Word of the ambulance scenes and the hostage standoff traveled quickly to Leawood and the public library. Parents grew tenser, but they worked together, exchanging information and passing around cell phones. It was tough to get a signal. Cell phones were not ubiquitous in 1999, yet everyone in this affluent community seemed to have one. They pounded at them furiously, grilling neighbors, updating relatives, leaving messages for their children on every conceivable answering machine. Some would hit Redial absentmindedly as they swapped information face-to-face, buzzing their own homes, praying that the machine wouldn’t pick up this time. Misty kept calling Brad. Still no word on Chris or Cassie.
Then a fresh story zipped through the pack: twenty students—or thirty or forty—were still inside the school. They were not hostages; they were hiding, barricaded in the choir room with equipment piled high against the door. The parents gasped. Was that good news or bad? Dozens more students were in danger, but dozens more confirmed alive—if it was true. A lot of wild rumors had already come and gone.
At least two to three hundred students were hiding in the school, in classrooms and utility closets, under tables and desks. Some had rigged up protection; others were right out in the open. Everyone was afraid to move. A great number whispered cautiously into cell phones. Many clustered around classroom TVs. They heard banging and crashing and the deafening screech of the fire alarm. CNN carried a live call between a local anchor and a student alone under a desk. What was he hearing? The same thing as you, the student said. “I’ve got a little TV [and I’m] watching you guys right now.” For four hours rumors, confirmations, and embellishments bounced in and out.
The cops were livid. Reporters had no idea hundreds of kids were trapped inside and no concept of the echo chamber in full bloom. The cops knew. The detective force was assembling teams to interview every survivor, and they knew hundreds of their best witnesses were still inside, getting compromised by the minute. But the cops had no means to stop it. This was the first major hostage standoff of the cell phone age, and they had never seen anything like it. At the moment, they were more concerned with information passing to the shooters. Sometimes the kids’ revelations scared reporters. On live TV, a boy described sounds he took to be the gunmen: “I hear stuff being thrown around,” he said. “I am staying underneath this desk. I don’t know if they know I’m up here. I am just staying upstairs for right now, and I just hope they don’t know—”
The anchorwoman interrupted: “Don’t tell us where you are!”
The boy described more commotion. “There’s a little bunch of people crying outside. I can hear them downstairs.” Something crashed. “Whoa!”
The anchor gasped. “What was that?!”
“I don’t know.”
The anchors had enough. Her partner told him to hang up, keep quiet, and try to reach 911. “Keep trying to call them, OK?”
The cops pleaded with the TV stations to stop. Please ask the hostages to quit calling the media, they said. Tell them to turn off the televisions.
The stations aired the requests and continued broadcasting the calls. “If you’re watching, kids, turn the TV off,” one anchor implored. “Or down, at least.”
Much of the country was watching the standoff unfold. None of the earlier school shootings had been televised; few American tragedies had. The Columbine situation played out slowly, with the cameras rolling. Or at least it appeared that way: the cameras offered the illusion we were witnessing the event. But the cameras had arrived too late. Eric and Dylan had retreated inside after five minutes. The cameras missed the outside murders and could not follow Eric and Dylan inside. The fundamental experience for most of America was almost witnessing mass murder. It was the panic and frustration of not knowing, the mounting terror of horror withheld, just out of view. We would learn the truth about Columbine, but we would not learn it today.
We saw fragments. What the cameras showed us was misleading. An army of police held at bay suggested an equivalent force inside. Hysterical witnesses corroborated that image, describing wildly different assaults. Killers seemed to be everywhere. Cell phone callers confirmed the killers remained active. They provided unimpeachable evidence of gunfire from inside the attack zone. The data was correct; the conclusions were wrong. SWAT teams were on the move.
The narrative unfolding on television looked nothing like the killers’ plan. It looked only moderately like what was actually occurring. It would take months for investigators to piece together what had gone on inside. Motive would take longer to unravel. It would be years before the detective team would explain why.
The public couldn’t wait that long. The media was not about to. They speculated.
15. First Assumption
An investigative team had assembled before noon. Kate Battan (rhymes with Latin) was named lead investigator. Battan already knew who her primary suspects were. Most of the students were perplexed about who was attacking them, but quite a few had recognized the gunmen. Two names had been repeated over and over. Battan quickly compiled dossiers on Eric and Dylan in the command post trailer in Clement Park. She dispatched teams to secure their homes. Detectives arrived at the Harris place at 1:15, just as the third SWAT team burst into the Columbine teachers’ lounge. Eric’s parents had gotten word and were already home. The cops found them uncooperative. They tried to refuse entrance. The cops insisted. Kathy Harris got scared when they headed for the basement. “I don’t want you going down there!” she said. They said they were securing the residence and removing everyone. Wayne said he doubted Eric was involved, but would help if there was an active situation. Kathy’s twin sister was with her. Wayne and Kathy were concerned about the repercussions, she explained; parents of the victims might retaliate.
The cops smelled gas; they had the utility company shut off power, then resumed the search. In Eric’s room they found a sawed-off shotgun barrel on a bookshelf, unspent ammunition on the bed, fingertips cut off gloves on the floor, and fireworks and bomb materials on the desk, the dresser, the windowsill, and the wall, among other places. Elsewhere they discovered a page from The Anarchist Cookbook, packaging for a new gas can, and scattered glass shards on a slab in the backyard. An evidence specialist arrived that night and spent four hours, shooting seven rolls of film. He left at 1:00 A.M.
The Klebolds were much more forthcoming. A police report described Tom as “very communicative.” He gave a full account of Dylan’s past and laid out all his friendships. Dylan had been in good spirits, Tom said. Sue described him as extremely happy. Tom was anti-gun and Dylan agreed with him on that—they wouldn’t find any guns or explosives in the house, that was for sure, Tom said. The cops did find pipe bombs. Tom was shocked. Dylan was fine, he insisted. He and Dylan were close. He would have known it if anything was up.
The first FBI agent on the scene at Columbine was Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier. He had shaken the Cajun accent, on everything but his name. FUSE-uh-lay, he said. Everyone got it wrong. He was a veteran agent, a clinical psychologist, a terrorism expert, and one of the leading hostage negotiators in the country. None of that led Dr. Fuselier to Columbine High. His wife had called. Their son was in the school.
Fuselier got the call in the cafeteria of Denver’s Rogers Federal Building, a downtown high-rise thirty minutes away. He was sipping a bowl of bland soup—-lowsalt, for his hypertension. The bowl stayed on the table. When he got to his Dodge Intrepid, Fuselier swiped his arm under the seat, groping for the portable police light. He hadn’t pulled it out in years.