Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold

"Sometime in April next year, me and V [Klebold] will get revenge and we'll kick natural selection up a few notches...It'll be like the L.A. Riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam, Duke and Doom all mixed together...I want to leave a lasting impression on the world." -Typed rant by Harris.

Eric David Harris and Dylan Bennet Klebold were a pair of school shooters responsible for the April 20th, 1999 Columbine High School massacre. The massacre is today the deadliest high school massacre in American history and the fourth deadliest school massacre in American history, behind the Bath School bombing, the Virginia Tech massacre, and the University of Texas massacre.

Backgrounds
Harris was born in Wichita, Kansas. His father was a U.S. Air Force transport pilot, forcing his family to move around frequently before he changed careers and became a part-time caterer in 1993, when the Harris family settled down in Littleton, Colorado, where they lived in a rented property for three years. His mother was a housewife. In 1996, the Harris family bought a house not far from Columbine High. Eric's older brother, Kevin Harris, was a popular athlete at Columbine and studied at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Klebold was born in Lakewood, Colorado. His father ran a small real-estate business from home and his mother was an employment counselor. He met Harris in Littleton when they were in middle school and the two became good friends. According to early accounts of the shooting, Harris and Klebold were very unpopular students and frequent targets of bullying at their high school, including homophobic remarks. They eventually began to bully other students; Harris and Klebold had written journal entries about how they themselves had bullied younger students and "fags". Klebold wrote that he tried not to pick on others, which seems to match with more recent hypotheses that Harris was the ringleader.

Harris began hosting a website where he posted home-made levels of Doom, a first-person shooter game which was notorious for its graphic violence and gore, and also of Quake. The levels later became known as the "Harris levels". Harris also began posting his personal thoughts about his parents, friends and school, but later started putting up instructions on how to make crude explosive devices and venting his personal hatred of people he knew, in particular fellow students, mostly school athletes who bullied him and Klebold for four years, and faculty members at their high school, Columbine High. In 1997, the parents of one of Harris' classmates, Brooks Brown, filed a formal complaint against him when they found a death threat directed at their son. Some time earlier, Harris had thrown a chunk of ice at Brown's car.

On January 30, 1998, Harris and Klebold had broken into a van and stolen electrical equipment. They were later arrested on felony charges of criminal trespassing and theft and were sentenced to psychiatric treatment, counseling and community service. Harris also received anger management treatment and made such a good impression on his probation officer that their treatment program ended a few months early. After completing his court hearing, Harris seemed contriumph. In his anger management essay video, he said "I'm happy to say, that with the help of this class, and some other diversion related experiences, I do want to try and control my anger." In his private journal, however, he expressed nothing but anger and resentment about being prosecuted. Their encounter with the law revealed the existence of a kind of parallel universe. While outwardly apologetic and reformed, Harris and Klebold were bonded by a shared rage. Klebold wrote in Harris's 1998 yearbook: "My wrath from January's incident will be GODLIKE! Not to mention our revenge in the Commons [the Columbine cafeteria]." Though Harris had removed the death threats from his website after his and Klebold's court hearing, he began putting up records of his gun collection, which they obtained by having friends buy the weapons for them, bomb-making and even a hit list of specific people he intended to target in his and Klebold's upcoming massacre. At one point, Harris tried to enlist in the U.S. Marine Corps, but his application was rejected because he was taking the anti-depressant Luvox (his autopsy showed therapeutic levels of the drug in his body). A local sheriff once drafted an affidavit for a search warrant for Harris' home, but it was never filed.

Violence was very prominent in Harris and Klebold's school work. Together, they made a video titled Hitmen for Hire in which after being hired by a bullied student as mercenaries, they walked around the school's hallways with fake guns and pretended to shoot students that messed with their client. At the end of the video, they screamed at the camera, threatening to kill any person that messed with their former client. They both also wrote violent stories for their creative writing assignments and made video recording where they discuss their motivations. These tapes would eventually be called "The Basement Tapes", for all but one of the tapes were recorded in Harris' basement. In one tape made very shortly before the massacre began, they say goodbye to their parents and made a verbal will, naming friends and what they could have. Klebold wrote a short will in the last entry of his journal. A few days before the shooting, Klebold went to the prom with Robyn Anderson as his date. Anderson had bought the rifle and the shotguns used in the massacre because she was 18 while Harris and Klebold were still 17. They deceived her by saying they meant to cause no harm and only wanted them for harmless fun, shooting or hunting deer.

