The killings sparked wall-to-wall media coverage around the world - much of which has . April 20, 1999 - At approximately 11:19 a.m., two students, Klebold, 17, and Harris, 18, carrying guns and bombs, open fire inside Columbine High School, killing 13 and wounding 23 others before. He is disgusted with the morons around him. The two teens bonded over their shared dissatisfaction with school but varied significantly in their personality traits and dispositions. Initially, the idea was to set off bombs in the school cafeteria. Five years ago today, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates and teachers at Columbine High School. The truth was more complicated, and thus, harder to digest. At last we know why the Columbine killers did it. - Slate Magazine Klebold's teacher was deeply concerned, but the authorities ultimately bought his explanation that it was "just a story". Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the worst school shooting in American history. They set their sights on eclipsing the worlds greatest mass murderers, but the media never saw past the choice of venue. -- On April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris walked into Columbine High School, carrying weapons and homemade bombs, and began slaughtering their classmates. "I was addicted before I even knew what was happening," Eubanks said, adding that prior to the day of the attack he had never drank alcohol or smoked marijuana. All rights reserved. He was hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Eric David Harris (April 9, 1981 - April 20, 1999) and Dylan Bennet Klebold ( / klibold /; September 11, 1981 - April 20, 1999) were an American mass murderer duo who perpetrated the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999. It was a slow, steady relationship that seemed largely based around a mutual hatred and disgust for their surroundings. All rights reserved. Rachel Scott, a spiritually-minded seventeen-year-old whose ambition was to become a missionary to Africa, died, too. Klebold and Harris were no longer mere fans of violent video games like Doom but had obtained three weapons that would later be used in the shooting from a female friend who was old enough to purchase guns in the state of Colorado. But theyre actually much easier to predict than the rest of us once you understand them. And just minutes later, I was playing dead underneath a table next to a pool of blood. As a boy, he was in the Boy Scouts and . Klebold and Harriss enthusiasm for violent video games was often cited as a direct link to and cause of the Columbine shooting. He is intelligent enough to achieve lofty goals as long as he stays on task and remains motivated.. He was more than angry, it seemed from his own words, but genuinely of the belief that he was bigger and more powerful than the rest of the world which he desperately wanted to quash. Austin Eubanks served as the COO for a long-term residential treatment program in Colorado. The truly hard-core psychopath doesnt quite comprehend emotions like love or hate or fear, because he has never experienced them directly. Trauma, as Eubanks said, keeps rippling outwards, one kind of damage turning into another. The Swat teams at Virginia Tech did not hesitate for an instant, almost certainly saving the lives of a dozen or more people. Fuselier remembers that it was packed with statements like Jeez, I understand now how you feel and I understand what this did to you. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised. Diagnosing Harris as a psychopath represents neither a legal defense, nor a moral excuse. The shooting took place almost exactly eight years after the Columbine shooting, when a 23-year-old student opened fire at two locations on campus - first in a dorm room and then in an academic . Harris and Klebold, we were told, were members of a campus group of losers and Marilyn Manson-worshipping goths called the Trenchcoat Mafia, who had few friends and attracted only derision from the cool kids. Our analysis found that about 80 percent of mass school shooters were suicidal, based on records we have gathered thus far. The climax would be captured on live television. Andrew Gumbel, who reported on the aftermath, explains what really happened that day - and why, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning, 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. For slightly under an hour, the pair killed a dozen of their peers, one teacher, and wounded 20 more people. She was then spared. After slightly under an hour of terrorizing and traumatizing some 1,800 students in ways that would haunt them for the rest of their lives, the two shooters committed suicide in the library. Indeed, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold fostered an unhealthy interest in Hitler, Nazi iconography, and the violence of the Third Reich. A visitor walks around the pool at the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial. Then, as the rest of the school swarmed for the exits, they would open fire with semiautomatic weapons