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Columbine's unanswered questions
The father of one of the students killed at Columbine blasts the sheriff's department's new report on the incident.
By Dave Cullen
[05/17/00]

The Columbine Report
Uncut text, video and audio from the year-long investigation into the tragedy.

[05/16/00]

Columbine report released
The long-delayed CD-ROM details the events of the massacre but fails to answer the central question: Why?
By Dave Cullen
[05/16/00]

Gulf War crimes?
In his latest exposé, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh reports allegations that the military committed a massacre against Iraqi soldiers and whitewashed it.
By Daniel Forbes
[05/15/00]

The hands that rocked the capital
Nearly a million mothers take their gun control message to Washington while the Second Amendment Sisters stage a feisty sideshow.
By Alexandra Starr
[05/15/00]

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But there's plenty of macabre, riveting true-crime fodder to keep your eyes glued to the monitor for hours, including previously unreported information and references to important stages in the investigation that Salon has been following since the day of the massacre.

You won't find lurid videos of the carnage, images of the deceased or the video message from Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris made before their shooting spree. But the photos of evidence, diagrams and painstaking timelines of the 16-minute killing spree in the report leave very little to the imagination.

"Glimpses of Klebold and Harris," offers snippets from the would-be Holden Caulfields-cum-Natural Born Killers' diaries, yearbooks, other ephemera and interviews with scores of friends, teachers and family. In some passages, the writing takes on the tone of a tabloid. At one point, the report quotes friends and teachers of Klebold describing him as a "nice, normal teenager." But, the report continues, "there was another darker side." A darker side that included Klebold's entry in Harris' 1998 yearbook, in which he refers to the "holy April morning of NBK (Natural Born Killer)."

Most of the video clips provided in the Columbine Report come from local Denver stations, who broadcasted footage from the high school during the immediate aftermath. But the report does include a single foggy video, from surveillance cameras, of Klebold and Harris pacing, guns in hand, from table to table in the school cafeteria. The video also shows an explosion and Klebold lobbing a small bomb. You can also listen to the 911 call placed by teacher Patricia Nielson from the school library, where most of the victims were killed, in which she screams to the children to get under the tables.

A chilling chronology offers a minute-by-minute, step-by-step account of the tragedy, from the moment (11:10 a.m.) Harris and Klebold stepped out of their cars to the time (4:45 p.m.) police had finished searching and clearing Columbine High School.

The question of Cassie Bernall's supposed martyrdom has been at the center of Columbine media coverage for months. The book, "She Said Yes," by mother Misty Bernall was a bestseller. But Salon and other media outlets questioned the veracity of popular accounts of her killing. According to the sheriff's report, there were no pronouncements of faith at the time of her murder. And the report only devotes a single paragraph to Bernall's death, which you can read, along with accounts of the other nine killings that took place in the school library, in the "Findings of library events."

Though teacher Dave Sanders was alive when SWAT team officers got to him, he had been bleeding for more than two and a half hours. He died within 30 minutes of when he was found. The final minutes leading up to Sanders' death are accounted for in "SWAT activity."

"SWAT team movement," offers diagrams of the path officers took to secure the building and a partial explanation of why it took so long to get to Sanders. "Searching the school," the report notes, "could be compared to searching 100 homes that are 2,500 square feet in size."

The report also devotes an entire section to the "Trench Coat Mafia," a loosely knit group of Columbine students and graduates who were part of Klebold and Harris' circle and became the focus of media and investigators' scrutiny immediately after the rampage. The report's conclusion on the Mafia? It "appears to have had cliques or small subgroups, not much different than most other social groups in a high school setting."

The same section also provides details about Robyn Anderson and Mark Manes, who purchased the guns the killers used that fateful day. Manes is serving a six-year sentence on felony charges, but Anderson, who supplied the teens with rifles, went unprosecuted because there are no laws on the books regulating the sale of shotguns from non-licensed dealers.
salon.com | May 17, 2000

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