The Massacre
"Today the world's going to come to an end. Today's the day we die."

-Harris while in the cafeteria

At 11:10 a.m. on April 20, 1999, Harris and Klebold arrived at Columbine High in separate cars and armed two 20 pound (ca. 9 kg) homemade propane bombs inside the cafeteria. Before Harris left his car, he ran into Brooks Brown. After they talked for a moment, Harris told Brown, "Brooks, I like you now. Get out of here. Go home." Brown promptly left the premises. Prior to the shooting, Harris and Klebold had placed a propane bomb ca. half a mile (ca. 800 m) from the school, presumably as a diversion. The bomb only partially detonated and caused a small fire that was put out by the fire department. The pair's plan was to detonate the propane bombs inside the school, causing everyone inside to flee through the main exits, and then open fire at them from vantage points as they came running out. When ambulances, police, the fire department and the press arrived on the scene, time bombs set up inside their cars would detonate to strike them as well. Klebold's car bomb detonated when the police tried to defuse it, but no one was hurt. As for the cafeteria bombs, they malfunctioned and failed to detonate in a fortunate circumstance.

After waiting a while, Harris and Klebold armed themselves and went inside through the West Entrance instead. They first threw a pipe bomb, which detonated, but didn't do any damage. The first to be shot were Rachel Scott and Richard Castaldo, both 17, who were sitting on a grassy knoll; Rachel was killed instantly by four shots, while Richard was severely injured and paralyzed by eight shots. It was later rumored that Harris and Klebold targeted Christians and first asked Scott whether she believed in God and gunned her down when she said, "You know I do." Castaldo reported this, though the FBI later concluded that it didn't happen. After killing Daniel Rohrbough, as well as injuring six more students and teacher Patti Nielson, Harris and Klebold entered the school. Harris then briefly engaged in a gun battle with school reserve officer Niel Gardner, but after Harris' carbine jammed and the bullets stopped flying, he and Klebold continued their rampage inside the school, injuring another student and mortally wounding teacher Dave Sanders, who saved many lives by evacuating the cafeteria with two other staff members.

At 11:26 a.m., they entered the library, which contained a total of 56 hiding students and staff. Harris injured a school athlete, Evan Todd, and Klebold killed a special-education student before they both reloaded their guns. When Harris said "Let's go kill some cops", they both proceeded to have another shootout with Denver police, but no casualties were taken on either side. Then, Harris and Klebold killed nine more students and injured eleven in the deadliest part of their massacre. All the while, they taunted students, even using racial slurs, and screamed their rage. They left the library at 11:36 a.m. after seven minutes of killing students. Their movements through the school then seemed directionless, shooting into empty rooms. They once threatened students hiding in a restroom, but didn't go in. They even made eye contact with students through door windows, but did not enter any classrooms. They then entered the cafeteria in an attempt to detonate their bombs. Harris made his first suicide bit by firing his carbine at one of the bombs, but it failed to detonate. They walked around, taking sips from cups left by students. A Molotov cocktail thrown by Klebold managed to only partially detonate one of the bombs, causing a fire. They walked through the school, reentered the cafeteria and the kitchen, then made their way back to the library. After having a third, brief shootout with the police and lighting a Molotov cocktail on a table, Harris and Klebold turned their guns on themselves and committed suicide by shooting themselves in the head.

Aftermath
After the massacre at Columbine, the local police came under a great deal of criticism, both for not entering the school sooner and also for not searching Harris' home before the incident. The former later led to the introduction of Immediate Action Rapid Deployment, a police tactic where they actively approach a situation that could become immediately life-threatening to the public, such as in cases where the perpetrators are in possession of dangerous weapons, such as firearms, explosives and/or WMDs. David Cullen, author of the non-fiction book Columbine, credits this tactic with saving a lot of lives during similar situations, including the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. The American school system was also affected; many schools heightened their security by implementing metal detectors, security guards and having students wear computer-generated ID cards and also introduced zero-tolerance policies against bullying, though a study made by the U.S. Secret Service concluded that it probably wouldn't be helpful.

