Dave Cullen - Columbine

Eric was also working hard to get laid. He made a final stab with Brenda, leaving a string of messages on her answering machine. “I’m sorry I lied to you,” he said. “There’s something we need to talk about. I’m seventeen.” He was through lying, he said—he wanted to take their relationship to the next level. And she could keep the Rammstein CDs he’d left at her house. He wouldn’t be needing them anymore.

The last part made her nervous. She called back to make sure he was all right. And she reiterated one more time that they were just friends.

Eric wasn’t bothered. He was working another chick. Kristi was the girl he had passed notes with in German class. Lately she seemed interested in more. So they tried a sort of informal group date to Rock’n’ Bowl night at Belleview Lanes.

Kristi liked him, but she was conflicted. There was this other guy, a friend of Eric’s, Nate Dykeman. Bastard!

Eric turned on the charm, and Kristi went for it—just not enough. It was sex he really wanted; he had no interest in a real relationship, and maybe Kristi picked up on that.

Nate moved in on Kristi fast. They started dating, got serious, and Eric turned on Nate.

As Eric wrapped up plans for April 20, Dylan was laying into his journal in a frenzy. They were short entries and erratic, tossing aside all his conventions. Several ran half a page or less. He was expressing himself more and more in pictures, all his old icons returning, linked together in wild, feverish strokes. Fluttering hearts were everywhere, filling up entire pages, blasting out the road to happiness, bursting with stars and powered by an engine shaped like the symbol for infinity. Dylan was focused on one topic now: love. Up until his final week, Dylan wrote privately of almost nothing else.

Ten days before the first anniversary, Brian Rohrbough threw a Hail Mary. The cops had been stonewalling, and litigation looked like the only answer. Families could sue for negligence or wrongful death, and use the process to force out information. The verdict would be less important than discovery.

Should they sue? How could they know? It all rested on Jeffco’s final report. If Jeffco released all the evidence, most families would be satisfied. If Jeffco held back, they were going to court. No one had anticipated that the report would take this long. Way back in the summer of 1999, Jeffco had said its report was six to eight weeks away. It was April now, and officials were still saying they had six to eight weeks to go.

The investigators had wrapped up most of their work in the first four months, but Jeffco was skittish about presenting the information. Yet the longer they waited, the more leaks they risked, the more rebukes, and the higher the stakes to get every sentence right.

Even the school administration was frustrated. “We keep getting ready,” Mr. D told a magazine in April. “I keep telling the community, ‘OK, we’re about two weeks away, we’re two weeks away.’ There’s only so many times you can get so wound up saying, ‘Oh, I’m ready now, I’m ready,’ and then all of a sudden, ‘No!’ There’s a level of frustration.”

The delays were maddening, but a practical problem was also arising. The first anniversary coincided with the statute of limitations. By delaying the report past April 20, 2000, Jeffco forced the families to trust them or sue. That was an easy choice. On April 10, the Rohrboughs and the Flemings filed an open records request demanding to see the report immediately—one last option to avoid a lawsuit. Since they were filing, they asked for everything, including the Basement Tapes, the killers’ journals, the 911 calls, and surveillance videos. Rohrbough wanted to compare the raw data to the narrative under construction by Jeffco. He predicted a chasm.

“They lie as a practice,” he said.

District Judge R. Brooke Jackson read the request. He said yes. Over furious objections from Jeffco, three days before the anniversary, he allowed the plaintiffs to read the draft report. He also granted them access to hundreds of hours of 911 tapes and some video footage. He agreed to begin reading the two hundred binders of evidence himself, but noted that would take months.

The ruling stunned everyone. But it was too little, too late. Fifteen families filed suits against the sheriff’s department that week. They would add additional defendants later.

The Klebolds chose not to sue. Instead they issued another apology letter. The Harrises did the same.

The lawsuits were expected to fail. The legal thresholds were too high. In federal court, negligence was insufficient; families needed to prove officers had actually made the students worse off. And that was only the first hurdle. But the main strategy was to flush out information.

The one suit with a plausible chance came from Dave Sanders’s daughter Angela. She was represented by Peter Grenier, a powerhouse Washington, D.C., lawyer. They charged that Jeffco officials went beyond neglecting Dave Sanders for three hours: they impeded his movement and prohibited others from getting him out of there. They deceived volunteer rescuers with false claims about an imminent arrival, to discourage them from busting out a window or taking him down the stairs. By doing so, the suit argued, Jeffco accepted responsibility for Dave and then let him die. In legal terms, they’d denied his civil rights by cutting off all opportunities to save him when they were not prepared to do it themselves.

The Rohrboughs and others followed similar logic. The library kids could have escaped easily, they said, unencumbered by police “help.” It looked ugly. But legal analysts were skeptical about any case holding up. “It’s going to be tough to ask a jury to say we know better than a SWAT team how to handle this situation,” said Sam Kamin, law professor at the University of Denver.

In legal circles, the lawsuits had been expected, but their ferocity shook the community. The anniversary was overwhelmed by animosity again, and media were everywhere. Many of the Thirteen left town. The school closed for the day and conducted a private memorial. A public service was held in Clement Park.

A few days after the anniversary, Judge Jackson ordered the sheriff’s department to release its report to the public by May 15. He also released more evidence, including a video that drew a lot of heat. For months, Jeffco had referred to it as a “training video” created by the Littleton Fire Department. It was based on footage shot in the library shortly after the bodies were removed. It would be the families’ first look at the gruesome scene. It would be “difficult” to watch, Jackson’s ruling stated, but that was no reason to suppress it.

“There is no compelling public interest consideration that requires that the video or any part of it not be disclosed under the Open Records Act,” Jackson wrote.

The next day, Jeffco began duplicating the tape and selling copies for $25. Spokesmen said the fee was to defray copying costs. The families were aghast. Then they saw the tape. There was no instruction, no narration, no attempt at “training.” It was someone’s ghastly attempt at commemoration: grisly crime scene footage set to pop music, Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You.” McLachlan’s record company threatened to sue for copyright infringement. Jeffco removed the music. Sales remained strong.

Brian Rohrbough had broken through Jeffco’s armor. Judge Jackson kept ordering releases. In May, he unleashed all the 911 tapes and a ballistics report. For a while, everything he read, he released. The killers’ families tried to stop him. On May 1, they filed a joint motion to keep materials seized from their homes private. That would include the most vital evidence: the journals and the Basement Tapes.