Some media reactions to the Columbine records…
NPR reporter Jeff Brady has read through much of the material. He says it is sometimes difficult to tell who wrote what, but he says he believes that this line came from the journal of gunman Eric Harris:
“I am full of hate and I love it. I hate people and they better f—— fear me if they know what’s good for them.”
Jeff says the writings depict Harris as an emotional person whose “thought processes are really deep but really disturbing at the same time.”
The newly released papers suggest that the two seniors dropped several clues about their plans in advance. But they were not enough to prompt intervention.
I disagree that they weren’t enough to prompt investigation. There was too much evidence for not one person to notice.
If we didn’t all know that in this case, it ended in bloody mayhem, this could be any parent agonizing over an adolescent’s serious misbehavior and trying to make certain the young person faces up to the consequences and learns better. Which Harris appeared to do, while he was in the program and conforming to its requirements, but secretly he was boiling with rage. He lied to everyone, he was proud of the lies and he fooled the people who were doing what they could to rescue him.
How can any parent read these lines and not wonder, “Could that be my child?”
The video game references that I’ve read in excerpts (not having had time to consume the entire document yet) paint Harris more as an obsessive fanboy, period, than particularly driven by the game itself.
The parents of Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have often been portrayed as disengaged from the lives of their sons and unaware of the dark paths lying ahead. But 936 pages of evidence taken from the killers’ homes and cars were released by the Jefferson County Sheriff’s office on Thursday, and a notebook kept by Eric’s father, Wayne, details a parent’s involvement in his child’s downward spiral.
But was still clueless to everything.
In one passage, he foreshadows the blame game that would follow the shootings. “I know I could get shot by a cop after only killing a single person, but hey … I chose to kill that one person so get over it! It’s MY fault! Not my parents, not my brothers, not my friends, not my favorite bands, not computer games, not the media, it is MINE!”
Harris was right. It was his fault. But plenty of others failed along the way.