Exorcising the Pain
Littleton buries its dead and tries to understand
What's perhaps most disturbing about Harris's Internet ravings is that people knew about them, yet nothing was done. Randall Brown, whose son's life was threatened by Harris, took the screeds to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department once--and again after the cops lost them. Brown says the police took no action, even though they were aware the boys had been arrested for breaking into a car. The sheriff's department said Friday that its deputy assigned to the school had been given the writings last March and was watching Harris, but saw no evidence of a crime. No one talked to his parents. No one told the court officer monitoring the boys' probation program about the threats. Nor did anyone tell the judge who handled their cases. Magistrate John DeVita told NBC: "I probably would have looked at it a little closer, I think, if that information may have been available."
There's also a question of whether America Online, which hosted the Web site, had some responsibility. Internet service providers are not liable for clients' postings, nor are they required to monitor them. At least not legally. But what about ethically? AOL bars threatening statements. "Our policy is to encourage members to notify AOL's call center if a threat rises to the level of suicide or violent threat, and then we'll contact the authorities," says spokesperson Kim McCreery.
Randy Brown did not show the vile missives to Harris's parents. In an interview with U.S. News, Brown nearly broke down when asked if he shared them with the Klebolds. Brown's wife, Judy, and Susan Klebold are close friends. The Browns did express concern to the Harrises several times--besides threatening Brooks Brown's life, Harris had cracked his windshield and urinated on the Browns' bushes. Both Harrises were "very concerned." Says Randy Brown: "His mother started to cry when I told her about the windshield. She said she'd take care of it." Wayne Harris gave his son a talking-to, but "Eric fooled them all. He fooled everyone," says Brown. "He convinced his father that there really wasn't anything serious about his behavior, and his father believed him." Indeed, that's the other side of Eric Harris--a smooth, well-mannered charmer. "That boy was very skilled at deception," says the mother of a Columbine freshman whom Harris repeatedly asked out in the weeks before the shooting.
Copycat crimes. And in that, too, Harris was like a lot of teenage boys. In fact, whatever was going on in the brains of Harris and Klebold is, on some levels, not unique. Far more than past school shootings, the Littleton massacre continued to spawn troubling copycat crimes in schools across North America last week.
The most serious came when a 14-year-old Canadian boy was charged with murder after he pulled a 22-caliber rifle from his long dark coat and opened fire on pupils at a high school in rural Alberta, killing an 11th grader and seriously injuring another student. But throughout the United States, hundreds of schools were on a heightened state of alert following threats of gun and bomb violence. Most proved unfounded, but there were more than a few signs of serious intent. In Brooklyn, N.Y., police arrested five 13-year-olds after they were overheard allegedly plotting to bomb the school at its June graduation ceremony. In Oklahoma, authorities evacuated 500 students at Enid High School after a school employee found a homemade pipe bomb in a bathroom. In California, several teenage boys were arrested after they threatened to blow up the school. At one boy's home, investigators found a school map marked with bomb targets and a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook--an explosives manual. For all their isolation, Harris and Klebold were not alone.
With Joannie M. Schrof, Jeff Kass, Ben Wildavsky and Susan Gregory Thomas
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