Haunted by Columbine | Retro Report Documentary | The New York Times

school violence erupted again today suddenly and with a vengeance columbine high in littleton colorado it has been a horror in 1999 two high school students went on a deadly rampage and the images seared themselves into the nation's collective memory one of the worst school shootings ever 15 dead bodies still being identified an american nightmare that too many schools know too well yet how much of our explanation for that nightmare was right the entire country was confident that these two killers were two loner outcasts from the trench coat mafia who were targeting jocks in a revenge fantasy none of that was true misguided perceptions of the columbine shooting continue to influence us today 1999 two students culminated months of planning by donning black trench coats and attacking their school armed with guns and an arsenal of homemade bombs they terrorized teachers and peers they had a couple of duffel bags at their feet and we witnessed them pulling out what we assumed to be paintball guns that later on turned out to be something completely different my secretary comes in and yells that there had been a report of gunfire and bombs exploding so i ran out of my office saw a gunman coming towards me i remember hearing gunfire and i remember glass breaking behind me i was laying in broken glass from the the window that had gotten shot out all i could hear was the the fire alarms going off um and then the gunshots at a distance okay has anybody been injured okay and the school is in a panic and i'm in the library i've got stunned down another table tip heads under the table we were all crouched under the tables and we could hear the um the the gunshots um getting louder and a couple times there was a big boom and the floor would shake oh god the gun is right outside the library they came into the library eric leaned under the table and pointed his gun at me i mean i was like trembling under there like a little leaf i saw the shotgun stared at the shotgun and all i remember is seemed like the barrel of the gun was the size of a cannon as soon as that bullet entered my backpack and actually paralyzed me shattering my vertebrae that's when the pain set in so there was like eric um on my right and then dylan was up on my left and i looked up at dylan and i said hey dylan and he said hey man and i said what are you doing and it still like chills me how he was just like killing people the killers fatally shot 12 students and a teacher in less than 20 minutes then they turned the guns on themselves 12 kids died on my watch along with the teacher in our lives you're not supposed to bury your kids and they were all my kids before the world had fully grasped what had happened inside the school there was a scramble to make sense of it we're getting coverage from four stations in the denver area of a shooting at a high school a still developing situation and one that looks like it's not going to be over anytime soon horrors like columbine terrify us and we need an explanation so even if we don't have an answer we find one and we find it really too fast two witnesses that we talked to on the telephone describe them as members of the trench coat mafia these are kids they claim routinely dress and blatch trench coats kids were watching this on tv and also it was the early days of cell phones if they weren't seeing it their friends were watching on tv calling them on their cell phones um and letting them know they were saying that um that they wanted to do this for their revenge for the school i guess because i mean they're such an outcast at our school was this little round and round feedback chamber so when a kid goes on tv and says oh yeah they were outcasts another kid who doesn't really know the killers well or at all thinks oh oh they're outcasts oh i didn't realize that then when he's interviewed he says they're outcasts so you're you know you're contaminating the witness pool like that and speculation about a black-coated mafia and its supposed grievances ran wild a gang that apparently hated athletes it was all because people were mean to him last year the trench coat mafia is more than just black clothes these boys were dangerously strange in a yearbook photo of some group members that was broadcast nationwide neither gunman appeared one member of the trenchcoat mafia john savage said there was a good reason for their absence eric and dylan were not not at all a part of the things that we did as a group they didn't hang out with us they weren't trench coat mafia at all and he says the media's description of him and his friends had little basis in fact the trench coat mafia was like we were we were video game nerds we weren't we like you know sit around the table and you know play dungeons and dragons you know which is just about the least dangerous thing you could do it was a group of friends that had similar interests some kids referred to him as the trench coat mafia but it was not that it was an organized club but the explanation about outcast loners seeking revenge against bullies had the dual advantage of being both dramatic and familiar what happened here at littleton is a grotesque distortion of high school fears and rivalries involving cliques the in groups and out groups that are a part of teen life in america author dave cullen spent nearly 10 years