Columbine

The reporter who got there first

The first thing worth knowing about Dave Cullen's book is that its author was on the ground within hours of the shooting, and was for a while part of the story he later spent a decade taking apart. He drove down Highway 6 toward the Rocky Mountains on 20 April 1999, looking for a high school he had never heard of, where shots had been reported but no injuries. He filed his first report by phone to Salon from the car. Then he turned on the radio and heard a story he did not recognise.

That gap between what he had seen and what the country decided had happened is the engine of the whole volume. It was published in 2009 by Twelve, the imprint launched by Grand Central Publishing Group, and it is built in two halves that alternate, a "before" story running alongside an "after" story, with shorter passages set inside the attack itself, plus a timeline and endnotes at the back. The edition cited here is the 2010 paperback, 417 pages, which adds an afterword.

Cullen frames everything around the question the networks asked for a week straight: why. He never hands you a tidy answer to carry away. What he gives instead is an account of two teenagers, and then of what a Colorado town did with the wreckage for the next ten years.

No motive. No lesson. Just the long work of getting it right.

The five sections carry plain titles that read like a police file. Female down is the radio call that brought the first deputies to the school. Then After and before, The downward spiral, Take back the school, and Judgment day, with a timeline of the year before printed at the front. The book opens in an assembly hall four days before the massacre, with Principal Frank DeAngelis talking to a room of students on the last Friday before prom weekend, and then it cuts back to the morning of the twentieth.

A morning in Littleton

The attack began shortly before 11:20 in the morning on 20 April 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Two students, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, both seniors, had filled the building with homemade bombs in the hope of detonating them over the cafeteria. The bombs failed. What followed was roughly fifty minutes of shooting, and then the end of it in the library, where both young men killed themselves.

Thirteen people died. Twelve of them were students. The thirteenth was a teacher, Dave Sanders, who was killed trying to walk students out of the way. More than twenty others were wounded. One of them, Anne Marie Hochhalter, was shot in the chest and back in the cafeteria and spent twenty-six years in a wheelchair. She died in 2025, and a coroner later ruled her death a homicide, so the number the attack is remembered by today is fourteen.

Thirteen. Then fourteen, twenty-six years later.

Cullen argues, with documents behind him, that the shooting was the fallback rather than the point. Harris had been assembling bombs for months with Oklahoma City in mind, and the two of them wrote in their own journals about mowing down survivors of the burning building for the entertainment value. The New York Times of 23 April 1999 ran a front page piece stating that the killers had been targeting athletes, side by side with a report about the two large propane bombs discovered in the cafeteria. Both stories ran under a single banner about destroying the school. Cullen keeps that layout in the book as a specimen of how a story gets built.

Two boys, and the myth built around them

The "before" chapters are the part of the book I kept thinking about. Cullen works from the killers' own websites, journals and videotapes, from police files, and from the specialists the FBI brought in, whose retrospective diagnoses he quotes: Harris as a textbook psychopath, Klebold as an angry depressive. Two boys who were, on the surface, popular at school. Two boys who went to a prom, Klebold three days before the shooting. Cullen's Klebold is suicidally depressed, a young man whose journals are full of longing to be loved and of a wish to die.

What Cullen refuses is the tidy motive. There was no bullying vendetta, no quarrel with a jock, no row over a girlfriend, and no moment that set it off. The pair were not hunting particular people. They were after a body count, and the bombs were supposed to deliver a number in the hundreds.

The groundwork was laid in plain sight for years. When Harris was fifteen he built a private site on America Online to host levels for the Doom and Quake games he designed, and he wrote the blog on it himself, calling his vandalism "mission logs". By the end of 1997 the site carried instructions for making pipe bombs and a threat to kill and injure as many people as he could. In January 1998 the two of them were arrested for breaking into a van near Littleton and stealing tools and computer equipment, and were given a year of juvenile diversion, which meant anger management classes and a diversion officer. Harris wrote a school paper on school shootings and a poem from the point of view of a bullet. Cullen is unsparing about the adults who saw the signs and did not act on them, and just as unsparing about the fact that two of the boys were also funny, and liked, and popular.

That last point is where Cullen's handling of the private material matters. He uses the killers' own journals, the videos they made at school and their drawings. He keeps one girl in the book under the name Harriet, a pseudonym he gives her in Klebold's diary entries, rather than printing the name of a student who did nothing more than exist near him.

That is where the second myth gets dismantled. Within days the story had hardened into two bullied loners from the Trench Coat Mafia taking revenge on the popular crowd, and into a Christian romance in which a girl killed in the library, Cassie Bernall, was remade as a martyr after she reportedly answered Harris's question about God. Cullen shows where that story came from: a surviving student mixed Cassie up with another student, Valeen Schnurr, and the error hardened as fact. He also traces the fever inside the evangelical community, where a tidy answer to a massacre was worth a great deal, and where parents were being told to explain the deaths to their children.

