A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(68)
This research lines up with the many anecdotal stories we heard after the tragedy from kids who suffered physical and psychological abuse at the hands of their classmates at the school. One story in particular stands out. When Tom went to the sheriff’s department in the fall of 1999 to retrieve Dylan’s car from the impound lot, a county employee offered his condolences and told him how his own son’s hair had been set on fire by some other students while he was attending Columbine High School. The boy, who sustained fairly serious burns to his scalp, refused to allow his father to go to the administration because he was afraid it would make the situation worse. Shaking with anger as he spoke, though the incident was no longer recent, the outraged dad told Tom he had wanted to take the school apart “brick by brick.”
About five years after the massacre, I spoke with a Columbine High School counselor. He told me that, after an earlier, publicized bullying incident, the high school had implemented closer supervision of the student body, including teachers in the hallways between classes, and in the cafeteria at lunch. But we agreed it’s impossible to control what two thousand students are doing on a campus—or to know what those kids are doing to one another in the Dairy Queen parking lot. Despite the administration’s claim that steps were taken to stem conflict among students, their efforts fell short. For many people, Columbine High School was a hostile and frightening place even if you were one of the most popular kids, and Dylan and his friends were not. One of our neighbors told us her grown son’s reaction to the tragedy, a refrain we heard many times: “I’m just surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”
Both Huerter and Larkin claim teachers turned a blind eye to harassment and even violence in the hallways, either because they did not take it seriously—“kids will be kids”—or because they sided with the popular athletes doing the bullying. They cite instances where school administrators declined to take action, even after being informed of specific incidents. This isn’t as surprising as it would be now. Bullying wasn’t on the cultural radar in 1999: there weren’t federal laws against it or mandated school guidelines or New York Times bestselling books about queen bees and sticks and stones. Peer cruelty certainly wasn’t seen as the serious public health issue we now understand it to be.
Tom believes, as Larkin does, that the culture at Columbine was toxic, and a desire for revenge motivated the attack the boys launched on the school. Many experts disagree: despite Larkin’s claim that the propane bombs Dylan and Eric placed in the cafeteria were put under the tables where the jocks typically sat, they did not target popular kids or athletes during the attack, or anyone at all. (Of the forty-eight shooters profiled in Dr. Langman’s book School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators, only one of them specifically targeted a bully.) Furthermore, there is almost no mention of bullying in Dylan’s journal. If anything, he appears to have envied the jocks for their social comfort and ease with girls.
I personally fall somewhere in the middle. Bullying, however severe, is not an excuse for physical retaliation or violence, much less mass murder. But I do believe Dylan was bullied, and that along with many other factors, and perhaps in combination with them, bullying probably did play some role in what he did. Given Dylan’s temperament and core personality traits, it’s easy to understand why being bullied would have been especially hurtful to him. He hated to be wrong, and didn’t like to lose. He was extremely self-conscious and critical of himself. (Relentless self-criticism is, incidentally, another sign of depression.) He liked to feel self-reliant, and wanted to be perceived as someone who was in control. This sense of himself would have been badly eroded with each incident. Apparently, they were common.
One day, Dylan came home, his shirt spotted with ketchup. He refused to tell me what had happened, only that he’d had “the worst day of his life.” I pressed, but Dylan downplayed it, and I let him. Kids have disagreements, I thought. Whatever it is, it’ll blow over—and if it doesn’t, I’ll know. There has been reporting that the incident was more serious than I could ever have imagined: a circle of boys taunting Dylan and Eric, shoving them, spraying them with ketchup, and suggesting they were gay. That incident alone may not explain the deadly kinship forged between the boys, but it is the kind of shared humiliation in which a bond is formed.
Tom and I were aware of another incident. Junior year, Dylan had a parking space in a remote lot next to the school grounds. A few weeks after he confronted the freshmen, he told his father his car wasn’t running well. Tom found the hood flattened as if someone had stood on it, leaving an indentation deep enough to damage the fuse box. Dylan said he hadn’t noticed the dent. Tom asked him outright if the freshmen had intentionally damaged his car. Dylan said he didn’t know when or how it had happened, although he was certain it had happened in the school parking lot. The car was old, and we’d never expected it to survive high school without a few dings. But our failure to find out what happened to it is one thing I regret.
Tom and I did not perceive Dylan as being unpopular; he simply had too many friends for us to see him that way. Unfortunately, we did not have the slightest idea what his daily life was really like at school. Larkin cites a video Dylan made. He and a few other boys are walking down a hallway, filming nothing in particular. Four students approach from the opposite direction. One of them, wearing a Columbine Football sweatshirt, drives an elbow into Dylan’s side as he passes, causing him to cry out and the video camera to swing wildly. The athletes laugh, and Dylan’s friends mutter something inaudible. Larkin correctly sums up what’s so chilling, which is that Dylan and his friends continue down the hallway after the hit as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. “Apparently such behavior was common enough to be accepted as normative,” Larkin writes. This observation was supported by a number of interviews he did with students.