COLUMBINE by Dave Cullen

It's astounding in its detail and reportage and heartbreaking in its simplicity of writing. It's the Columbine book written by the right guy for the job, and probably one of the best true crime books I've ever read. Bought it on Friday, got about halfway through and it still really fucked up my weekend.

There's a terrifying section early on where Cullen lays out the exact specifics of the boys' plan and just how high the body count would have been had it all gone off without a hitch. (As the book describes it repeatedly, Columbine was less of a school shooting and more of a "bombing that failed." Had the killers' propane bombs exploded in the commons area, it would have probably collapsed the library above it onto the 500 people already in the commons. And the two wanted to ratchet up the body count even after they were dead; rigging their cars to explode with additional bombs, taking out news crews and medical personnel that responded to the scene.)

I'm at the part now where the investigative team is starting to piece together the story, and so it's getting to the part where chunks of the story -- like the fact there was an affidavit to search Harris' house a year before the massacre that was buried -- are about people covering their ass or letting things slide. So it's past the "fuck, that's fucked up" section and more the "that's bullshit" section.

Although Cullen's simple style -- letting the "what" explain the "why" -- leads to some darkly funny passages/sentences. There's one where he's talking about Dylan Kleibold's journal. Kleibold was obsessed with this one particular girl, and wrote "I hope she likes techno." The next paragraph is: "That was the other hurdle. He did not yet know whether she liked techno."

That works for Cullen, because he just tells the story, he doesn't judge or make conclusions. He lets the people whose job it was to figure out the "why" do that. He explains how the rumors and myths got started, and the only blame he lays are on the newspapers/media outlets that hid or misreported information. (Cullen was one of the guys who broke the Cassie Bernall story as false, and later learned that one of the local papers chose to sat on that information for months.) Another interesting fact: the chief psychologist/FBI investigator who put together the profile on the boys based on their journals, etc. was also the last known guy to speak to David Koresh.

The most painful thing I took from this book is this inescapable feeling that Dylan Klebold wasn't beyond help. Eric Harris was a psychopath, nobody was going to get through to him. But goddamn it, Dylan could've been ok if somebody else, somebody better could've influenced him to the degree that Eric did. He was a lovesick teenager who had misplaced anger issues. I don't think he was beyond help at all.

The book is quite good. I'm amazed at how much I didn't know. I never heard that Cassie Bernhall's story was proven to be a misquote. I knew the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department mishandled things but man, I didn't know they fucked things up to this degree.

The most startling thing were the numbers of how many would've died if the cafeteria bombs had exploded. I knew the bombs were big, and I knew they involved propane tanks, but I'd either never known or forgotten the way the school was constructed (the library is directly above the cafeteria, if the bombs had exploded they would've collapsed most of that wing).

A miniseries would be almost too much, I think. A longer film, done in a Zodiac 'just the facts' style, would be about as much as I think most people could take. And I know given his gift for adapting real life events makes people think Greengrass, but I think Peter Berg could do amazing things with this story, combining the obsessive detail of his mentor Michael Mann with the humanity of a Friday Night Lights.

This book made me really angry, although that was more towards the sections of what happened after than the actual lead up to the massacre itself. I got angry at everyone in it, for different reasons. I found myself being frustrated at the media for creating the echo chamber for rumors to spread, and then I got pissed at the community for painting all members of the media with the same "you people" brush. The Bernall thing really pissed me off, as it always has -- I understand Misty Bernall needed to grieve, and the book was her way of dealing with it, but I really hated how she brushed off the kids who were there for the sake of needing to make sense out of her daughter's death. I get it, but, you know, still.

