Columbine

Columbine’s prom takes place on April 17, three days before the shootings. “Rebels” opens with Cullen offering descriptions of what both shooters—Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, are like. Cullen describes Harris as “a brain” and “He smoked, he drank, he dated. He got invited to parties. He got high. He worked his look hard: military chic hair…black T-shirts and baggy cargo pants” (6). Harris enjoys “German industrial rock,” roads trips across state lines to Wyoming, and fireworks. He is behind on getting a date to the prom. Klebold’s date is Robyn Anderson, the individual who has aided them in purchasing three of the firearms they use in carrying out their attack on Columbine High School.

Cullen describes Klebold as “taller and even smarter than Eric…a brain, too, but not quite as cool.” He adds that Klebold “saw the worst version of himself” (7). Klebold is six-three, Harris five-nine. Cullen remarks that both are involved with school activities, including attending football games and doing video production for the school’s television network. Both are baseball fans. Harris’ nickname is “Reb,” while Klebold’s is “VoDKa, capitalizing of his initials in the name of his favorite liquor” (9).

Both of the boys work at Blackjack Pizza, and, along with their manager, “would climb up on the roof sometimes…while [Eric and Dylan] shot bottle rockets over the strip mall” where the pizza place was located. Harris is described as being like “a robot under pressure…nothing could faze him,” while “nobody put Dylan in charge of anything” (9). Cullen adds, “Outwardly, Eric and Dylan looked like normal young boys about to graduate. They were testing authority, testing their sexual prowess—a little frustrated with the dumbasses they had to deal with, a little full of themselves. Nothing unusual for high school” (10).

Cullen goes on to describe the geography surrounding Columbine High School: “Rebel Hill slopes gradually, rising just forty feet above Columbine, which sits at its base…halfway up the hillside, the Rockies are suddenly spectacular…the mountains leap up behind [the hillside], a jagged brown wall rearing straight off the Great Plains” (10).

Next, Cullen offers a description of Columbine High School itself. The school “sits on a softly rolling meadow at the edge of a sprawling park, in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains,” and is “a large, modern facility—250,000 square feet of solid no-frills construction.” It has a “beige concrete exterior and very few windows [and] looks like a factory from most angles.” Cullen adds that the architecture is “practical, like the people of south Jefferson County, or Jeffco, as it’s known locally, scrimped on architectural affectations but invested generously in chem labs, computers, video production facilities, and a first-rate teaching force” (11). Downtown Denver is ten miles away. 

Spring has arrived on Colorado’s Front Range. Among seniors, college now dominates conversations. Cullen affirmsthat “80 percent of [Columbine’s] graduates [were] headed on to degree programs” (13). Principal Frank DeAngelis makes the rounds in the school cafeteria, as he almost always did during “A” lunch, the first lunch period of the school day. DeAngelis tries “to avoid discipline at lunch [but] couldn’t stop himself, though, when he saw abandoned trays and food scraps.” To this end, DeAngelis “had four surveillance cameras installed in the commons. A custodian loaded a fresh tape every morning around 11:05, and the rotating cameras continually swept the commons, recording fifteen-second bursts of action automatically cut from camera to camera. Day after day, they recorded the most banal footage imaginable. No one could have imagined what those cameras would capture just four months after installation” (14).

The chapter concludes with an overview of school shootings leading up to the Columbine attack: February, 1997, Bethel, Alaska; October, 1997, Pearl, Mississippi; December, 1997, West Paducah, Kentucky; December, 1997, Stamps, Arkansas. 1998, Cullen says, “was worse: ten dead, thirty-five wounded, in five separate incidents” (14). He adds, “and then…nothing. During the entire 1998-99 school year, not a single shooter emerged” (15). 

Cullen remarks that Columbine High was an open campus, meaning that those with drivers’ licenses could leave for lunch. He reveals that Eric Harris has two objectives for the Friday before the shootings: “to find ammo and a date for prom night.” Cullen then adds that though “Eric and Dylan plan to be dead shortly after the weekend” (16), they complete one last shift at Blackjack Pizza. While Eric has no plans for the future and has not applied to college, Dylan has applied and decided upon the University of Arizona. Both Eric and Dylan ask for advances against their paycheck then go to Belleview Lanes, a bowling alley, to bowl and hang out with friends. Cullen notes that “Eric was into all this German shit lately: Nietzsche, Freud, Hitler, German industrial bands like KMFDM and Rammstein, German-language T-shirts” (18). Cullen adds that Eric would sometimes “punctuate his high fives with ‘Sieg Heil’ and ‘Heil Hitler’” (18). The chapter concludes with Eric getting a date for the prom. 