The long after

The second half of the book follows what happened after the cameras left, and this is the part less quoted. Principal Frank DeAngelis tries to get his school back. A student who spent the last hour of the shooting looking out of a window becomes "the boy in the window", Patrick Ireland, and spends years afterwards carrying what he saw. FBI Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier works out how the killers planned, and how close the whole thing came to killing more people at once. Cullen sits with the families of Daniel Rohrbough and of Dave Sanders, the teacher who died moving students toward the exit, and with the investigators who had to decide what to charge and what to ask.

There is a harder thread too, and Cullen does not flinch from it. A grand jury convened years later examined the decision by the sheriff's office not to disclose that an investigator had drafted a search warrant for Harris's house more than a year before the shooting and never filed it. Cullen is unsparing about the adults around the school who had pieces of the picture and never put them together.

In the town itself the making of meaning was just as fast. Within days, candles and crosses went up on the hill above Clement Park, fifteen of them for the thirteen people who died and the two who killed themselves, and many parents were furious when they learned that the two young men's crosses stood among the others. They came down. What replaced them, eventually, was a memorial that took eight years to fund and agree on. Cullen treats that squabbling as part of the story rather than as an epilogue to it, because in his account the fight over who gets a cross is the same fight as the fight over whose story this is.

The 2010 afterword is the part I would hand to a sceptical reader. It adds something nobody expected: the account of four secret meetings Cullen had with all four parents of the two attackers, including the Harris family, who cooperated with investigators and then lived with the consequences of their son's actions. The afterword also updates three people whose positions on forgiveness Cullen had reported in 2009 and found incompatible: Linda Mauser, the mother of a murdered student, Bob Curnow, the father of another, and Valeen Schnurr, a survivor who was in the library. Their answers do not agree with each other. Cullen leaves them standing where they stand.

The story Cullen got wrong himself

Here is the part that keeps the book honest, and the part some readers find maddening. Cullen did not only debunk other people's myths. He debunked one of his own making, and he says so plainly, in a chapter that is really an apology.

On the drive home from Littleton he had filed what was essentially a body count, and the radio told him the "why" had already been solved: the killers had gone after jocks and black people, and had been lashing out at bullies. The next morning he read the newspapers, saw the death count being corrected from twenty-five to fifteen, and saw the bullying story being repeated as established fact. He changed his story to match. It took him years to establish that the jock theory rested on four words shouted once in the library while other slurs were shouted alongside, and that the bomb plan, uncovered two days later, made the targeting story impossible.

His own summary of the first week is worth keeping: myths are for ever. Reporters who got it wrong mostly published corrections nobody read, and by then the country had a permanent shape in its head. Cullen also wrote in a Slate piece that ran five years before the book, "The Depressive and the Psychopath", reporting the diagnosis of the killers by the FBI team before the official findings were published. His arc is from a reporter who repeated a story to the man who spent a decade explaining how the story was manufactured, including his own part in manufacturing it.

What it is like to read

The praise is well earned. Reviews in Time, Newsweek, People, The New York Observer and Entertainment Weekly were all glowing, and the Columbia Journalism Review said no parent of a teenager should read it without a sense of discomfort. It won an Edgar Award, and the honours kept coming.

The complaints are fair too. It is a long book, and the pacing is uneven: some chapters of the "before" story run like a slow build, others sit on the same ground again. Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times made the sharpest charge, that Cullen does not only dissect the events but invites the reader to relive them, replaying the planning and execution for maximum dramatic effect. She was writing about the replayed passages of the attack, and anyone who has read the book knows the feeling. There is also a stretch in the middle where Cullen keeps returning to his own error, hunting for the moment he went wrong, and a reader who wants the motive story will find those pages slow.

He has spoken publicly about how the reporting broke into him, and about how long it took to get back out. That is worth remembering when the prose gets flat and the reporting gets relentless. The book was a hit, eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and a peak at number three, and Cullen went on to write about Parkland in 2019, which means the long middle of his career is spent in the same county of attention.

What is left at the end

The question the media asked that week was why, and the book is honest enough to say that there is no satisfying why to be had. What Cullen substitutes is more useful and harder to summarise: two boys, one of them a monster and the other a depressed kid who had attached himself to one, and a set of ordinary people afterwards who had to decide what to do with what had happened to them.

That is the reason the book still matters. The killers' names are known to millions of people. Their victims are known to their families, to their town, and to a small number of readers who go looking for them in the book's later chapters, where the story finally belongs to them. Cullen was there on day one and he was wrong about the story. The book is the record of what it took to get the record right, and of how long the wrong version survived.