Anger and contempt kept rising. A federal judge finally had enough. He ruled that Jeffco could not be trusted even to warehouse valuable evidence. He ordered the county to hand over key material such as the Basement Tapes to be secured in the federal courthouse in Denver.
Agent Fuselier beat Mr. D to retirement. Six months after the massacre, the investigation was largely complete. Fuselier continued studying the killers, but he transitioned back to his role as head of domestic terrorism for the Colorado-Wyoming region. Few Americans had heard of Osama bin Laden, but a life-sized WANTED poster of him greeted visitors to the FBI branch office. Fuselier saw enemy number one’s picture every morning as he got off the elevator on the eighteenth floor.
“He’s a dangerous man,” Fuselier told a visitor. The Bureau was determined to stop him.
Fuselier also resumed training hostage negotiators and went back on call for serious incidents. Two years later, he concluded one of the most notorious prison breaks in recent history. The Texas Seven had escaped a maximum-security facility and embarked on a crime spree. The ringleader was serving eighteen life sentences—he had nothing left to lose. On Christmas Eve 2000, they stole a cache of guns from a sporting goods store and ambushed a police officer. They shot him eleven times and ran him over on the way out, to be sure he was dead. He was. A reward was posted: $500,000.
The gang kept moving. On January 20, 2001, they were spotted in a trailer park near Colorado Springs. A SWAT team captured four of them, and a fifth killed himself to avoid recapture. The two holdouts barricaded themselves in a Holiday Inn. It took Agent Fuselier’s team five hours to talk them out. They were fixated on corruption in the penal system, so Fuselier arranged a live interview on a local TV station at 2:30 A.M. A cameraman came inside the room so the holdouts could see they were actually broadcast live. Both convicts then surrendered and were sentenced to death. All six survivors await lethal injection in Texas.
The stress wore Fuselier down. He would have twenty years at the Bureau that October and be eligible for his pension. He announced his retirement for that date. He would be fifty-four.
On September 11, 2001, the country was attacked. Bin Laden was behind it. Fuselier postponed his retirement and spent most of the next eleven months on the case. By the summer of 2002, the United States had taken over Afghanistan, bin Laden had fled into hiding, and the urgency had abated.
Fuselier’s son Brian graduated from Columbine High that May—the last class Mr. D had been waiting for. Brian was leaving for college in July. Dwayne scheduled his retirement for the week afterward, so Brian wouldn’t see his dad lazing about jobless.
“I could see a change the next day,” Brian told his dad when he returned home for a visit. “You had mellowed out more than I had ever seen.”
Fuselier missed the work, though. Within months, he was consulting for the State Department. It sent him to conduct antiterrorism training in Third World countries. He spent a quarter of the year in sketchy sections of Pakistan, Tanzania, Malaysia, Macedonia—anywhere terrorists were active.
Mimi worried. Dwayne didn’t think about it much, and Brian didn’t hear the tension return to his voice. Fear wasn’t the problem at the FBI; it was the responsibility.
“It was getting harder going to work knowing someone’s life might depend on me not making any mistakes that day,” he said.
Shortly before Brian left Columbine, Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine drew raves at Cannes. It became the top-grossing documentary in U.S. history. It wasn’t really much about Columbine, and the title featured a minor myth—that Eric and Dylan went bowling on April 20—but it included a dramatic scene where Moore and a victim went to Kmart and asked to return the bullets still inside the guy. The stunt and/or publicity around it shamed Kmart into discontinuing ammunition sales nationwide.
Marilyn Manson was interviewed in the film. Moore asked Manson what he would say to the killers, if he had a chance to talk to them: “I wouldn’t say a single word to them,” he said. “I would listen to what they have to say, and that’s what no one did.” That was the story the media had told.
The connection to KMFDM, the nihilistic band Eric did idolize and quote frequently, was ignored by the major media. Fans got word, however, and the band issued a statement of deep remorse: “We are sick and appalled, as is the rest of the nation, by what took place in Colorado… none of us condone any Nazi beliefs whatsoever.”
The killers’ parents remained silent. They never spoke to the press. Pastor Don Marxhausen stayed close to Tom and Sue Klebold. He was a great comfort. Sue went back to training disabled students at the community college. That helped her cope.
“It’s amazing how long it took me to get up and say my name at a meeting, to say, ‘I’m Dylan Klebold’s mother,’” she said later. “Dylan could have killed any number of the kids of people that I work with.”
Shopping could be intimidating—anticipating that moment of recognition as a salesperson examined her credit card. It was a distinctive name. Sometimes they noticed.
“Boy, you’re a survivor,” one clerk said.
Tom worked from home, so he had a choice about when to go out. He stayed in all the time. Pastor Don worried about him.
Reverend Marxhausen paid for that compassion. Much of his parish loved him for it; others were outraged. The church council split. That was untenable. A year after the massacre, he was forced out.
Marxhausen had been one of the most revered ministers in the Denver area, but now he could not find a job. After a bout of unemployment, he left the state to head up a small parish. He missed Colorado, and eventually moved back. He got a job as a chaplain at a county jail. His primary function was to advise inmates when loved ones had died. He was born for the job, ministering to the desperate. He empathized with each one, and it sucked the life out of him.
The lawsuits sputtered on for years. They got messier. A rash of new defendants was added, including school officials, the killers’ parents, the manufacturer of Luvox, and anyone who had come in contact with the guns. The suits were consolidated in federal court. Judge Lewis Babcock accepted the county’s two major arguments: that it was not responsible for stopping the killers in advance, and that cops should not be punished for decisions under fire. Babcock said the authorities should have headed off the massacre months earlier but were not legally bound.
In November 2001, he dismissed most of the charges against the sheriff and the school. The families appealed, and the county settled the next year: $15,000 each—a fraction of their legal fees. The discovery process never brought much to light; it didn’t need to. The Rohrboughs’ initial offensive had set the legal process in motion, and it continued under its own power.
Judge Babcock refused to dismiss the Sanders case. He balked at the contention that Dave’s rescue involved split-second decisions.
“They had time in the third hour!” Babcock boomed.
The cops had hundreds of people to rescue, their attorney responded. They’d had to allocate resources.
More then 750 cops had been on the scene, the judge reminded him. “It’s not as though they were a little shorthanded out there that day,” he said.