The Littleton Massacre: ...In Sorrow And Disbelief

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Klebold and Harris had charmed their way through the legal system. They were convicted of a felony in January 1998 after breaking into a van and stealing about $400 worth of electronic equipment. They entered a juvenile-court rehabilitation program that allowed them to clear their records by participating in community-service programs and an anger-management seminar. Last Feb. 3 both were allowed to finish the program early, having been such model participants. "Eric is a very bright young man who is likely to succeed in life," said the termination report on Harris. As for Klebold, he too was "intelligent enough to make any dream a reality, but he needs to understand hard work is part of it."

If the professionals did not spot the warning signs, neither did the people who saw the boys every day. The owner of the pizza parlor where they worked says they were model employees. For all the talk of fierce racism, Harris was well liked back in Plattsburgh, where his best friends, according to the local Press-Republican, were black and Asian. As for the neo-Nazi Klebold, his great-grandfather was a prominent Jewish philanthropist back in Ohio.

Yet the police disclosed that the handwritten diary they had found was drenched in Nazi-philia: phrases in German punctuating a year's worth of meticulous planning for the attack on Hitler's 110th birthday. There were also annotated maps of the school showing the best places to hide and where and when the most students gathered. Again and again, hatred for the jocks emerged in the writings. Said Sheriff Stone: "They wanted to do as much damage as they could possibly do, destroy as many children as they could and go out in flames." The remains of their preparations were evident, he says: the barrel of a gun was clearly visible on the dresser of one suspect when investigators entered his room at home.

Whatever the threats and intentions, the killings were, in the end, blindly indiscriminate. They shot at the math whiz and the actress, the wrestler, the debater, jocks, brains, band members, freshmen, seniors. They shot at the head football coach; they shot at the science teacher. "They shot at everybody," says senior Nick Zupancic, "including the preps, the jocks and the people who wore Abercrombie & Fitch clothes. But it would be hard to say they singled them out, because everybody here looks like that. I mean, we're in white suburbia. Our school's wealthy. Go into the parking lot and see the cars. These kids have money. But I never thought they'd do this."

By the time the memorial services had been held and the flowers piled up in the soft spring snow in the parking lot, the recriminations were well under way. How could parents not know their garage was a bomb-making factory? How could a school not know the hatred in its halls was more than routine teenage alienation? Why had the SWAT team members been so cautious when people were trapped and bleeding to death? What if their kids had been inside?