from two positions in the car park. The truth was more sinister. Only later did the authorities realise Harris and Klebold were already lying dead in the library, along with 10 of their 13 murder victims. People gather to hold a vigil for the victims of Columbine high school shooting. But he had argued that the toll of mass shootings in America was much larger than a simple count of the injured or the dead. The teen who bravely jumped from a window to escape the Columbine High School . I read Eubanks quotes again, and I tell myself that feeling this pain is better than not feeling it. Seung Hui Cho, the disturbed gunman who killed more than 30 students at Virginia Tech in 2007, called Harris and Klebold "martyrs". He also saw a very close connection between trauma, depression, addiction and suicide. The duos waning interest in academics was soon reflected in Klebolds grades. How many students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school would deal with their trauma, as he did, through negative coping methods like addiction, he wondered. Cho killed 32 people and wounded 17 others with two semi-automatic pistols on April 16, 2007, at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.This killing is the deadliest school shooting in US history, and was at the time . Meanwhile, Harris met Dylan Klebold, a fellow student who shared some of these dark ideas. Yeah I stopped smoking. The piece of the puzzle that remains most troubling is the role of the media. Fuselier and Ochberg share their conclusions publicly here for the first time. Hurt people often hurt other people: Eubanks saw this clearly in his own life. ), FILE - In this April 19, 2004, file photo, a sign at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. Students who were planning to attack schools showed the same types of troubled histories as those who carried them out - they were badly bullied, often suffered from depression with stress at home, and their behavior worried others, according to a U.S. Secret Service study released March 30, 2021. Bombs made of propane that they had placed in duffel bags in the school cafeteria to explode around lunchtime failed to detonate. Columbine School Shooters: How They Got The Guns I adversely affected hundreds of people through the course of my 20s by way of my addiction and the turmoil of my life, he said. But that was never asked, it was never talked about.. They . I think that it's really important that -- not as survivors of trauma but survivors of addiction -- speak out and they share their story, Eubanks said. At scores of high schools around the US, meanwhile, teachers and mental health professionals have taken death threats or the discovery of weapons with the utmost seriousness. Most Americans have reached one of two wrong conclusions about why they did it. Wikimedia CommonsColumbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in the school cafeteria during the massacre. Another victim, already badly wounded in the head, arm and legs but seized by a compulsion to get out of the school at any cost, somehow pirouetted his broken body across a window ledge and let himself tumble into the arms of two waiting officers. For example, they can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.. Harris certainly felt drawn to the Nazis' genocidal mania - at one point in his journal he quotes Himmler approvingly and comments, "Here was someone who got it!" Most of these smaller scale copycat killings don't make headlines, but are picked up by Park Dietz, a criminal profiler who has been offering violence prevention advice to the US TV networks for years. Seals, who was Black, had grown up in an area where violence was endemic and gunshots were common and young men like him had no expectation of being safe. Strangle them, squish their head, rip off their jaw, break their arms in half, show them who is God.. How many first responders, traumatized by their encounters with the carnage inside the school, might do the same? Lauren's older brother . Circa 1998. April 20, 1999. All rights reserved.). When she answered yes, Harris laughed and pulled the trigger. Eubanks, 37, was found dead in his home in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, on Saturday morning. But he was also harboring a deep hatred for the world. Cool, calculating Harris calmed down Klebold when he got hot-tempered. He wrote an ingratiating letter to his victim offering empathy, rather than just apologies. Fuselier was finally convinced of his diagnosis when he read Harris response to being punished after being caught breaking into a van. And it was all thanks to two troubled teens: Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. But the FBI and its team of psychiatrists and psychologists have reached an entirely different conclusion. