Eric David Harris (April 5, 1981 - April 20, 1999) and Dylan Bennet Klebold (September 11, 1981 - April 20, 1999) were the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, resulting in the deaths of 12 classmates and one teacher. 18-year-old Harris and 17-year-old Klebold committed suicide after they killed the students.
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2 Dylan Klebold 3 The friendship 4 Fermenting frustration 5 Armed to the teeth 6 Ambitious plans 7 The Columbine massacre 8 Related articles 9 External links |
Eric Harris was born in Wichita, Kansas. His parents, Wayne Harris and Kathy Harris were both born in Colorado. However, the two moved around quite a bit, as Wayne was a U.S. Air Force transport pilot. The three had lived in Ohio, Michigan, and New York. As soon as Wayne retired, they settled in Littleton in 1996. After the move, Wayne worked at the Flight Safety Services Corporation in Englewood, Colorado. Kathy worked at a catering company in the area. Eric soon bonded with a boy named Dylan Klebold. Some neighbors described the Harrises as supportive of their son.
Earlier in his childhood, Eric was in the Little League and served as a Boy Scout. Eric wanted to be in the United States Marine Corps, but was rejected from the Corps several days before the shooting due to the fact that he was taking Luvox, an antidepressant.
Dylan Klebold was born in Lakewood, Colorado. He was a resident of Littleton for many years. His parents were Sue Klebold and Tom Klebold. He also had an older brother named Bryon Klebold. Tom Klebold was a former geophysicist who operated from the family home. Sue worked at the State Consortium of Community Colleges. Her job was to provide accessibility for disabled students.
Dylan's neighbors felt that he lived in a good family, yet they saw the power the influence of his friend Eric had on him after 1996.
Soon after they became friends, the two boys linked their personal computers on a network. They both played a lot of games over the internet.
In the past, the two boys got into trouble for breaking into a car and snatching tools. In March 1998, the boys were arrested on felony charges for criminal trespass and theft. The boys left a good impression on the juvenile officers and they were offered to have their criminal records cleared if the boys attended a diversionary program and to stay out of trouble. Harris was forced to attend anger management classes. He too made a good impression there.
The boys became peripheral members of a group of boys called the "Trenchcoat Mafia", a small clique which they wore heavy black trenchcoats, possibly inspired by The Matrix. The boys generally embraced a goth culture, obsessed with death and violence. They were said to be fans of Marilyn Manson and violent video games such as Doom. Most of the major members of the group had graduated or dropped out of the school by the time that Harris and Klebold committed the massacre.
The two were upset at the life around them. They blamed jocks for harassing them by "ridiculing" them and "calling them outcasts". They even made a video for school project that showed them wielding guns and killing students in the hallway of their school. The two boys were upset when the teacher barred the video from being shown upon finding of its graphic nature. Eric Harris often displayed themes of violence in his creative writing projects. Some of the teachers saw that they were sympathetic to the Nazi causes and that they were depressed and angry. Nothing happened to the boys despite the fact that the teachers complained about the boys, although one of them was suspended for the rest of the school year for cracking into the school computer system.
Eric Harris maintained a website under the name "Reb" that openly showed hatred for the people of Littleton, especially teachers at his high school, Columbine High School. As early as March 1998, words such as "God, I can't wait until I can kill you people," and "I'll just go to some downtown area in some big (expletive) city and blow up and shoot everything I can" appeared. The two boys were experimenting with pipe bombs and posting results of the bombs' explosions on the website.
The two families never knew of the boys' violent tendencies, due to a lack of communication between school and the families.
The boys possessed several guns. Harris legally owned two shotguns and a rifle, since he turned 18 two weeks prior to the shooting. Yet the TEC-DC9 semiautomatic was illegally possessed, since the age cutoff was 21 for that gun.