I think a lot of my reaction to it also comes from the fact that the massacre was a formative event in my adolescence. The passages near the end where Fuslier and other shrinks were discussing how "zero tolerance" doesn't really work resonated because I was one of those kids in high school, recognized as a potential threat by his peers and a nutbar by the administration. I remember hearing the Bernall story told at a mandatory mass and knowing even then it was bullshit. I still have a lot of anger over those things, but the years since have dulled it. But Columbine still looms large when I think about my high school experience, and this book brought back a lot of those memories. It was painful to read, and I'll probably read it again every couple of years or so, but it's the closest we'll get to the truth.

Surprising Cullen never saw the Basement Tapes, though.

Sounds like a must-read. I've long been interested in the myths around this case (Cassie, etc.) and how they spread so quickly and stayed so ingrained despite the counterevidence.

Plus what Rath mentioned, that this was a big, permeating story for those who were in school at the time.

I hear ya man. Being a weird(but completely harmless) fucker, I took so much shit after Columbine it was ridiculous. I'd get picked on mercisously and when I try to defend myself the other kids would start in with "careful I heard he say he's gonna pull a gun on all of us" or something to that effect. It continued until eventually, I too got labeled as a threat by the teachers at this Christian middle school I was attending and got kicked out; which in retrospect was a blessing in disguise. I mean, after all, who knows where I'd be if I had a few more years of their brainwashing

I graduated from a Long Island high school in '86. From grade school (when I was given a Rorschach test and said one image looked like a giant demon eating someone's head) though high school (when I listened to metal, everyone (students and teachers) knew I carried a knife, and I openly admitted to teachers that it would be an interesting experience to kill someone) I exhibited behaviors that would have me medicated and watched like a hawk (if not outright expelled) today.

I think the difference was that I was an honor/advanced placement student, Merit Scholar semi-finalist, chess club dude. Everyone knew I was marginally sociopathic, they just gave me a pass because I was smart.

Thank you guys for recommending this. I've been absolutely engrossed in it ever since I picked it up a couple days ago. When I first started reading, I just thought "Oh, I'll just read a few chapters and then go to bed." And before I knew it two hours had passed and I had just torn through a hundred pages.

The best (and also most harrowing) part of reading this book? The admission that every single major media report of the events that took place led to exactly the wrong conclusions and myths that people are exploiting to this day are still alive and well. Cases in point:

- the two were not loners
- the two of them bullied younger kids
- the two weren't on any kind of medication at the time of the shooting or before hand for that mater (which will piss off the Scientologists to no end, given how much they use that myth to push their War! On! Psychiatry!)
- the two didn't even wear trenchcoats

It sort of makes the endless pages of messageboard posts around the world saying "We were bullied too don't you understand?? We totally GET how they snapped!" 100% complete bullshit. Like Chris Rock said, "Crazy is just crazy!"

What a fantastic read though!

Columbine was probably my favourite school shooting of the past decade, so I'll be picking this up.

Well, that's a lousy post to follow-up, but hey: I've started this, and it's as gripping and as fascinating as billed. It reminds me immediately of 102 Minutes, given how impressive the reporting is. Due to the setting and Cullen's approach to the various people in and around the story, I've also spent a few moments recalling Bissinger's Friday Night Lights.

So good. Goldberg's above story is my own.

I read this last summer and was blown the fuck away by it. An exhilarating, disturbing, and god-honest-true account of the massacre, heavily detailed, and yes, it's paced and feels so cinematic.

I WOULD KILL to see this made into a movie a la Zodiac or JFK, and I have ideas for it as well. For casting, I thought about these, not as much the younger roles for students, but for some of the adults:

Robert Downey Jr. as Principal Frank DeAngelis
Edward Norton (alternates Jeffrey Dean Morgan or Josh Brolin) as FBI Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier
Woody Harrelson (alternate John Slattery) as Brian Rohrbough
Amy Ryan (alternate Toni Collette) as Misty Bernall
Paul Giamatti as Dave "Coach" Sanders
William Forsythe as Sheriff John Stone

I could also see their being an opening credits sequence set to "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails chronicling a history of school shootings as well as the onset of violence in America during the Clinton era, then segueing into the first part of the book.