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were radically different individuals, with vastly different motives and opposite mental conditions. He is a psychologist. Perhaps thats because no one wanted to believe hope could be lost on two young men like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. I hope we kill 250 of you, Klebold said in a video. The first conclusion is that the pair of supposed Trench Coat Mafia outcasts were taking revenge against the bullies who had made school miserable for them. Two months later, the massacre took place. Klebold, by contrast, was a depressive, perpetually racked by the idea that he was a failure, despite having a loving family and privileged background. Gone were the carefree days of the Clinton era here was the dawn of active shooter drills and daily fears for our children's safety. He lost the battle with the very disease he fought so hard to help others face, his family told media outlets. While an autopsy is being conducted to determine the cause of death, his family says they already know what killed him. She specializes in Texas features, consumer and business news and local crime coverage. They not only hated jocks, they were racists who picked 20 April for the attack because it was Hitler's birthday. FBI Records: The Vault Columbine High School How Columbine changed the way police respond to mass shooting - CNN On 18 May 2019, a 37-year-old man died of a heroin overdose in Colorado. His talk on trauma and addiction is still being viewed. As the son of an Air Force pilot, Harris had moved around fairly often as a child. The psychiatrists cant help speculating what might have happened if Columbine had never happened. Many of the overdose deaths that year nearly 200 each day did not receive much attention, but his was marked by a few news stories. He wasnt in any hurry.. History.com notes while numerous theories about the teens motives for the shooting were raised -- from bullying to involvement in the Trenchcoat Mafia to violent video games -- investigators later pointed to journals which showed the pair wanted to create an Oklahoma City bombing-style disaster. Supposedly, they also had a grudge against evangelical Christians. The footage is a part of a series the pair recorded called Hitmen for Hire. While the myth that they had been bullied and ostracized by the proverbial jocks and popular kids quickly filled the airwaves, that was an entirely unfounded narrative. This would induce mass panic, and force the entire school to flood outside into the parking lot only for Harris and Klebold to spray rounds of bullets into every single person they could. In this 25 April 1999 photo, Austin Eubanks hugs his girlfriend during a memorial service for Columbine high school shooting victims. In some ways, Columbine is unlike other school shootings because of its sheer scale. Harris was not merely a troubled kid, the psychiatrists say, he was a psychopath. This required more than mere firepower and so Harris and Klebold built pipe bombs over the course of several months before the attack. Their planning, meanwhile, was nothing if not meticulous. The report summarizing Harris mental state and development during the temporary probationary period a year prior even ended on a positive note. The first steps to understanding Columbine, they say, are to forget the popular narrative about the jocks, Goths, and Trenchcoat Mafiaclick here to read more about Columbines mythsand to abandon the core idea that Columbine was simply a school shooting. Suicides in the US, which outnumber homicides, rose about 35% between 1999 and 2018, and most suicides are committed with guns. April 20, 1999. Eubanks focused on the connections between trauma, addiction and the choices and profits of the American medical and pharmaceutical industries. His depression and rage simmered and showed themselves in his work, once even causing him to hand in an essay so gruesome his teacher later remarked that it was the most vicious story shed ever read.. In 1998, junior Brooks Brown discovered his name on that very website and that Harris had threatened to murder him. But my emotional pain was an absolute 10. How survivors of Columbine are coping, 20 years later Klebold is easier to comprehend, a more familiar type. Both Eubanks and Seals were gun violence survivors whose shootings had turned them into activists. March 6, 1999. One girl was shot in the chest nine times. Both killers feigned regret to obtain an early release, but Harris had relished the opportunity to perform. As it was, their homemade bombs did not detonate, and they were forced to improvise. There was a girl crouched beneath a desk in the library, and the guy came over and said, Peek a boo, and shot her in the neck, said Kirkland, recalling Klebolds vicious killing of Cassie Bernall. And what happened on April 20, 1999, when 14 students, including the two shooters and a teacher . In his 30s, he began to speak out nationally about the connection between violence, trauma and the opioid epidemic, demanding a deeper reckoning about the connections between addiction and Americans inability to grieve. A doctor prescribed the 17-year-old opioids to help deal with the pain from the bullet wounds in his hand and his knee, but the teenager found the drugs more helpful for his emotional wounds, the