Columbine reports
There were many warning signs that something wasn't right in Dylan and Eric's world. Several people saw some of those signs, but no one saw everything. The bloody events of 4-20-1999 took almost everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was too easy to overlook what seems obvious in retrospect. It was the boys' last year of school and they were smart guys. They were two weeks away from graduation. Why would they wait until they were at the brink of freedom from the school they hated so much to lash out? For reasons we will never truly understand, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold decided it was more important to blow up their school and broadcast their rage-fueled message than it was to migrate to the next phase of life.

The tragic event wants for a "trigger event" - something that set the killers off, some major event that was the last straw for them. But there wasn't one. No one isolated event caused this, though several influential factors have surfaced over the years. Eric Harris had been diagnosed with anger manangement issues. In addition to anger management classes, he was prescribed Luvox® (Fluvoxamine maleate). This drug has since been found to increase volatile behavior as well as thoughts of homicide and suicide, particularly in young people. Harris certainly had enough venom in him to write several hateful webpages, one of them directed at his former friend Brooks Brown. He logged more violent and angry thoughts in his diaries and journals, as did Dylan Klebold. Dylan's creative writing subject choices got so gory and disturbing, at one point his teacher wouldn't even grade his assignment until she met with him to discuss it. She even talked with his parents about it, but he and his family dismissed it as 'just a story'.

Over the years that they knew each other, Harris and Klebold were known to have caused all sorts of mischief together, including booby trapping the fence behind the Blackjack Pizza where they worked to ward off other teens who used a hole in the fence as a shortcut. They set off pipe bombs at the restaurant and even started a fire in the sink, resulting in Dylan's temporary suspension. He was hired back when the place needed help.

The gunmen made several video tapes that spelled out just how unhappy and violent they were feeling, but these weren't discovered until after everyone was dead. The tapes weren't hidden. Neither were the supplies they used to make bombs. The barrel of a sawed-off shotguns was sitting on Dylan's dresser in plain sight when investigators went to search his room. Eric and Dylan gloated on their 'Basement Tapes' about how they'd been caught with bombs by their parents and nearly caught with their weapons. There were several instances where they thought their 'plan' was done for. Yet time and again they were allowed to slip right off the hook, so often that they admitted their parents "made some mistakes" and were easy to fool.

Many things contributed to what happened, but it can't be said that no one knew the boys were having problems. Eric's father, Wayne Harris, kept a diary detailing the times Eric had gotten into trouble with the law and with classmates. Below are scans of several police reports filed over the years leading up to the shootings. The top links lead to the most recent reports that have been released, investigative reports having to do directly with the Columbine massacre.

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