An 18-year old student at Columbine named Robyn K. Anderson purchased the two shotguns and rifle for Dylan Klebold at a Denver-area gunshow. She was close friends with Klebold and they both attended the school prom, which was three days before the shooting. The two were not in love. Anderson, who planned to be a Valedictorian, was not a suspect, as she did not know of Klebold's and Harris' plans.
The manufacturer of the TEC-DC9 first sold it to Miami-based Navegar Incorporated. It was then sold to Zander's Sporting Goods in Baldwin, Illinois in 1994. The gun was later sold to Thornton, Colorado firearms dealer Larry Russel. He didn't keep records of the sale, yet he determined that the purchaser of the gun was twenty-one years of age or older. He was unable to identify the pictures of Klebold, Anderson, or Harris shown to him by police after the shooting. Two men named Mark Manes and Philip Duran were found to have supplied weapons to the two boys. Before one of the men confessed at the police station, police suspected that Chris Morris, a member of the "Trenchcoat Mafia" and an employee of a pizza parlor called Blackjack Pizza that Harris worked at supplied the gun.
Text from Eric Harris' website indicated that two other boys, one codenamed "VoDkA", or "V", found to be Dylan Klebold, and an unidentified boy named "KiBBz", conspired in the shooting. The website contained vivid detail on the rage that Harris felt towards his peers, as well as accounts of the experiments that the three boys conducted with bombs. At least 12 detonations in Jefferson County, Colorado may have been the work of the conspirators. The boys had learned how to make bombs over the internet.
Police did not divulge the specific details on many of the bombs that the boys constructed, yet the ingredients were easily found at hardware stores. A sales clerk at a hardware store claimed that Klebold and Harris bought five large propane tanks, nailss, wire, screws, and duct tape one week before the incident, as well as that two other boys accompanied the perpetrators in an automobile.
Some of the bombs that the boys made were crude and made with carbon dioxide canisters, galvanized pipe and metal propane bottles. The powerful bombs were primed with matches placed at one end of the bomb. The boys had striker tips on their sleeves. When they rubbed against the bomb, the match head would light the fuse.
More complex bombs, such as the one that detonated on the corner of South Wadsworth Boulevard and Ken Caryl Avenue had timers.
The largest bombs built were found in the cafeteria. The two bombs were each made of a pipe bomb and several smaller fuel cylinders containing propane. When the bombs failed to go off in the attacks, the boys shot at it, yet the bomb still didn't blow up. Up to three hundred students may have perished if the bomb went off.
In yearbooks, journals, and computer files, Harris and Klebold listed 67 people they did not like. Only one of them got injured in Columbine, and he probably wasn't specifically targeted because he was on the list.
A journal found in Harris' bedroom stated almost every detail that the boys planned to follow after 5:00 a.m. on April 20, 1999. The attack was being planned from as early as April of 1998.
The journal found in Harris' bedroom stated that the two teenagers planned to kill upwards of five hundred students in their school using homemade bombs and guns. The diary mentioned notes on "good hiding places". The attack was to start at 11:00 a.m. as the highest number of students would be located in the cafeteria at the time. The boys kept a list of other schools to be hit in the diary. They were then to run into the surrounding neighborhood and downtown and massacre neighbors on the street and in apartment buildings. Finally, they planned to either escape the United States or to hijack an airplane and crash it into the heart of New York City.
The two killed 12 students and a teacher, before each shooter shot himself in the head after it became apparent that they would not be able to make it out of the building scot-free. Eric Harris aimed a shotgun at his mouth and literally blew his brains out. Dylan Klebold supposedly shot himself in the right temple. Some say that Eric killed him since Klebold was left handed.
The two things that prevented the deaths of many people were the failure of their bombs to explode and the quick response of police, which surrounded the campus. No drugs and alcohol were found in Eric Harris' body post-mortem. The boys had planted from 30 to 50 bombs all over the school.
For more details, see: Columbine High School massacre
Eric Harris
Dylan Klebold
The friendship
Fermenting frustration
Armed to the teeth
Ambitious plans
The Columbine massacre
Related articles
External links