ones he did not know how to talk about. *) Unlike psychotic individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Columbine Killers Targeted Christians, Too All rights reserved. All rights reserved. Jefferson County Sheriffs Office/Getty ImagesThe west entryway to Columbine High School, with flags marking points where bullet casings were found. While the school shooting is largely remembered by most to have gone as the pair planned, this couldnt be further from the truth. I would like my body to stop reacting the way it does now after each new mass shooting. Before they eventually turned the guns on themselves, the two shooters reportedly taunted their victims with a glee so disturbing it could understandably sound fictional. Fuselier and Ochberg say that if you want to understand the killers, quit asking what drove them. Hes not saying that hes gonna beat me up, hes saying he wants to blow me up and hes talking about how hes making the pipe bombs to do it with.. Eric Harris And Dylan Klebold: The Story Behind The Columbine Shooters Though Harris temperament and behavior were seemingly as normal as anyone elses at his age, he did appear to have trouble finding his place in Littleton. Eubanks, then 17, was shot in the hand and leg in the rampage that claimed the lives of 12 students and a teacher, and ended with the gunmen taking their own lives. Bernall, it turns out, was shot and killed outright. Why did the April 20, 1999, mass shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado become a blueprint for future shooters? One student saw either Harris or Klebold (the account remains unclear) shoot a kid at point-blank range, in the back of the head. Three months after the massacre, the FBI convened a summit in Leesburg, Virginia, that included world-renowned mental health experts, including Michigan State University psychiatrist Dr. Frank Ochberg, as well as Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, the FBIs lead Columbine investigator and a clinical psychologist. These kinds of responses from a countrys elected leaders are an invitation to numbness. Adults, and even some other kids, described him as nice. But Harris was cold, calculating, and homicidal. . In the window of one classroom, a student put up a piece of paper that read, Help me, Im bleeding. Others tried to get out through heating vents or used anything at their disposal desks and chairs to barricade themselves. He was 29. On March 25, Jeremy Richman, 49, whose 6-year-old daughter, Avielle, was among the 26 children and educators killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook, apparently took his own life. Through Klebolds personal writings discovered after the shooting, it became clear that he had been suicidal for a while. Updated September 9, 2022 The motives for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to carry out the Columbine High School massacre had nothing to do with bullying or revenge and the real truth is even more disturbing. Unfortunately, none of this was discovered or taken seriously before it was too late for the Columbine shooters. And numbness can feel like an acceptable way of dealing with the world we are being asked to live in. The damage might not stop with the people who witnessed the shooting and its aftermath, he noted, but could spread to their family members and friends, even be passed along to their children, as an inheritance of generational trauma. Jefferson County Sheriffs Department via Getty Images. He blamed himself for his problems. Copyright 2023 Click2Houston.com is managed by Graham Digital and published by Graham Media Group, a division of Graham Holdings. By Dave Cullen April 20, 200411:59 AM Littleton residents gather at the Clemment Park memorial on Apr. I want to grab some weak little freshman and just tear them apart like a fucking wolf. It took Eubanks 10 years, and multiple fights, arrests and damaged relationships, before he finally moved through the stages of grief for his murdered friend and got sober. Neither one chose to focus, as many American activists do, on gun access and gun control laws. On April 20, 1999, Eubanks was in the library at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, with his best friend, Corey DePooter, waiting for other classmates to go to lunch, when teenage gunmen Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, launched what at the time was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history to occur at a high school. April 20, 1999: Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 before killing themselves at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. has since been eclipsed by other mass shootings. This includes the Parkland shooter. CNN . His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something even worse. The school, meanwhile, failed to recognise the danger, even though Harris spilled much of his venom on his publicly accessible website, and even though Klebold wrote an essay two months before the attack about a man gunning down innocents and enjoying it. As the Colorado-based