The Littleton Massacre: ...In Sorrow And Disbelief

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Sure it can. It can even happen in Littleton, a town of 35,000 near the dusty-tan foothills of the Rockies, just southwest of Denver. It was once a small prairie town of gold rushers and traders, where the biggest scare was getting hit by a prairie dog. Now it's a stretched finger of the big city, with aspiring families who don't lock their doors, enclaves with names like Coventry and Raccoon Creek and Bel Flower, scrubland turned into golf courses, houses than run anywhere from $75,000 to $5 million or so. There's an arch over a hallway in the high school engraved with a motto: "The finest kids in America pass through these halls."

The day began with an omen. On the classroom video monitors, the "phrase of the day" was not exactly Ralph Waldo Emerson. Instead, noticed a student, it was something to the effect, "You don't want to be here." Below that was the date, not spelled out April 20, as was the custom, but written 4/20 in bold type, a pulsing message easily decoded. "It's weed-smoking day," one student said, referring to the shorthand for going out and getting stoned: marijuana is supposed to contain 420 different chemicals: the Los Angeles police department's code for a drug bust is 420.

And it was also, as we now know too well, Adolf Hitler's birthday. In the handwritten diary of one of the suspects, the anniversary, say the police, was clearly marked as a time to "rock and roll." Some members of Harris' and Klebold's clique, tagged in derision a few years before as the Trench Coat Mafia, had embraced enough Nazi mythology to spook their classmates. They reportedly wore swastikas on black shirts, spoke German in the halls, re-enacted World War II battles, played the most vicious video games, talked about whom they hated, whom they would like to kill. Harris and Klebold liked to bowl: when Harris made a good shot, he would throw his arm up, "Heil Hitler!"

But they were not really dangerous, right? Every school has its rebels, its Goths in black nail polish and lipstick, its stoners and deadbeats, sometimes, as in this case, the very brightest techie kids who found solidarity in exclusion. "We hung out. We listened to music," says Alejandra Marsh, 16. "We went over to someone's house and watched cartoons. We loved Pinky and the Brain and Animaniacs." Fellow students described them as discarded, unwanted "stereotype geeks," who, like the jocks and preppies, had their own table in the cafeteria, their group picture in the yearbook with the caption, "'Who says we're different? Insanity's healthy. Stay alive, stay different, stay crazy."

"They do it for the attention," says Greg Montgomery, 19. "It's kind of like a rivalry with us," pipes in hockey player Chip Dunleavy, 17. "They hate us because we're like the social elite of the school."