The Fire Last Time They dreamed of fire. It would be a cleansing fire, fueled by propane, gasoline, gunpowder, homemade napalm — and their own savage hatred. Explosion after explosion, building to a conflagration that would settle all arguments and consume hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives. At first, when the…
For the past eighteen months, ever since Columbine families filed nine lawsuits against him and his agency, Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone has refused to talk to reporters about the school massacre. When other county officials deign to comment on the police response to the attack, they invariably parrot the…
Two weeks ago, when Kmart officials announced that their stores would stop selling handgun ammunition, they described the decision as a shift in “merchandising strategy” that had been in the works for some time. It was just a coincidence, they suggested, that Kmart executives had met with filmmaker Michael Moore…
Judging from the Denver dailies, the Governor’s Columbine Review Commission completed a masterful bit of finger-pointing last week. Following the long-awaited release of the commission’s final report at a Statehouse press conference on May 17, both newspapers featured front-page photos of Governor Bill Owens stabbing a forefinger at the cameras…
For a moment last Friday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock sounded like one of the Brothers Karamazov — the brooding, metaphysically challenged one. “If you’re confronted with evil, what do you do about it?” he asked the attorneys gathered in his courtroom. “If you do nothing, doesn’t that become evil…
The last two weeks have not been the best of times for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. The agency has been in serious damage-control mode since the court-ordered release of hundreds of pages of police records that indicated the JCSO was telling something less than the whole truth about its…
David Gelber adjusts his tie. He tugs it left, then right again. It’s as if he’s trying to get more oxygen without disrobing, as if what’s needed right now is a little fresh air, something to cleanse his lungs of the bad odor wafting through the halls of the Jefferson…
In an effort to streamline what promises to be a lengthy legal process, all fourteen lawsuits filed by families of people injured or killed in the shootings at Columbine High School have been moved to federal court in Denver. But an attorney for two of the families says his clients…
What may have been the defining moment in the history of the Governor’s Columbine Review Commission unfolded last month. Consigned to a small meeting room in the basement of the Jefferson County Justice Center, struggling to make sense of the worst school massacre the country has ever seen and faced…
One of the most glaring deficiencies of the sheriff’s report is its cursory treatment of the circumstances that led up to the attack. “While this report establishes a record of the events of April 20,” it states, “it cannot answer the most fundamental question — WHY?…The evidence provides no definitive…
The Story They Don’t Want to Tell On the morning of Judgment Day, minutes before they launch their deadly assault on Columbine High School, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold complete their last video project together. Guns loaded, bombs and extra ammo packed in duffel bags and trench coats, they take…
There were a lot of things Melissa Sowder didn’t like about Columbine High School. The bullies, for instance. They were football players, mostly. They shoved her friends in the halls and threw snowballs or bottles at them on the way home. Sometimes they shoved her, too. Who needed it? “Teachers…