Violence in media was also examined when it came out that Harris and Klebold were fans of Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D and violent movies such as Natural Born Killers. A number of victims of Columbine and/or their families filed lawsuits against school officials, law enforcement, the manufacturer of the drugs which Harris had been prescribed, the people who helped him and Klebold get the guns they used, and even Harris and Klebold's parents. All of them were either settled or dismissed. Also, rumors and conspiracy theories were made that there was at least one more shooter involved, including a rooftop gunman. This "gunman" was later identified as a custodian making repairs to the vents. One student that was suspected of being a potential third shooter was Chris Morris, a member of the Trench Coat Mafia. While he was not involved, Harris had attempted to recruit him for the massacre three times, starting on March 20, 1999. Chris refused on all counts, thinking Harris was just joking. Another theory was that Harris murdered Klebold before committing suicide. This theory was supported by the fact that Klebold was left-handed and the gun that was used, the TEC-DC9, was found in his right hand, and also because he was half-Jewish on his mother's side, which Harris was alleged to have disliked.

The massacre prompted many incidents of teenagers attempting to commit similar shootings at their schools. While most of these attempts were prevented before they could even take place, there were three instances where a plan to emulate Harris and Klebold succeeded. They are:


 * Todd Cameron Smith, a student at W. R. Myers High School in Taber, Alberta, Canada, who, on April 28, 1999 (just eight days after the Columbine massacre), shot at three students with a sawed-off .22-caliber rifle, killing one and injuring another. He was then apprehended by a gym coach. Possible motives were stated to be bullying and depression. A medical examination later found that Smith had a heart ailment that required open-heart surgery; during the surgery, he suffered a stroke and fell into a coma that he soon recovered from, but as a result, he had diminished mental capacity. Smith later recovered and went to trial, being eventually found guilty and sentenced to three years in prison and seven years of probation. He was released into a halfway house on March 2005, but Smith escaped, leaving behind a note stating that he wouldn't surrender alive. However, he turned himself in the next day and was most likely incarcerated again. Since then, Canadian media outlets have been disallowed to use Smith's name and photograph ever again.
 * Thomas "TJ" Solomon, a student at Heritage High School at Conyers, Georgia, who, on May 20, 1999 (the one-month anniversary of the Columbine massacre), shot and injured six students with a .22-caliber long rifle. He then attempted to commit suicide with a .357-caliber revolver, but was talked down by an assistant principal. Solomon was then sentenced to 40 years in prison despite being recognized as mentally ill; the sentence was commuted to 20 years in 2001, making him eligible for parole in 2017, when he will be 33 years old.
 * Charles Andrew Williams, a student at Santana High School at Santee, California, who, on March 5, 2001, shot and killed two students and injured an additional 13 with a .22-caliber revolver before surrendering to authorities. This shooting was the deadliest shooting at a high school since Columbine until the Red Lake massacre. There was no definite motive revealed for the shooting (though friends have stated that it might be bullying), and Williams was sentenced to 50 years in prison and will be eligible for parole in 2052, when he will be 66 years old.
 * Note: Seung-Hui Cho, the perpetrator of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, was also inspired by Harris and Klebold, even naming them as "martyrs" in his personal journals.

Possible Motives
In the wake of the massacre and years following it, the motivations behind the event have been heavily disputed amongst both investigators and the general public, as Harris and Klebold's writings in their journals never explicitly confirmed them. Violent video games and their role in American society have also come under fire when it was revealed that Harris and Klebold were fans of several of them, as aforementioned, with their favorite game being Doom. In the book Columbine by Dave Cullen, it states that Harris and Klebold, according to their attempt at a more grandiose, elaborate, and terrifying attack than the one they committed, wanted to commit the deadliest terrorist attack the U.S. has ever seen, by killing 240 (as said by Klebold on video)-500 people as planned; this seems to be supported by the focus on how they envisioned their assault found in both shooters' journals. In The Final Report, it has been stated that the massacre was an act of revenge against the local law enforcement following their January 30, 1998 arrest and bullies. In the Zero Hour documentary, it states that Harris's journals and video recordings clearly reveal a disturbed mind that concocts grandiose and destructive schemes. Klebold's emotions, however, are a mystery. He did seem to be reduced to a gesture of repressed rage as the massacre in the library came to an end.