Chapter 5 includes detailsabout Coach Dave Sanders, the only adult killed in the Columbine mass shooting, while concurrently providing background on Jefferson County and its population surge.

Having grown up in Indiana, Sanders moved to Jefferson Country in 1974. Columbine High School was built the year before. A “wave of upscale suburbanites [would flood] into Jeffco in the late 70s”; prior to this population surge, “hardly anyone lived there,” though this would change when “court-ordered bussing had spurred an avalanche of white flight out of Denver, and subdivisions were popping up all along the foothills.” In 1995, “just before Eric and Dylan arrived, Columbine High School underwent a major overhaul” with “permanent interior walls…installed…and the old cafeteria on the east side…converted into classrooms.”The size of the school was doubled. It was assumed by many that Columbine High was in nearby Littleton, Colorado, though this is actually not the case. Instead, “by April 1999, [when] the plain was nearly filled…the fiercely independent residents refused to incorporate [as a] new town would only impose new rules and new taxes.” Cullen adds: “The 100,000 new arrivals filled one continuous suburb with no town center: no main street, no town hall, town library, or town name. Littleton is a quiet suburb south of Denver where the massacre did not actually occur. Although the name would grow synonymous with the tragedy, Columbine lies several miles west … in a different county with separate schools and law enforcement (20-21).

Dave Sanders was the coach for seven different athletic teams during his tenure at Columbine. He and his first wife, Kathy, divorced when their daughter, Angela was three. In 1991, Sanders met his second wife, Linda Lou.

The chapter concludes with details about the prom nights of Patrick Ireland and Cassie Bernall, two of the victims of the Columbine mass shooting. Ireland would live but be gravely injured, while Bernall would be killed. 

Chapter 6 opens with Dylan Klebold’s experience of prom night. Cullen offers that Klebold is “giddy and beaming [while] getting ready,” and that the group he goes with “rode downtown in a big honking stretch [limo] with tinted windows and a mirrored ceiling. Whoa!” (26). Eric goes to the prom with his date, Susan. Prom and then after-prom pass. Eric joins the group of students Dylan has gone with. Cullen concludes the chapter by saying that Columbine victim “Patrick Ireland hung out nearby. [He and Dylan] never met. Dylan kept talking about college, about his future. He kept saying he could hardly wait” (28).

Cullen opens this chapter with a discussion of Jefferson County as a stronghold for Christian Evangelicalism: “Since pioneer days and the Second Great Awakening, Colorado had been a hotbed on the itinerant ministry circuit. By the 1990s, Colorado Springs was christened the Evangelical Vatican” (29). Cullen mentions a trio of churches that will figure in the aftermath of the Columbine mass shooting: Trinity Christian Center, Foothills Bible Church, and West Bowles Community Church. For evangelicals, “religion did not mean an hour a week on Sundays,” and the Columbine Bible Study group, out of West Bowles church, “met at the school once a week” (30).

The conclusion of the chapter focuses on FBI Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, and moves the narrative forward to Monday, April 19, the day before the Columbine mass shooting. Fuselier, at the time, is head of the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit in Denver. Six years earlier, to the date, Fuselier was in Waco, Texas, watching FBI agents storm cult leader David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound, while the structure burnt. Cullen identifies Fuselier as the “nation’s foremost hostage negotiator”; Fuselier was the last person, outside of Branch Davidian members, to ever speak to Koresh. Cullen concludes the chapter: “Speculation raged about the FBI’s role in the [Branch Davidian] blaze. The controversy nearly ended Attorney General Janet Reno’s career. Waco radicalized the anti-government militia movement, made April 19 into a symbol of perverse authority. Timothy McVeigh sought vengeance by bombing the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma on April 19, 1995 [two years after Waco]. His explosion killed 168 people, the largest terrorist attack in American history to that point”(31).