since been eclipsed by other mass shootings. He lied for pleasure, Fuselier says. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? Routt County Coroner Rob Ryg told ABC affiliate station KMGH-TV in Denver that Eubanks died sometime late Friday or early Saturday. Seung-Hui Cho (Korean: , properly Cho Seung-hui; January 18, 1984 - April 16, 2007) was a South Korean mass murderer responsible for the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. FILE - In this April 28, 1999, file photo, a woman stands among crosses posted on a hill above Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in remembrance of the people who died during a school . At scores of high schools around the US, meanwhile, teachers and mental health professionals have taken death threats or the discovery of weapons with the utmost seriousness. For slightly under an hour, the pair killed a dozen of their peers, one teacher, and wounded 20 more people. United in their cynical view of the world, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold spent their time playing violent video games, dressing in black, and eventually, diving deeply into their mutual curiosity and affection for guns and explosives or more generally, destruction. Eric Harris School Assignment", "The Bombs: The Columbine Guide-Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold Sue", "At 'perfect' school, student sat next to bomb", "Terror in Littleton: The Seniors; In Horrific Circumstance, Sense of Lost Pomp", "Columbine Survivor With Words for Virginia Students", "Friend of Columbine Killers Still Seeking Answers", "The chance mistake that saved hundreds of lives on the day of the Columbine shooting", "Mass shootings: what are the deadliest attacks in the US? Columbine High shooting survivor dies from 'the very disease he fought It was the most anxious hour of my life, she said. "I often think back to my pain that day," he said in the Tedx Mile High talk. They were hoping for a death toll of at least 2,000, matching the student population of the school. "But you've got to imagine this small number of people sitting at home, with guns on their lap and a hitlist in their mind. Both Eubanks and Seals were gun violence survivors whose shootings had turned them into activists. Its like an earthquake. What we were seeing, though, was not quite what we thought. Klebold was called a bright young man who has a great deal of potential.. Harris and Klebold werent just playing video games like Doom in their spare time, but also used the Internets DIY resources, including The Anarchist Cookbook, The Guardian reported, to learn about sophisticated bomb making. The school setting drove analysis in precisely the wrong direction. He had so much more work he wanted to do. The school served as means to a grander end, to terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life. How many students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school would deal with their trauma, as he did, through negative coping methods like addiction, he wondered. In the meantime, parents were ushered into a nearby elementary school to provide authorities with their childrens names so they could match survivors and victims to their corresponding families. But I try to remind myself that these feelings the grief, the anger, the panic, the nausea are a refusal to accept this kind of mass death as normal. Within an hour after fleeing the library, he was given sedatives in a hospital to relieve his pain. Columbine High School shooting: Remembering the deaths that brought Hopefully, Columbines legacy is one we will learn from rather than be doomed to continue to repeat. Almost all of them die at the scene . The truth about Columbine. He survived the Columbine High School mass shooting, but a 20-year battle with drug addiction that followed, one that Austin Eubanks had publicly said started with pills given to ease his pain from bullet wounds suffered in the 1999 rampage, has now cost him his life, his family said. Eubanks talked a lot about the dangers of numbness, about the impossibility of healing if we do not move through our grief. It has been nearly 20 years since the first mass school shooting in the U.S. -- the shocking tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999. The 11 mass deadly school shootings that happened since Columbine The footage is a part of a series the pair recorded called Hitmen for Hire. Despite earlier reports about Harris and Klebold being equal partners, the psychiatrists now believe firmly that Harris was the mastermind and driving force. If they hadnt been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. He blamed himself for his problems. Indeed, even two decades later, people are still attempting to reconcile how two children couldve engaged in such immense violence and become the Columbine shooters. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counselor. "In 1999, that's what deputies did. In 1999, however, Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold became the nations first poster boys for the phenomenon and the first to be widely misunderstood. With 377 school shootings since Columbine, Americans are still reckoning with the real toll of these attacks. The teen who bravely jumped from a window to escape the Columbine High School . Duping delightpsychologist Paul Ekmans termrepresents a key characteristic of the psychopathic profile. "It's not that the news coverage made the person paranoid, or armed, or suicidally depressed," Dietz says. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were charged with theft, criminal mischief, and criminal trespassing for breaking into a van and stealing belongings therein. ), FILE - In this April 19, 2004, file photo, a sign at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. Students who were planning to attack schools showed the same types of troubled histories as those who carried them out - they were badly bullied, often suffered from depression with stress at home, and their behavior worried others, according to a U.S. Secret Service study released March 30, 2021. Gone were the carefree days of the Clinton era here was the dawn of active shooter drills and daily fears for our children's safety. Circa 1998. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. Eubanks had seemed to be in recovery from his addiction, speaking to millions of people across the nation about the ravages of opioids and the "emotional pain" he said doctors were failing to treat. And numbness can feel like an acceptable way of dealing with the world we are being asked to live in. How Columbine Reshaped US Response to School Shootings A vegan who said he did not like the texture of food, he was only 111lb (50kg) when he died. First, they wanted to detonate two propane bombs in the cafeteria, killing not only the 600 or so students taking early lunch but also students in the library above, which they hoped would come crashing down. Harris claimed to lie to protect himself, but that appears to be something of a lie as well. Maybe you would, too. People visit a memorial on the 5th anniversary of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school mass shooting in February 2023. Jefferson County Sheriffs Office/Getty Images. The climax would be captured on live television. Trauma is not the only force that ripples outwards, affecting first hundreds, then thousands, then millions of people, that keeps moving years after the initial event has ended. The partnership did enable Harris to stray from typical psychopathic behavior in one way. And what happened on April 20, 1999, when 14 students, including the two shooters and a teacher . He was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. Patrick Ireland recounts his escape from Columbine killers For doing it, not for getting caught. "I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can," he wrote in his journal. When they watch the coverage of a school shooting, it only takes one or two of them to say, 'That guy is just like me, that's the solution to my problem, that's what I'll do tomorrow.'" They feel willing to die. But he was also harboring a deep hatred for the world. Columbine High School Shooting: The Full Story Behind The Tragedy "As you can imagine, we are beyond shocked and saddened," his family's statement reads. Masri was just 31, one of several Ferguson protesters lost too young. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority. Only later did the authorities realise Harris and Klebold were already lying dead in the library, along with 10 of their 13 murder victims. (Hare is also one of the psychologists consulted by the FBI about Columbine and by Slate for this story. Circa 1998. Columbine: Were There Warning Signs? - CBS News Though Harris temperament and behavior were seemingly as normal as anyone elses at his age, he did appear to have trouble finding his place in Littleton. At last we know why the Columbine killers did it. - Slate Magazine Just before the Halloween of his senior year, Eric Harris began assembling his arsenal.