Psychiatrists have diagnosed Harris as a psychopath and Klebold as a manic-depressive respectively and believe that these two mental conditions influenced the two: Harris was influenced by sadism, Klebold was influenced revenge against those he was jealous of. For Harris, a list of hallmarks of psychopathy in juveniles was created by Dr. Robert Hare. It consisted of gratuitous lying, inability to feel remorse or guilt, indifference to the pain of others, defiance of authority figures, unresponsiveness to reprimands or threatened punishment, petty theft, persistent aggression, cutting classes and breaking curfews, cruelty to animals, early sexual promiscuity, vandalism and setting fires. Harris showed all of these except for animal cruelty (he wrote that he cried when his dog died). As for Klebold, he was consumed by despair and depression. He described himself in his journal as a "god of sadness" and summed up his life as "the most miserable existence in the history of time". He fell in love with a Columbine student, filling page after page with hearts and wrote about her, including letters that he didn't send to her, but apparently, she didn't return his feelings or even knew him. "I have no happiness, no ambitions, no friends and NO LOVE!!!".

The general public's most popular and widely-accepted theory of Harris and Klebold's motivation was four years of bullying by school athletes (known in the school as "jocks", who wore white baseball caps) and popular students. Harris wrote twice that "everyone" was always making fun of him, sometimes directly in his face, and that he would get revenge. They both spoke of their rage caused by their abusers to their video camera. Another recording also caught Harris, Klebold and another friend getting elbowed in the face at school by Columbine athletes and almost knocking the video camera out of Klebold's hands. Klebold even complained that his own older brother Bryon and his friends constantly "ripped on" and made fun of him and that "everyone but my family treated me like the runt of the litter". At one point during the massacre as they entered the school library, Klebold screamed their motive, "Everybody with white hats stand up! This is for all the s--- you've given us for the past four years!" Also, Nathan Vanderau, a friend of Klebold, and Alisa Owen, Harris' eighth-grade science partner, have both reported that Harris and Klebold were constantly picked on, the former noting that a "cup of fecal matter" was thrown at them. Chad Laughlin described an event were Klebold was pelted with ketchup covered tampons by seniors. Despite these facts and statements, this motive continues to remain unconfirmed as Harris and Klebold never mentioned their motives, as mentioned above.

Modus Operandi
Harris and Klebold arrived with a huge arsenal of weapons, making them possibly the most heavily-armed school shooters in American history. Harris shot his victims with either a 9mm Hi-Point 995 Carbine rifle or a Savage 67H pump-action sawed-off shotgun. Klebold used an Intratec TEC-DC9 semiautomatic handgun and a Stevens 311D double-barreled sawed-off shotgun against his victims. The two also had two knives each, which they intended to use under the occasion that they were disarmed by resistance, or if they found killing their victims by shooting "boring". The knives were never used, despite Klebold saying "Maybe we should start kniving people, that might be more fun" after they said the thrill of shooting victims was gone.

Harris and Klebold's most notable portion of their arsenal were their total of 99 explosives. They used three propane bombs: two were placed in the cafeteria but failed to completely detonate, though one partially detonated during the massacre via a Molotov cocktail; the third was placed far from the school as a diversion, but it partially detonated. Klebold and Harris also used carbon dioxide (CO2) and pipe bombs. They also left booby-trap bombs in their cars that were timed to detonate when emergency personnel arrived; only Klebold's car bomb did detonate, but at 11 p.m. instead of 11 a.m. as planned, after police attempted to defuse it; no one was hurt.

Victims
All of the following were attacked during the April 20, 1999 Columbine High School massacre

Fatalities

 * The shootings outside:
 * Rachel Scott, 17
 * Daniel Rohrbough, 15
 * The hallway rampage: Dave Sanders, 47
 * The school library massacre:
 * Kyle Velasquez, 16
 * Steven Curnow, 14
 * Cassie Bernall, 17
 * Isaiah Shoels, 18
 * Matthew Kechter, 16
 * Lauren Townsend, 18
 * John Tomlin, 16
 * Kelly Fleming, 16
 * Daniel Mauser, 15
 * Corey DePooter, 17

