Dave Cullen - Columbine

Fuselier continued ruling out profiles. None of the usual theories fit. Everything about Dylan screamed depressive—an extreme case, self-medicating with alcohol. The problem was how that had led to murder. Dylan’s journal read like that of a boy on the road to suicide, not homicide.

Fuselier had seen murder arise from depression, but it rarely looked like this. There is usually a continuum of depressive reactions, ranging from lethargy to mass murder. Dylan seemed muddled on the languorous side. Depressives are inherently angry, though they rarely appear that way. They are angry at themselves. “Anger turned inward equals depression,” Fuselier explained. Depression leads to murder when the anger is severe enough and then turns outward. Depressive outbursts tend to erupt after a debilitating loss: getting fired, dumped by a girlfriend, even a bad grade, if the depressive sees that as significant. “Most of us get angry, kick a trash can, drink a beer or two, and get over it,” Fuselier explained. For 99.9 percent of the population, that’s the end of it. But for a few, the anger festers.

Some depressives withdraw—from friends, family, schoolmates. Most of them get help or just get over it. A few spiral downward toward suicide. But for a tiny percentage, their own death is not enough. They perform a “vengeful suicide”—a common example is the angry husband who shoots himself in front of his wedding photo. He deliberately splatters his remains on the symbol of the marriage. The offense is directed straight at his conception of the guilty party. A tiny number of angry depressives decide to make the tormentor pay. Typically that’s a wife, girlfriend, boss, or parent—someone close enough to matter. It’s a rare depressive who resorts to murder, but when one does, it nearly always ends with a single person.

A few lash out in a wider circle: the wife and her friend who bad-mouthed him; the boss and some coworkers. The targets are specific. But the rarest of these angry depressives take the reasoning one step further: everyone was mean to them; everyone had a role in their misfortune. They want to lash out randomly and show us all, hurt us back and make sure we feel it. This is the gunman who opens fire on a random crowd.

Fuselier had seen each of those types several times over the course of his career. Dylan didn’t look like a candidate. Murder or even suicide takes willpower as well as anger. Dylan fantasized about suicide for years without making an attempt. He had never spoken to the girls he dreamed of. Dylan Klebold was not a man of action. He was conscripted by a boy who was.

Patrick Ireland was trying to learn to talk again. So frustrating. The first couple of days he couldn’t manage much of anything. He struggled to spit out a single sentence, word by word, and when he had finished, it often made no sense. In his best moments, Patrick spoke like the victim of a severe stroke: slow, labored attempts would produce a single guttural syllable, then a sudden burst of sound. He could form the words in his head, but few made the passage to his mouth. Where did all the rest go? Any chance distraction could hijack the thought as it made its way to his vocal chords. Random phrases often slipped in to replace the ideas. His mom would ask how he was feeling, and he’d answer in Spanish, or recite the capitals of South American countries. His brain was never aware of the mix-up. He was sure he had just described his mood or asked for a straw, and was confused by her confusion.

Patrick’s brain tended to spit out whatever was in short-term memory. He had been studying the capitals just before the shooting, and recently returned from Spain. Often the memories were more immediate. Hospital intercom announcements were constantly echoing out of Patrick’s mouth, in response to unrelated questions. He had no idea he had even heard the voices in the background. Other times it was complete nonsense. “Picture-perfect marsupials” kept popping out. No one knows where that came from.

It got frustrating, for everyone. One of Patrick’s first meals out of the ICU was a juicy hamburger. He was so excited about it, and couldn’t wait to slather the bun with… something. Kathy gently asked him to repeat. That was annoying, but he answered with fresh gibberish. Over and over he repeated himself, more angry with each new batch of nonsense. He tried miming it, shaking the bottle—he really wanted that condiment. Kathy’s sister ran downstairs and got one of everything from the cafeteria: mustard, relish, salsa—big handfuls of packets. None of that. They never did figure out what he wanted.

Patrick understood that he’d been shot. He knew he had gone out the window. He didn’t grasp the scale of the massacre. He didn’t know he had been on TV—or that television shows were interested in him. He had no idea the networks had cast him as The Boy in the Window.

Now and then, Patrick would stammer out an intelligible answer. And it would make him extremely happy. His motor skills seemed fine on the left side. If his brain could control his left hand to work a fork, why not a pen? Someone fetched a pack of markers and a whiteboard.

“Oh boy, was that a mistake,” Kathy recalled.

“ Big mistake,” John said. “It was just scribbles. Just scribbles, absolute.”

It was one thing to hear Patrick struggle. Seeing his inability sketched out in black and white, that was a shocker. It was like a diagram of a brain malfunctioning: scads of tiny neurons, misfiring randomly into nowhere.

The Irelands were also confronted with the realization that the problem lay deeper than the control centers for Patrick’s vocal cords: he couldn’t organize the thoughts behind them. He could respond emotionally, but he could not translate that into language, regardless of the medium.

“It frustrated him; it scared the hell out of us,” John said. “He can’t speak and now he can’t write, and how are we going to communicate with him?”

Sometimes, with a great struggle, Patrick formed the words out loud. Sometimes that posed bigger problems. The questions could be unsettling. Urgently, he begged them to tell him one thing: “How long is this going to be?”

This?

The hospital, the recovery—he didn’t have time for all this. He had finals in three weeks, he had ski season and basketball to train for, he was totally coming into his own on the basketball court. He couldn’t afford to get a B. He had gone three straight years without one; he had worked his ass off again all semester, and he was acing every class. The valedictorian thing was for real now, almost in reach. He wasn’t about to screw it up with this hospital crap. He was going to graduate as valedictorian.

It had been an ambitious goal. Patrick was a bright kid, but no genius. And Columbine was competitive. Some kids could cruise to easy A’s, but Patrick had to fight for some of his. Several students with unblemished records shared the valedictory title every year. He couldn’t afford even one B.

The geniuses could cruise to A’s without breaking a sweat. Patrick hated getting lumped in with them.

So Patrick made his parents a little uneasy when he announced his intention, freshman year, in the car, on the way to basketball practice. He didn’t make a big deal out of it, and he didn’t say he would try, he just said he was going to do it.

Two years later, in his hospital room, John and Kathy Ireland had let go of basketball, waterskiing, and academic honors. Walking and talking sounded ambitious.

The severity of his situation was more than Patrick could swallow. “I didn’t comprehend, really,” he said later.