Doom Rules

The district has pledged to add more counselors now. Bencomo, of course, thinks it's a smart move. "I've had kids come in who will complain about the jocks mistreating them, particularly the kids with the black fingernail polish, the goth people," he says.

"They say, 'They call us dirts.' These may not all be horrible things, but they add up, and you become disenfranchised."

In the absence of an appeal to adult authority, students figured out their own way of dealing with the oppressive aspects of Columbine. One response was the Trenchcoat Mafia, a haphazard group of nonconformists who took to wearing the jocks' sneering nickname for them as a badge of honor, along with their black dusters. They were geeks and goths, oddballs and losers; only one or two exuded even a faint aura of menace. And they were far more likely to be targeted for ridicule than most students.

Principal DeAngelis has said that he never heard of the Trenchcoat Mafia before April 20--despite the ad they took out in the 1998 yearbook begging others to notice them ("Insanity's healthy!"), despite the fact that several members of the group were suspended, expelled or flunked out that same year. The statement has prompted much eye-rolling among DeAngelis's critics; to them, it's part of an official campaign to deny that anything was less than perfect at Columbine--right up there with the principal's boast that, when investigators searched every locker in the school following the shooting, they failed to turn up any drugs or weapons. ("That he would even say that is pretty amazing to us," says Rohrbough. "Nobody's talking about how many drugs were found in the cars.") Recently DeAngelis told a Denver Rocky Mountain News reporter that he was aware of "some kids wearing black dusters" but not of the harassment claims; yet even his supporters don't understand how an administrator as ubiquitous as DeAngelis, always roaming the halls and dropping in on classes, could fail to take note of such an exhibitionistic crew and ponder what it might mean.

"I can't imagine he wouldn't have noticed eight or nine kids wearing trenchcoats in May," says Strahl.

But the group's seeming invisibility may explain why few people paid any attention to the increasingly bizarre behavior of Klebold and Harris. If school officials weren't particularly interested in the problems of a few purple-haired types--some of whom were chronically ditching school, obsessing on madness and suicide and all but wearing signs around their necks screaming "TROUBLED YOUTH"--then it's unlikely that they would take much notice of other black-coated students.

Klebold and Harris didn't dye their hair or wear makeup; by most accounts, they didn't even adopt the fashion statement of black dusters until last fall, after most of the Trenchcoat crowd had left Columbine. They were not leaders of the group and had only a tenuous relationship to it, through their friendship with one key member. They certainly didn't share the group's desire to revel in their outcast status.

Several students who knew Klebold and Harris as classmates or even as friends have trouble with the notion that they were really outcasts at all. Most of the Columbine population comes from a single middle school, a situation that would seem to encourage long-term friendships and rivalries, yet the school's cliques were actually more fluid than most media reports indicate. Harris kept mostly to himself, but Klebold had a wide range of friends, from skaters and stoners to preps and even jocks.

The two participated in school-spirit skits on the Rebel News Network. Klebold volunteered to do the sound for school plays and one time scrambled to correct a technical problem in order to save a performance by Rachel Scott, who would later become one of the first casualties of April 20. Harris made good grades and got along well with most of his teachers; he presented his composition teacher with a Christmas present last year. Both teenagers may have complained bitterly about the jocks on occasion, but it's possible to conclude that the two actually liked school--or, at least, certain aspects of it. (From Harris's list: "YOU KNOW WHAT I LOVE!!!? SCHOOL! YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? SCHOOLWORK!")

"I never saw them being hostile or dissing on other people," says Jeni LaPlante, Darry Strahl's youngest daughter.

LaPlante had several classes with Harris her junior and senior years, as well as a bowling class with Harris and Klebold. Her two closest friends worked with them at Blackjack Pizza, and she frequently went with them to Rock 'n Bowl at Belleview Lanes on weekends. She considered the pair to be "out of the ordinary"--but then, there were a lot of people who were a little unusual at Columbine. She didn't see anything terribly disturbing about them. She continued to think that up until the morning of April 20; she was outside the school when terrified students began pouring out and running for cover.

"I never saw this coming," she says. "It hit me hard, because I didn't ever see a problem at Columbine. It was the all-American school. It had different cliques, but that was also diversity."