Eric had not given up on the twenty-three-year-old. For months, he kept calling Brenda. She told him she had a new boyfriend, but he persisted. Late in the year, she met him at a Macaroni Grill. “He was really bummed out,” she said. She thought he was bummed because she’d dumped him. He denied it, but offered no explanation. She never saw him again.
Just before Christmas, Eric celebrated his last final, ever. He laughed at his classmates, who assumed they had another batch ahead.
The next day, Eric ordered several ten-round magazines for his carbine rifle. Those would do some damage. He could peel off 130 rounds in rapid succession.
There was a problem. Eric gave Green Mountain Guns his home number. They called just before New Year’s, and his dad answered.
“Your clips are in,” the clerk told him.
Clips? He didn’t order any gun clips.
Eric overheard the conversation. Oh God. He described the incident in his journaclass="underline" “jesus Christ that was fucking close. fucking shitheads at the gunshop almost dropped the whole project.” Luckily, Wayne never stopped to ask the guy if he had the right number. And the guy never asked any questions either. That could have been the end of it right there. If either one of them had handled that phone call a little differently, the entire plan might have come crashing down, Eric said. But they didn’t.
But Wayne was suspicious.
“thank god I can BS so fucking well,” Eric wrote.
Once they got the guns, Eric lost interest in “The Book of God.” It was on to implementation. After New Year’s, he would leave just one final installment, a few weeks before they did the deed.
Eric was raring to go; Dylan continued to waver. “Existences” had been silent for five months, since he said good-bye. But on January 20, Bob Kriegshauser called Dylan in for an important meeting. Dylan resumed his journal the same day.
“This shit again,” he began. He didn’t want to be writing this again, he wanted to be “free,” meaning dead. “I thought it would have been time by now,” he wrote. “The pain multiplies infinitely. never stops.” Eric’s plan offered the solace of suicide: “maybe Going ‘NBK’ (gawd) w. eric is the best way to be free. i hate this.” Then more hearts and love. He hardly seemed committed to the plan. But he appeared to be putting up a good front to Eric. Neither boy ever recorded a suggestion of Dylan’s resistance, but Eric seemed to be doing most of the work.
Eric was also working hard to get laid. He made a final stab with Brenda, leaving a string of messages on her answering machine. “I’m sorry I lied to you,” he said. “There’s something we need to talk about. I’m seventeen.” He was through lying, he said—he wanted to take their relationship to the next level. And she could keep the Rammstein CDs he’d left at her house. He wouldn’t be needing them anymore.
The last part made her nervous. She called back to make sure he was all right. And she reiterated one more time that they were just friends.
Eric wasn’t bothered. He was working another chick. Kristi was the girl he had passed notes with in German class. Lately she seemed interested in more. So they tried a sort of informal group date to Rock’n’ Bowl night at Belleview Lanes.
Kristi liked him, but she was conflicted. There was this other guy, a friend of Eric’s, Nate Dykeman. Bastard!
Eric turned on the charm, and Kristi went for it—just not enough. It was sex he really wanted; he had no interest in a real relationship, and maybe Kristi picked up on that.
Nate moved in on Kristi fast. They started dating, got serious, and Eric turned on Nate.
As Eric wrapped up plans for April 20, Dylan was laying into his journal in a frenzy. They were short entries and erratic, tossing aside all his conventions. Several ran half a page or less. He was expressing himself more and more in pictures, all his old icons returning, linked together in wild, feverish strokes. Fluttering hearts were everywhere, filling up entire pages, blasting out the road to happiness, bursting with stars and powered by an engine shaped like the symbol for infinity. Dylan was focused on one topic now: love. Up until his final week, Dylan wrote privately of almost nothing else.
47. Lawsuits
Ten days before the first anniversary, Brian Rohrbough threw a Hail Mary. The cops had been stonewalling, and litigation looked like the only answer. Families could sue for negligence or wrongful death, and use the process to force out information. The verdict would be less important than discovery.
Should they sue? How could they know? It all rested on Jeffco’s final report. If Jeffco released all the evidence, most families would be satisfied. If Jeffco held back, they were going to court. No one had anticipated that the report would take this long. Way back in the summer of 1999, Jeffco had said its report was six to eight weeks away. It was April now, and officials were still saying they had six to eight weeks to go.
The investigators had wrapped up most of their work in the first four months, but Jeffco was skittish about presenting the information. Yet the longer they waited, the more leaks they risked, the more rebukes, and the higher the stakes to get every sentence right.
Even the school administration was frustrated. “We keep getting ready,” Mr. D told a magazine in April. “I keep telling the community, ‘OK, we’re about two weeks away, we’re two weeks away.’ There’s only so many times you can get so wound up saying, ‘Oh, I’m ready now, I’m ready,’ and then all of a sudden, ‘No!’ There’s a level of frustration.”
The delays were maddening, but a practical problem was also arising. The first anniversary coincided with the statute of limitations. By delaying the report past April 20, 2000, Jeffco forced the families to trust them or sue. That was an easy choice. On April 10, the Rohrboughs and the Flemings filed an open records request demanding to see the report immediately—one last option to avoid a lawsuit. Since they were filing, they asked for everything, including the Basement Tapes, the killers’ journals, the 911 calls, and surveillance videos. Rohrbough wanted to compare the raw data to the narrative under construction by Jeffco. He predicted a chasm.
“They lie as a practice,” he said.
District Judge R. Brooke Jackson read the request. He said yes. Over furious objections from Jeffco, three days before the anniversary, he allowed the plaintiffs to read the draft report. He also granted them access to hundreds of hours of 911 tapes and some video footage. He agreed to begin reading the two hundred binders of evidence himself, but noted that would take months.
The ruling stunned everyone. But it was too little, too late. Fifteen families filed suits against the sheriff’s department that week. They would add additional defendants later.
The Klebolds chose not to sue. Instead they issued another apology letter. The Harrises did the same.
The lawsuits were expected to fail. The legal thresholds were too high. In federal court, negligence was insufficient; families needed to prove officers had actually made the students worse off. And that was only the first hurdle. But the main strategy was to flush out information.
The one suit with a plausible chance came from Dave Sanders’s daughter Angela. She was represented by Peter Grenier, a powerhouse Washington, D.C., lawyer. They charged that Jeffco officials went beyond neglecting Dave Sanders for three hours: they impeded his movement and prohibited others from getting him out of there. They deceived volunteer rescuers with false claims about an imminent arrival, to discourage them from busting out a window or taking him down the stairs. By doing so, the suit argued, Jeffco accepted responsibility for Dave and then let him die. In legal terms, they’d denied his civil rights by cutting off all opportunities to save him when they were not prepared to do it themselves.