Injuries

 * The shootings outside:
 * Richard Castaldo, 17
 * Sean Graves, 15
 * Lance Kirklin, 16
 * Michael Johnson, 15
 * Mark Taylor, 16
 * Anne-Marie Hochhalter, 17
 * The hallway rampage:
 * Brian Anderson, 16
 * Patti Nielson, 35
 * Stephanie Munson, 16
 * The school library massacre:
 * Evan Todd, 15
 * Patrick Ireland, 17
 * Daniel Steepleton, 17
 * Makai Hall, 18
 * Kacey Ruegsegger, 17
 * Mark Kintgen, 17
 * Lisa Kreutz, 18
 * Valeen Schnurr, 18
 * Nicole Nowlen, 16
 * Jeanna Park, 18
 * Jennifer Doyle, 17
 * Austin Eubanks, 17
 * Note: Another teacher and two to three other students were injured making their escape, but not by bullets or bombs. Most of these injuries were sustained by falling from the vents.

Attempts

 * Harris and Klebold's initial plan for the massacre follows as this:
 * About 480 unnamed students and faculty members
 * Numerous unnamed students and faculty members fleeing
 * Numerous unnamed police officers and emergency personnel
 * The shootings outside:
 * Three unnamed students at a grassy knoll with Michael Johnson and Mark Taylor
 * Several unnamed students at the cafeteria entrance
 * Numerous unnamed students at a soccer field
 * Deputy Sheriff Niel Gardner
 * The hallway rampage:
 * Numerous unnamed students
 * The unnamed student accompanying Dave Sanders
 * The two shootouts with police: Numerous unnamed police officers
 * The library massacre: Evan Todd, 15
 * Note: Harris also typed a rant about plans of carjacking a vehicle, then committing home invasions prior to the massacre, in which any present occupants would be killed by firebombs and their (possible) firearms stolen. He also wrote the possibility of crashing an airplane loaded with explosives into New York City in a suicide attack a la then-non-occurring 9/11. But these were mostly just fantasy rantings.

In Criminal Minds
Harris and Klebold were mentioned in Jump Cut and The Perfect Storm as an example of team killers. Reid also mentions them in Hanley Waters, describing that while they documented their hatred of the athletes at Columbine, they switched their focus from the gymnasium, which housed the athletes who had bullied them, to the school cafeteria in order to "obtain the highest maximum body count". It should be noted that security cameras record many athletes, identified by white hats which was a common "uniform" for them, in the cafeteria that day. And they killed at least two athletes (Shoels and Kechter) and wounded Todd.

Though Harris and Klebold were not mentioned in Painless, the episode was possibly based on the massacre they committed because:
 * Two people were involved (although only one committed the massacre in Criminal Minds).
 * Both massacres involved the usage of explosives and guns.
 * Eric Harris and Randy Slade were both posthumously diagnosed as psychopaths.
 * Both used weapons in cafeterias.
 * In both cases, the perpetrators committed suicide.
 * Thirteen victims were killed in both massacres.
 * The library massacre is somewhat alluded by Slade's SEMTEX bomb: both were the deadliest portions of the massacres and claimed the lives of the last ten victims. Also, Harris and Klebold also committed suicide in the library, while Slade committed a suicide attack with the SEMTEX bomb.
 * Dozens were injured.
 * Slade's narcissistic statements, such as when he declares himself God, bears some resemblance to the kind of grandiose statements Harris and Klebold made in their journals.
 * Both Harris and Slade had hit lists.
 * In both cases, the perpetrators taunted students.
 * At the Columbine massacre, Dylan Klebold taunted Evan Todd, an injured jock. But he decided to spare him, despite his hatred for him for calling him a "fag". In Painless, Slade taunted Jerry Holtz but decided to spare him, though this was revealed to be a false story made up by Jerry, as it was Robert Adams who was taunted.
 * The way Slade kills Allison Humwald while she was praying is somewhat similar to a rumor that circulated in the aftermath of Columbine, but was concluded by the FBI and other witnesses not to have happened: the belief that Eric Harris asked a girl, Cassie Bernall, if she believed in God and shot her when she replied that she did. In reality, Dylan Klebold asked already injured student Valeen Schnurr if she believed in God. He spared her after she said yes and explained why.
 * All three perpetrators had brothers, although Slade was the older brother while Harris and Klebold were the younger ones.