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“You can't really teach a kid anything: you can only show him the way and motivate him to learn it himself.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“The final portrait is often furthest from the truth.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Psychopaths don't act like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates. They come off like Hugh Grant, in his most adorable role.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“When I fell out the window, I knew somebody would catch me. That's what I need to tell you: that I knew the loving world was there all the time. -Patrick Ireland of the Columbine massacre”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“You know, it gets frustrating, because you know in your heart where you were and what you said, and then people doubt you. And that's what bothers me the most. -Valeen Schnurr of the Columbine massacre”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“from the Basement tapes

Eric outdid Dylan with the apologies. To the untrained eye, he seemed sincere. The psychologists on the case found Eric less convincing. They saw a psychopath. Classic. He even pulled the stunt of self-diagnosing to dismiss it. "I wish I was a fucking sociopath so I didn't have any remorse," Eric said. "But I do."
Watching that made Dr. Fuselier angry. Remorse meant a deep desire to correct a mistake. Eric hadn't done it yet. He excused his actions several times on the tapes. Fuselier was tough to rattle, but that got to him.
"Those are the most worthless apologies I've ever heard in my life," he said. It got more ludicrous later, when Eric willed some of his stuff to two buddies, "if you guys live."
"If you live?" Fuselier repeated. "They are going to go in there and quite possibly kill their friends. If they were the least bit sorry they would not do it!”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“The goal with hostages is to gradually lower expectations; in nonhostage crises, it's to lower emotions.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Prom was more about acting out some weird facsimile of adulthood: dress up like a tacky wedding party, hold hands and behave like a couple even if you've never dated, and observe the etiquette of Gilded Age debutantes thrust into modern celebrity: limos, red carpets and a constant stream of paparazzi, played by parents, teachers, and hired photo hacks.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Columbine also changed police response to attacks. No more perimeters. A national task force was organized to develop a new plan. In 2003, it released “The Active Shooter Protocol.â€� The gist was simple: If the shooter seems active, storm the building. Move toward the sound of gunfire. Disregard even victims. There is one objective: Neutralize the shooters. Stop them or kill them.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“The Columbine crisis was never a hostage standoff. Eric and Dylan had no intentions of making demands. SWAT teams searched the building for over three hours, but the killers were lying dead the entire time. They had committed suicide in the library at 12:08, forty-nine minutes after beginning the attack. The killing and the terror had been real. The standoff had not.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Eric dreamed big but settled for reality.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Eric Harris wanted a prom date. Eric was a senior, about to leave Columbine High School forever. He was not about to be left out of the prime social event of his life. He really wanted a date. Dates were not generally a problem. Eric was a brain, but an uncommon subcategory: cool brain. He smoked, he drank, he dated. He got invited to parties. He got high. He worked his look hard: military chic hairâ€� short and spiked with plenty of product—plus black T-shirts and baggy cargo pants. He blasted hard-core German industrial rock from his Honda. He enjoyed firing off bottle rockets and road-tripping to Wyoming to replenish the stash. He broke the rules, tagged himself with the nickname Reb, but did his homework and earned himself a slew of A’s. He shot cool videos and got them airplay on the closed-circuit system at school. And he got chicks. Lots and lots of chicks. On the ultimate high school scorecard, Eric outscored much of the football team. He was a little charmer. He walked right up to hotties at the mall. He won them over with quick wit, dazzling dimples, and a disarming smile.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Eric penned nearly a dozen new journal entries in the next two months.
"I have a goal to destroy as much as possible," he wrote, "so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that."
It was a mark of Eric's ruthlessness that he comprehended the pain and consciously fought the urge to spare it. "I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom," [the computer game he played day and night] he wrote. "I have to turn off my feelings.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“The narrative unfolding on television looked nothing like the killersâ€� plan. It looked only moderately like what was actually occurring. It would take months for investigators to piece together what had gone on inside. Motive would take longer to unravel. It would be years before the detective team would explain why. The public couldn’t wait that long. The media was not about to. They speculated.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“The warrants were typed up in Golden, the county seat, delivered to a judge, signed, driven out to the killersâ€� homes, and exercised within four hours of the first shots—before the SWAT team reached the library and discovered the attack was over.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“And we have obviously failed on guns. Victims have engaged the public, and polls consistently indicate that huge majorities, including gun owners, support commonsense steps. Dr. Ochberg is frustrated, too. “Good people have tried to do good things but no policy has been enacted to reduce access of military weapons to kids,â€� he said. “No leader has had the guts to take on the NRA.â€� Nor has its own membership.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“The pastor walked through Clement Park and sniffed the air. Satan. The pastor could smell him wafting through the park. It was an acrid odor—had it been a little stronger, it might have singed his nose hairs. The Enemy had swept in with this madness on Tuesday, but the real battle was only now under way. “I smell the presence of Satan,â€� Reverend Oudemolen thundered from the pulpit Sunday morning. “What we saw Tuesday came from Satan’s home office. Satan had a plan. Satan wants us to live in fear in Littleton. He wants us to see black trench coats or people in Goth attire and makeup and here’s what he wants us to feel: Look how powerful and scary Satan is!”