The Columbine Navigator

Summary:

     The purpose of this guide is to point readers to the wealth of Columbine information out there, and guide you through it: steering you toward the accurate information, away from the pervasive myths. Most of the early coverage got most of what the killers were up to and why completely wrong. With the luxury of hindsight, we now have a good idea of the truth about Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold, but all the misconceptions remain in print, and everyone researching Columbine learns the same myths over and over. This site is designed to help you sort through it all. (Con't after the index.)

Misconceptions You Probably Arrived With:

     On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attempted to blow up the Columbine High School cafeteria at the peak of lunch hour, gun down the fleeing survivors, and then blow up many of those survivors, along with rescue workers and media. However, they were exceptionally poor bomb-makers, and the timers failed on the propane bombs in the cafeteria and on the explosives in their cars--each packed to the hilt in the parking lot. (Con't after the index.)    

Book Announcement:

     Dutton (Penguin/Putnam) has contracted me to write a book profiling the killers, their motives and the aftermath. It is due in stores in 2007: A preview.

Index:

1.     Comprehensive News stories: Start here: for 99% of readers this is all you will ever need to know. Six one-stop stories that tell the full Columbine tale (as best as it has been told so far). And the one great Columbine film so far, "Zero Day." (Look for it on video/DVD.)  

3.     Newspaper/Magazine Archive Sites--which provide a complete index to all their stories on Columbine, Harris and Klebold.

4. Official Government Documents--Nearly all of them here: The Columbine Research Site is just a dream come true for anyone researching Columbine. It is mainly restricted to official government releases, but those are a key part of the record, and it has nearly all of them. It includes the obvious ones like the sheriff's report and first 11,000 pages of police files, along with many more obscure items, like the search warrants (where I found a surprisingly useful trove of info, and had formerly only found in paper, bound in the Columbine Library in Littleton), the second 10,000 pages of police reports (not even available at the Columbine Library), and much, much more. If you want to dig down into the nitty gritty, this is your spot.

5.  Latest Columbine Developments: A direct link to the Rocky Mountain News site featuring Columbine stories from the past several months. (And nearly five years later, there are still several stories a month on Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold or Columbine.)

6.      Yahoo Full Coverage: three sites which link to a tremendous number of Columbine stories and sites. Yahoo's 20 most popular Columbine sites.

7.  Officials/Spokespersons and contact info--coming.

8.  List of all official Columbine material released via court order, with details on how to obtain each.

Summary (con't):

     If you're wondering who I am, and why I started this site:

     I began after covering Columbine for Salon for several years (later for Slate and others). I broke several major stories, won some awards, and was cited by most of the major media at one time or another. I am now writing a book for Dutton about what actually drove Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to do it. (It will most likely come out in 2007.) After the first few hundred emails from people stumbling across my work and hungry for more Columbine information but frustrated by how to find it, I decided to start organizing everything I had waded through in my years of research and making it available to the public.

     There doesn't seem to be a single good central repository of Columbine information: each news organization has an its own archive, but typically it's just its own material. Worse, much of the early published material was wrong, even from the best sources. (I shudder at some passages from my own stories.) There's no way to expunge that, but I can guide you through it. I have sprinkled this guide liberally with commentary on what's good, what's bad, which reporters and news organizations to rely on at which times.

     Before plunging into all the info out there, it might be useful to start with a summary of what we know about Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold, and more importantly, start disabusing you of all the Columbine myths:

Columbine Misconceptions (con't):

     On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attempted to blow up the Columbine High School cafeteria at the peak of lunch hour, gun down the fleeing survivors, and then blow up many of those survivors, along with rescue workers and media. (Published summary linked in that sentence.) However, they were exceptionally poor bomb-makers, and the timers failed on the propane bombs in the cafeteria and on the explosives in their cars--each packed to the hilt in the parking lot.

     They apparently had no Plan B, so when the explosives failed, Harris & Klebold winged it and began randomly opening fire: first outside, and then in the school, primarily in the library. They killed 12 students and one teacher, injured many more, roamed the school for several minutes and then returned to the grisly library to shoot themselves.

     It was obviously a horrible and traumatic experience that terrified the country. For months afterward, the public hungered for an answer to one question: why?

     Unfortunately, the media really let the country down. We failed to grasp that Columbine was primarily an attempted bombing, and most of the media refused to correct that basic misunderstanding once they did comprehend. We characterized it instead as a school shooting and worked exceptionally hard to fit it into the model of previous school shootings, regardless of how poorly it fit.
     The media also rushed to innumerable judgments about what Columbine was all about, and later made only the feeblest attempts to correct that story. Any Columbine journalist can/will tell you without hesitation that Columbine had nothing to do with jocks, Goths or the Trenchcoat Mafia--or any of a dozen other myths. Most major outlets got around to publishing a "Columbine Myths" story six months to a year after the tragedy, but that was hopelessly inadequate to reverse an avalanche of coverage which had solidified the myths. And some of the myths were harder to unravel. It took years to understand that the media pretty much had it right the first time in portraying Eric Harris as the mastermind, and Dylan Klebold as a follower. The release of The Basement Tapes reversed that conception, but it was a rare case where our early instincts were correct. But now both versions, and everything in between remain out there. 

     We will never know everything about Columbine, and we still lack some key pieces, including the bulk of Eric Harris's journal. But there is a tremendous amount of data available. This Columbine Almanac is dedicated to help you sort through it all and come to some truths of your own about this tragedy.