journalist Dave Cullen tells in his gripping and authoritative new book Columbine, Harris and Klebold had plenty of friends, did pretty well in school, were not members of the Trenchcoat Mafia, did not listen to Manson, were not bullied, harboured no specific grudges against any one group, and did not "snap" because of some last-straw traumatic event. Klebold was hurting inside while Harris wanted to hurt people, Fuselier says. Duping delightpsychologist Paul Ekmans termrepresents a key characteristic of the psychopathic profile. They were indeed wearing long black coats, not because of any campus affiliation but simply to hide their arsenal of shotguns, semiautomatic machine pistols, pipe bombs, knives and small carbon dioxide canister bombs Harris called "crickets". Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Eubanks recalled in a 2017 Tedx Mile High Talk. That, in retrospect, may not have been an entirely good thing. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The question of Nazi sympathies is a little more complicated. Jefferson County Sheriffs Office/Getty Images. Ten years ago, two teenagers walked into a Colorado school and massacred 13 people. The Columbine shooters were obsessed with the mayhem Timothy McVeigh had wrought in Oklahoma City a few years earlier and were desperate to outdo him, CNN reported. He survived the Columbine High School mass shooting, but a 20-year battle with drug addiction that followed, one that Austin Eubanks had publicly said started with pills given to ease his pain from bullet wounds suffered in the 1999 rampage, has now cost him his life, his family said. It was the bloodiest, creepiest, most vivid school attack anyone at the time could remember and remains, to this day, the episode the American popular imagination just can't seem to shake. For doing it, not for getting caught. Psychopaths follow much stricter behavior patterns than the rest of us because they are unfettered by conscience, living solely for their own aggrandizement. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. School shooters tend to act impulsively and attack the targets of their rage: students and faculty. Its like an earthquake. A story soon spread that one of the murder victims in the library, Cassie Bernall, had been asked at gunpoint if she believed in God. How Columbine Victim Rachel Scott Became A Teen Martyr - All That's By the time the TV crews arrived, Harris and Klebold had in fact ended their rampage and turned their weapons on themselves. Group, a Graham Holdings Company. It wasnt just fame they were afterAgent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing termthey were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. The primary emotion for me these days is anger, Eubanks told me the evening of the Parkland shooting. The baffling question never really went away. From there, they began to shoot anyone they encountered and deigned worth their time. A pretty standard childhood of baseball, video games, and studious learning comprised Klebolds early years. Eubanks' death follows the apparent suicides of two students who survived the Feb. 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the apparent suicide of a father whose young daughter was killed in the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, on Dec. 14, 2012. Columbine High School massacre - Wikipedia A staff writer for All Thats Interesting, Marco Margaritoff has also published work at outlets including People, VICE, and Complex, covering everything from film to finance to technology. But the local drug dealer who was supposed to provide Harris and Klebold with their ammunition was late. The county sheriff's department knew Harris and Klebold had been making pipe bombs and threatening their schoolmates. Of course, the day of the shooting proved they hadnt learned quite as much as theyd thought. Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in the school cafeteria during the massacre. It was only once Eric Harris And Dylan Klebold joined forces that their shared dissatisfaction began to morph into something more tangible. Dylan Bennet Klebold was born in Denver, Colo., on Sept. 11, 1981. Much of what we reported, though, was simply wrong, as attested by tens of thousands of official documents and other evidence that has at last seen the light of day after years of suppression by the local authorities. Students and teachers were just convenient quarry, what Timothy McVeigh described as collateral damage.. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. "I remember how I felt: I was confused, I was afraid, I felt sick and I was vulnerable. "In 1999, that's what deputies did. But, reading his words, I also know that the work Eubanks did is not over. Its like flipping a switch between two alternate brain-mechanisms.). In popular usage, almost any crazy killer is a psychopath. But in psychiatry, its a very specific mental condition that rarely involves killing, or even psychosis.
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how did the columbine shooters die
