When she answered yes, Harris laughed and pulled the trigger. A story soon spread that one of the murder victims in the library, Cassie Bernall, had been asked at gunpoint if she believed in God. Supposedly, they also had a grudge against evangelical Christians. They not only hated jocks, they were racists who picked 20 April for the attack because it was Hitler's birthday. Harris and Klebold, we were told, were members of a campus group of losers and Marilyn Manson-worshipping goths called the Trenchcoat Mafia, who had few friends and attracted only derision from the cool kids. The illusion of an ordeal lasting for hours - some television stations even described it as a hostage stand-off - was just the first of many misconceptions. Only later did the authorities realise Harris and Klebold were already lying dead in the library, along with 10 of their 13 murder victims. 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. By the time the TV crews arrived, Harris and Klebold had in fact ended their rampage and turned their weapons on themselves. What we were seeing, though, was not quite what we thought. That, too, was broadcast live on international television. Another victim, already badly wounded in the head, arm and legs but seized by a compulsion to get out of the school at any cost, somehow pirouetted his broken body across a window ledge and let himself tumble into the arms of two waiting officers. One of the dead was left stranded in a parking lot, which terrified fellow students would eventually have to pass as they ran out at the end of their ordeal. That, in retrospect, may not have been an entirely good thing.įrom the start, the images seemed to suck viewers right into the heart of the mayhem. Denver television crews got there while the horrors were unfolding, and the cameras did not stop rolling for a week. In contrast to previous American school shootings, which had unfolded in hard-to-reach locales such as West Paducah, Kentucky, or Jonesboro, Arkansas, this one happened half an hour's drive from a major media hub. They laughed and hollered while they were doing it, as though they were having the time of their lives. Harris and Klebold did not just gun down their victims in cold blood. It was the bloodiest, creepiest, most vivid school attack anyone at the time could remember and remains, to this day, the episode the American popular imagination just can't seem to shake. What is indisputable is that Columbine quickly became a byword for the nightmarish phenomenon - now seemingly a worldwide contagion - of school shootings. The teenagers were called Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, and their school was Columbine High, an idyllic sounding place nestled between the Denver metropolitan area and the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
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