Most of the bodies lay under tables. The victims had been attempting to hide. Two bodies were different. They lay out in the open, weapons by their sides. Suicides, clearly. The SWAT team had descriptions of Eric and Dylan. These two looked like a match. It was over.
The team discovered four women hiding in back rooms attached to the library. Patti Nielson, the art teacher from the 911 call, had crept into a cupboard in the break room. She had squatted in the cupboard for three more hours, knees aching, unaware the danger had passed. Three other faculty hid farther back. An officer instructed one to put her hand on his shoulder and follow him out, staring directly at his helmet, to minimize exposure to the horror.
It had been over how long? No one knew. With the fire alarm blaring, none of the staff had been close enough to hear.
Detectives would piece it together eventually—how long the attack had lasted, and how long Eric and Dylan had killed. Those would turn out to be very different answers. Something peculiar had transpired seventeen minutes into the attack.
The investigation outpaced the SWAT teams. Detectives were combing the park, the library, Leawood Elementary, and the surrounding community. They interviewed hundreds of students and staff—everyone they could find. When waves of fresh survivors outnumbered police officers, they conducted thirty-to sixty-second triage interviews: Who are you? Where were you? What did you see? Friends of the killers and witnesses to bloodshed were identified quickly, and detectives were waved over for lengthier interviews.
Lead investigator Kate Battan performed some interviews personally; she was briefed on the rest. Battan was intent on getting every detail right—and avoiding costly errors that might come back to haunt them later. “Everyone learned a lot from hearing about the O. J. Simpson case and JonBenet Ramsey,” she said later. “We didn’t need another situation like those.”
Her team also ran a simple search on Jeffco computer files and found something stunning. The shooters were already in the system. Eric and Dylan had been arrested junior year. They got caught breaking into a van to steal electronic equipment. They had entered a twelve-month juvenile Diversion program, performing community service and attending counseling. They’d completed the program with glowing reviews exactly ten weeks before the massacre.
More disturbing was a complaint filed thirteen months earlier by Randy and Judy Brown, the parents of the shooters’ friend Brooks. Eric had made death threats toward Brooks. Ten pages of murderous rants printed from his Web site had been compiled. Someone in Battan’s department had known about this kid.
Battan organized the information and composed a single-spaced six-page search warrant for Eric’s home and a duplicate for Dylan’s. She dictated them over the phone. The warrants were typed up in Golden, the county seat, delivered to a judge, signed, driven out to the killers’ homes, and exercised within four hours of the first shots—before the SWAT team reached the library and discovered the attack was over.
The warrants cited seven witnesses who’d identified Harris and/or Klebold as the gunmen.
Agent Fuselier heard about the bodies on the police radio at 3:20. He had just gotten word that his son Brian was OK. Mass murder meant a massive investigation. “How can I help?” Fuselier asked the Jeffco commanders. “Do you want federal agents?” Definitely, they said. Jeffco had a small detective team—there was no way it could handle the task. An hour later, eighteen evidence specialists began arriving. A dozen special agents would follow, along with half a dozen support staff.
At 4:00 P.M., Jeffco went public about the fatalities. Chief spokesman Steve Davis called a press conference in Clement Park, with Sheriff Stone by his side. The pair had been briefing reporters all afternoon. Most of the press had never heard of either man, but consensus about them emerged quickly. Sheriff Stone was a straight shooter; he had a deep, gruff voice and classic western mentality: no hedging, no bluster, no bullshit. What a contrast to the blow-dried spokesman affixed to his side. Steve Davis began the conference by reiterating warnings about rumors. Above all, he stressed caution on two subjects: the number of fatalities and the status of the suspects.
Davis opened the floor to questions. The first was directed to him by name. Sheriff Stone stepped forward, brushing Davis and his cautions aside. He held custody of the microphone through most of the press conference. The sheriff answered nearly every question directly, despite later evidence that he had little or no information on many of them. He winged it. The death count nearly doubled. “I’ve heard numbers as high as twenty-five,” he said. He pronounced the killers unequivocally dead. He fed the myth of a third shooter. “Three—two dead [suspects] in the library,” he said.
“Well, where is the third?”
“We’re not sure if there is a third yet or not, or how many. The SWAT operation is still going on in there.”
Stone repeated the erroneous death count several times. It led newscasts around the world. Newspaper headlines proclaimed it the next morning: TWENTYFIVE DEAD IN COLORADO.
Stone said the three kids detained in the park appeared to be “associates of these gentlemen or good friends.” He was wrong; they had never met the killers, and were soon cleared.
Stone made the first of an infamous string of accusations. “What are these parents doing that are letting their kids have automatic weapons?” he asked.
Reporters were surprised to hear the rumors about automatic weapons confirmed. They rushed in with follow-ups. “I don’t know anything about the weapons,” Stone admitted. “I assume there were probably automatic weapons just because of the mass casualties.”
A reporter asked about motive. “Craziness,” Stone said. Wrong again.
By now dozens of kids had fled the school with their friends. School officials herded them across Clement Park to meet school buses that would drive past police barricades to Leawood. The buses parked directly beside the site of the press conferences.
The kids trudged meekly toward the media throng. Many sobbed quietly. Others helped distraught students along, holding their hands or slinging an arm over their shoulders. Most of the kids stared at the ground. The crowd of reporters parted. These were not the faces of interview subjects.
But the students were eager to speak. Teachers hurried the kids, chiding them to keep quiet. They were having none of that. The bus windows started coming down, heads popped out, and kids recounted their ordeals. Kids piled off the buses.
The teachers tried to coax them back on. Not a chance. A tough-looking senior described his terror in the choir room with a sense of bravado and chivalry. But his voice cracked when a reporter asked how he felt. “Horrible,” he said. “There were two kids lying on the pavement. I just—I started crying. I haven’t cried for years, I just—I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Attention focused on the students. Endless reunions with their parents played out on TV. A different group weathered the crisis in seclusion. More than a hundred teachers worked at Columbine, along with dozens of support staff. A hundred and fifty families feared for their husbands, wives, and parents. There was no rendezvous point where they could gather. Most drove home and waited by their phones. That’s where Linda Lou Sanders kept vigil.
She had celebrated her mom’s seventieth birthday with the family; then they’d headed up into the mountains for a pleasure drive. On the way, Linda’s brother-in-law called her sister, Melody, on her cell.