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“For Eric, Columbine was a performance. Homicidal art. He actually referred to his audience in his journal: “the majority of the audience wont even understand my motives,â€� he complained. He scripted Columbine as made-for-TV murder, and his chief concern was that we would be too stupid to see the point. Fear was Eric’s ultimate weapon. He wanted to maximize the terror. He didn’t want kids to fear isolated events like a sporting event or a dance; he wanted them to fear their daily lives. It worked. Parents across the country were afraid to send their kids to school. Eric didn’t have the political agenda of a terrorist, but he had adopted terrorist tactics. Sociology professor Mark Juergensmeyer identified the central characteristic of terrorism as “performance violence.â€� Terrorists design events “to be spectacular in their viciousness and awesome in their destructive power. Such instances of exaggerated violence are constructed events: they are mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater.â€� The audience—for Timothy McVeigh, Eric Harris, or the Palestine Liberation Organization—was always miles away, watching on TV. Terrorists rarely settle for just shooting; that limits the damage to individuals. They prefer to blow up things—buildings, usually, and the smart ones choose carefully. “During that brief dramatic moment when a terrorist act levels a building or damages some entity that a society regards as central to its existence, the perpetrators of the act assert that they—and not the secular government—have ultimate control over that entity and its centrality,â€� Juergensmeyer wrote. He pointed out that during the same day as the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, a deadlier attack was leveled against a coffee shop in Cairo. The attacks were presumably coordinated by the same group. The body count was worse in Egypt, yet the explosion was barely reported outside that country. “A coffeehouse is not the World Trade Center,â€� he explained. Most terrorists target symbols of the system they abhor—generally, iconic government buildings. Eric followed the same logic. He understood that the cornerstone of his plan was the explosives. When all his bombs fizzled, everything about his attack was misread. He didn’t just fail to top Timothy McVeigh’s record—he wasn’t even recognized for trying. He was never categorized with his peer group. We lumped him in with the pathetic loners who shot people.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“What good were special talents when there was no one to share them with?”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Local churches felt a surge following Columbine. Attendance spiked, fervor was unprecedented. It faded. Pastors reported no long-term impact. ____”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“So what accounted for all the confusion? “Eyewitness testimony, in general, is not very accurate,â€� one investigator explained. “Put that together with gunshots going off and just the most terrifying situation in their life, what they remember now may not be anywhere near what really happened.â€� Human memory can be erratic.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“All the talk of bullying and alienation provided an easy motive. Forty-eight hours after the massacre, USA Today pulled the threads together in a stunning cover story that fused the myths of jock-hunting, bully-revenge, and the TCM. “Students are beginning to describe how a long-simmering rivalry between the sullen members of their clique [the TCM] and the school’s athletes escalated and ultimately exploded in this week’s deadly violence,â€� it said. It described tension the previous spring, including daily fistfights. The details were accurate, the conclusions wrong. Most of the media followed. It was accepted as fact.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“The trauma specialists disagreed. These kids had been raised in a western mentality, they argued: real men fend for themselves; tears are for weaklings; therapy is a joke. “Frank, you are the key,â€� one counselor advised him. “You’re an emotional person, you need to show those emotions. If you try to hold your emotions inside, you’re going to set the image for other people.â€� The boys, in particular, would be watching him, DeAngelis felt. They were already dangerously bottled up. “Frank, they need to know it’s all right to show emotion,â€� the counselor said. “Give them that permission.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“They talked to a lawyer that night. He related a sobering thought. “Dylan isn’t here anymore for people to hate,â€� he said. “So people are going to hate you.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Jesus Jesus Jesus. There was a whole lot of Him that day.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Stone made the first of an infamous string of accusations. “What are these parents doing that are letting their kids have automatic weapons?â€� he asked.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Three months after Columbine, the FBI organized a major summit on school shooters in Leesburg, Virginia. The Bureau assembled some of the world’s leading psychologists, including Dr. Hare. Near the end of the conference, Dr. Fuselier stepped up to the microphone and gave a thorough briefing on the minds of the two killers. “It looks like Eric Harris was a budding young psychopath,â€� he concluded. The room stirred. A renowned psychiatrist in the front row moved to speak. Here it comes, Fuselier thought. This guy is going to nitpick the assessment to death. “I don’t think he was a budding young psychopath,â€� the psychiatrist said. “What’s your objection?â€� “I think he was a full-blown psychopath.â€� His colleagues agreed. Eric Harris was textbook.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Dr. Fuselier saw the danger early on. “Once we understood there was no third shooter, I realized that for everyone, it was going to be difficult to get closure,â€� he said. The final act of the killers was among their cruelest: they deprived the survivors of a living perpetrator. They deprived the families of a focus for their anger, and their blame. There would be no cathartic trial for the victims. There was no killer to rebuke in a courtroom, no judge to implore to impose the maximum penalty. South Jeffco was seething with anger, and it would be deprived of a reasonable target. Displaced anger would riddle the community for years.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“The officers knew they had a problem, and it was much worse than the Browns realized. Thirteen months before the massacre, Sheriff’s Investigators John Hicks and Mike Guerra had investigated one of the Brownsâ€� complaints. They’d discovered substantial evidence that Eric was building pipe bombs. Guerra had considered it serious enough to draft an affidavit for a search warrant against the Harris home. For some reason, the warrant was never taken before a judge. Guerra’s affidavit was convincing. It spelled out all the key components: motive, means, and opportunity.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine

“Healing begins, the Denver Post announced Thursday morning. The headline spanned the full width of page one thirty-six hours after the attack. Ministers, psychiatrists, and grief counselors cringed. It was an insanely premature assessment.”
― Dave Cullen, Columbine