Dave Cullen - Columbine

Outside, they ran for a police car parked on the side of the hill. Cops were there, pointing their guns at the library windows. Craig continued to pray. He asked other kids to join him. Craig had accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior, and they needed Him badly now. He led a small prayer group.

The cops shuttled the wounded out first. When Craig’s turn came, he heard more gunfire behind him. “They’re shooting at us,” one of the cops said.

The officers dropped the kids off at a cul-de-sac just off the school grounds. Craig joined hands with others in a group to pray. Then he got to a phone, called his mom, and asked her to pray for his sister. He had a bad feeling about her. He prayed that Rachel was not injured. Within an hour or two, he began accepting that she might be dead. She was. Rachel had been the first one killed, on the lawn outside. Matt and Isaiah were dead too. Kacey lived.

Craig took it hard. He had seen horrible things, but he’d heard something wonderful. In the worst of it in the library, he’d heard a girl profess her faith. Amazing. Craig began telling the story early that first afternoon. It spread like brushfire. Among Evangelicals, e-mails, faxes, and phone calls whipped across the country.

On Friday it hit the mainstream media. Both Denver papers featured it. The Rocky ’s piece, “Martyr for Her Faith,” opened with a play-by-play:

A Columbine killer pointed his gun at Cassie Bernall and asked her the life-or-death question: “Do you believe in God?”

She paused. The gun was still there. “Yes, I believe in God,” she said.

That was the last thing this 17-year-old Christian would ever say.

The gunman asked her “Why?” She had no time to answer before she was shot to death.

Bernall entered the Columbine High School library to study during lunch. She left a martyr.

The Post ran a similar account. The national press quickly jumped aboard. On Saturday, an Evangelical Teen Mania rally in Michigan “turned into a Cassie Bernall festival,” according to Weekly Standard writer J. Bottum. He described 73,000 teens in the Silverdome “weeping along with sermon after sermon about her death.” On Sunday morning, it was proclaimed from countless pulpits.

At first, her mother was unsure what to make of Cassie’s martyrdom. But soon Misty was bursting with pride, and her husband, Brad, was, too. “This tragic incident has been thrown back into the face of Satan,” Brad said in a statement. He called on teens to step forward while The Enemy was in retreat: “To all young people who hear this: Don’t let my daughter’s death be for nothing. Make your stand. If you’re not in the local church’s youth group, try it. They want you and will help support you.”

On Monday, Brad and Misty were featured on a 20/20 segment titled “Portrait of an Angel.” Stories were circulating that the killers had targeted Evangelicals as well as jocks and minorities. Brad’s community presumed that Cassie’s response had provoked the killer to shoot. “She knew where he was coming from,” Brad said. “And she was saying that, ‘You can’t defeat me. You can’t really kill me. You can take my body away, but you can’t kill me. I’m going to live in heaven forever.’”

Initially, Brad seemed to draw a bit more strength from Cassie’s bravery than Misty did. “You wake up crying,” she said. “I hope one day I can wake up in the morning and not cry. But I said to Brad, I wondered how they could do this. Why did they kill our baby girl? Why did they do that? Why?”

A few days after the 20/20 segment, Brad and Misty appeared on Oprah . “Do you wish she had said ‘No’?” Oprah asked.

“Knowing that a girl begged for her life and was released” made a big difference, Misty said. Eric had taunted Bree Pasquale for several minutes, repeatedly forcing her to beg, then finally dismissed her. “As a mom, you would have wanted her to beg,” Misty said. “So on the one hand, you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’d have wanted her to beg.’ But I can’t think of a more honorable way to die than to profess your faith in God.”

Two years before Cassie’s murder, Dylan laid out his case for God. He enumerated the pros and cons of his existence. Good: a nice family, a beautiful house, food in the fridge, a few close good friends, and some decent possessions. The bad list went on and on: no girls—not even platonic, no other friends, nobody accepting him, doing badly in sports, looking ugly and acting shy, getting bad grades, having no ambition in life.

Dylan understood what God had chosen for him. Dylan was to be a seeker: “one man in search of answers, never finding them, yet in hopelessness understands things. He seeks knowledge of the unthinkable, of the undefinable, of the unknown. He explores the everything—using his mind, the most powerful tool known to him.”

Dylan thrashed about madly, but clarity sometimes emerged: “death is passing through the doors,” he wrote. “the ever-existant compulsion of everything is the curiosity to keep moving down the hall.” Down the hall, exploring the rooms, finding the answers, raising new questions—at long last, Dylan the seeker would achieve the state he was searching for.

Dylan took to referring to humans as zombies. That was a rare similarity to Eric. But pitiful as we zombies were, Dylan didn’t want to harm us. He found us interesting, like new toys. “I am GOD compared to some of these un-existable brainless zombies,” he wrote.

That was Dylan’s first brush with blasphemy. He immediately qualified it: he wasn’t claiming godhood, just that he was like God compared to humans. It would be months before he’d try it again. Each time, he would push the idea further, but he never quite seemed to believe. As spring 1997 progressed, he filled page after page with aborted attempts.

He saw history as good vs. bad, love vs. hate, God vs. Satan—“The Everlasting Contrast.” And he saw himself on the good side.

Eric had more practical concerns. Two months of heat from his dad taught Eric to cover his tracks better. The vandalism missions continued through spring and early summer, with no record of further detection. By mission 5 the boys were drinking again. Wayne appeared to have watched Eric closely for a while, then resumed trusting him. According to Eric, only one outing went alcohol-free.

The emphasis on larger explosives continued; some of the timing devices began to work. Eric discovered that he could light the tip of a cigarette and let it burn down toward the fuse for an added delay. The boys survived a few close calls, including near detection by a police officer in a squad car. On the sixth outing, they brought along Dylan’s sawed-off BB gun and fired randomly into houses. “We probly didnt do any damage,” Eric wrote, “but we arent sure.” That same night, they stole some Rent-a-Fence signs from a construction site. Eric didn’t make much of the swipe, but this appears to be the moment where they crossed the hazy boundary between petty vandalism and petty theft.

The missions had been satisfying for a couple of months. But sophomore year was over. Eric was hungry for more. In the summer of 1997, Zack Heckler went to Pennsylvania for two weeks. When he got back, Eric and Dylan had built a pipe bomb. Dylan was involved, but it was Eric’s baby.

Eric would not begin his journal until the spring of 1998. But he was active with his Web site the previous year. By the summer of 1997, he had posted his hate lists:

YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!?