on his account of columbine researching police records the killer's diaries and their lives at the school he said the boys had busy social lives and didn't seem motivated by bullying there was lots of bullying at columbine it was a high school in america did it have anything to do with driving these two boys to murder i cannot find any evidence of that the killers directed their hostility toward the whole student population placing propane bombs set to go off in the cafeteria at lunchtime but the devices failed to detonate as planned columbine actually wasn't a successful shooting it was a failed bombing how much more indiscriminate can you get two big bombs to kill everyone who happens to be in that part of the building at the start of a launch cullen describes the killer's motives as a cocktail of malice self-loathing and a craving for fame over time they became something like a two-man cult bent on making their mark on the world in one final act it was a murder-suicide for both of them for eric it was primarily a murder for dylan it was primarily suicide they took the tactics of terrorists and said we can do the same stuff for our own aggrandizement eric talked about his audience in his journal and whether they were going to understand this and there was one message observers seem to take from the event immediately school shootings have become a dark stain on american life the phenomenon of kids turning guns on their schoolmates is all too familiar it's not just littleton we know that now we've had lots and lots and lots of places columbine came after a string of school shootings in oregon arkansas and other states reaction to the colorado massacre helped fuel a national movement towards school security parents across the country are demanding to know what their schools are doing to keep their children safe today nearly half of public schools surveyed nationwide employ police or hired guards at least 21 states mandate lockdown drills for school shooting scenarios and millions of dollars have been spent on everything from metal detectors to anti-bullying programs when people hear as somebody was caught planting a columbine the world knows what that means more than a decade after columbine we're still struggling to figure out not only what causes school shootings but whether or not we're seeing more of them and coverage of the issue offers little clarity school shootings are on the rise in america i'm telling you i have the numbers to show it but there's actually very little consensus on those numbers experts say that the number is statistically unchanged since the 1990s the number of school shootings in america has been rapidly in decline over the last decade researchers can't agree on a methodology for tallying up attacks they make different decisions about whether to include non-fatal attacks on schools or foiled ones or even on-campus suicides or gun accidents and this leads to vastly different final numbers we unfortunately tend to judge how frequently events occur by how often we hear about them and that of course depends on on news reports of these things happening the death toll rises in an attack inside the school cafeteria in los angeles two students were wounded in an accidental shooting a school shooting in texas leaves two students injured one statistic with a more clear-cut definition is overall homicides in schools the center for disease control regularly tracks those numbers and the trend line is clear while they vary from year to year school homicides are essentially flat across the decades they're also extremely rare there are over 300 shootings every day in the united states how many of those occur in schools almost none of them and rare as they are when school shootings do happen there's some evidence that past attacks and intense media focus on the killers have helped inspire future ones that he was inspired by the columbine killers attack eight years ago today the gunman adam lanza was obsessed with the 1999 columbine high school attack and some news outlets are beginning to take notice we are not during this broadcast using the name of the shooter often it seems that in history remembers the names of murderers and not the names of victims it's good that school shootings are still shocking because it shows that they're they're really rare so i think it's important to to kind of keep in mind that there are a lot of schools all over the world where no one's ever been shot i could spend my entire life living in fear wondering when's the next attack or when's the next person gonna do that but that would be it i'd be living in fear i would be giving in to what they wanted to happen you

Channel: The New York Times

Views: 7,585,737

Rating: 4.8591089 out of 5

Keywords: Haunted, Columbine, Documentary, Columbine High School, 1999, chool shootings, school violence, colorado, violence, deadly rampage, memory, 15 dead bodies, american nightmare, horror, killers, history, misguided, guns, april 20th, school attack, homemade bombs, gun fire, panic, 12 students, The New York Times, NY Times, NYT, Times, NYTimes, Video, nytimes.com, news, newspaper, feature, reporting

Id: AUSJ6rqEWUY

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Somebody9935]

For some reason columbine always sticks with me more than any other school shooting. They are all horrible but somthing about eric and dylan is really interesting