Massacre Rubs Old Wounds at Columbine
It should surprise no one that news of this week's Virginia Tech massacre has rubbed old wounds like Brian Rohrbough's raw.
It's not that the killings rekindled grief over his only son, Daniel, who was shot dead eight years ago this Friday during a bloody rampage by fellow Columbine High School students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
"Those feelings [of grief] never really go away," Rohrbough says. "They're something you just learn to live with."
Rather, Monday's hauntingly similar killings by Cho Seung.Hui–a deeply troubled student whose hostile behavior was well known to fellow students, school officials, and police–sent Rohrbough into a seething funk because he has spent much of his life since his son's murder fighting to prevent another campus slaughter.
"What we're seeing in Virginia so far is the same exact pattern," Rohrbough says in frustration. "And the likelihood is that it probably could have been avoided."
Convinced that lessons gleaned from tens of thousands of pages documenting the events of April 20, 1999, could do just that, Rohrbough and other Columbine parents have waged a seven-year battle to make public a dense collection of police, medical, and school records, as well as interviews with the killers' parents and video and audio tapes Harris and Klebold made before the shootings–all of which they believe could help others better understand the witch's brew of risk factors that can send young people over the edge. Yet from the earliest days of the investigation into the Columbine killings, they say they have been stymied by a woeful combination of tight-lipped officials, overly protective privacy laws, and judges so wary of copycats that they have kept a wealth of details about the killings sealed from public view–a fact some believe has not only undermined prevention of future attacks but has also left people like Rohrbough unable to move on.
Though the healing has begun in Virginia, the continuing struggle to understand what until this week was the worst school shooting in U.S. history serves as a cautionary tale of just how long the recovery process can take, especially when information is withheld from those who can most benefit from it. Indeed, many involved in the Columbine case say that fuller disclosure of information could have quelled a years-long firestorm of suspicions and conspiracy theories that at one point pushed Rohrbough to claim that his son had been killed not by Harris or Klebold but by a police officer–a belief that took nearly three years and a follow-up investigation to finally disprove.
"That's a hard lesson we learned," says Dave Thomas, the former district attorney who revisited Daniel Rohrbough's death. "There's something inherently healing about having full information. In traumatic deaths, human nature wants to know exactly who, why, and where it happened. It helps the process of moving on."
Yet even when information is made available, it can sometimes take years before it's put to good use. Take the findings of a Colorado state commission issued a year after the Columbine tragedy, which, among other things, recommended that information-sharing agreements be mandated between police, schools, and others who deal with troubled kids. Although signed into law in 2000, legislators failed to provide the necessary funding to ensure it was put into practice.
As a result, of the 176 school districts in the state, "only about five [information-sharing agreements] have been completed so far," notes criminologist Bill Woodward, who has tracked their progress at the University of Colorado's Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence. "People still don't want to share information because [over] their whole lives they've been taught that the liability will be on them if they do."
That is most likely what motivated the killers' parents to try to withhold their sons' notorious "basement tapes" in which they detail their reasons for the attack, as well as keep under wraps the depositions the parents gave. Although the basement tapes were eventually shown to the press and to parents, they remain unavailable to the public, and the judge in the case recently ruled that the parents' depositions should remain sealed in the National Archives for 25 years, in part out of concerns that they could be used by those planning copycat crimes.
Yet some are dubious of such reasoning. "It's ridiculous to think that those depositions could have inspired someone like that person in Virginia to go on a killing spree," says Judy Brown, whose son Brooks was threatened by Eric Harris a year before the shooting. "I'll tell you who would read them: parents and psychologists trying to avoid another Columbine."
As for the basement tapes, "if you saw what Eric had in his room, every parent would be stunned," she says of the pipe bombs hidden behind CDs and gunpowder in a coffee can.
"Then he hands over the camera and says, 'Look, Mom, my room is clean.' "
Adds Rohrbough: "These [tapes] are so critical because before seeing them I could never have guessed what you should be looking for. There's stuff so remarkably similar [to the Virginia Tech attack] that it will send a chill down your back."