Dave Cullen - Columbine

The years after the tragedy were tumultuous. He got to Columbine at 6 A.M., left at 8 or 9 in the evening. Weekends he came in for shorter stints—quiet time to catch up. At any given time he had a dozen kids on suicide watch. Breakdowns were a daily occurrence among the students and the staff. He got tremendous satisfaction out of helping the kids, but it was a terrible drain. He had a couple of hours every night to forget it all. “I needed that time to regenerate,” he said. “The last thing I wanted to do when I got home was talk about it.”

His wife implored him to open up. His son and daughter were concerned. His parents and siblings seemed to call constantly. Are you eating? Should you be driving? “I think I know when to eat,” he would say. Everyone had to know how he was feeling. How are you doing? How are you doing? “Enough!” he would say. “Please stop!”

Mr. D struggled with some of the staff, too. A therapist complained that she spent years in his school after the tragedy and he never learned her name. He could name all two thousand students. He had a strong team of administrators who were great at heading off problems, but some of them needed support themselves. One was brilliant but chatty—she had to talk out all her pain. Frank wouldn’t do it. He confessed to his staff that he knew he wasn’t there for them. He just didn’t have the juice. He had so much in him, and it was all going to the kids. It got the kids through.

Frank sought out avenues for relaxation. He joined a Sunday night bowling league with his wife. Strangers would approach every frame. How are you doing? How are the students? “Once again, it was Columbine,” he said. Out to dinner, same thing. “People would come right up to the booth. It got to the point where I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted to stay home.”

Home was just as bad. “I would go down to my basement, to avoid my wife and kids,” he said. His golden retriever followed. That was nice.

His family resented him. “They could not understand why I was acting that way,” he said. He felt awful, too. “I wasn’t the person I wanted to be.”

He started counseling immediately after the attack, and he credits it with saving him. If he could do one thing over, it would be to include his family in the therapy. “They had no idea what PTSD was,” he said. “If they had just understood what I was going through, it would have been all right.”

His marriage didn’t make it. Early in 2002, he and his wife agreed to divorce. He said Columbine had not been the sole reason, but it was a big part.

As he prepared to move out, Frank came upon four thousand letters he’d received in 1999. Most were supportive, some angry, a few threatened his life. He had tried to read twenty-five a day; that proved traumatic. Now he was ready to face them. He read through a big stack, and one name caught him off guard. Diane Meyer had been his old high school sweetheart. They had broken up before graduation and lost touch for thirty years. He looked her up. Her mom was in the same house. He called Diane and she was so understanding. They spoke several times, never in person, but long comforting chats. She helped him through the divorce and the emotional upheaval ahead of him in May. He had one more thing he had to do.

Columbine was a cathartic experience for much of the faculty. They reevaluated their lives. Many started over on new careers. By the spring of 2002, most of them had moved on. Every other administrator but Frank was gone. As May approached, Mr. D considered what had made him happiest. How did he really want to invest his remaining years?

No compromises, he decided; he would follow his dream. He chose to remain principal at Columbine. He loved that job. Some of the families hated him; they were disgusted by his announcement. Others were pleased. His kids were ecstatic.

Rohrbough was furious. But he was having success with the cops. His Hail Mary pass had broken the dam: Judge Jackson continued releasing evidence. Eventually, Jeffco was ordered to release almost everything, except the supposedly incendiary items: the killers’ journals and the Basement Tapes. The mother lode came in November 2000: 11,000 pages of police reports, including virtually every witness account. Jeffco said that was everything.

It was still hiding more than half. Reporters and families kept chipping away, demanding known items. Jeffco acted comically in its attempts to suppress. It numbered all the pages and then eliminated thousands, releasing the documents with numbered gaps. One release indicated nearly 3,000 missing pages.

Jeffco was forced to cough up half a dozen more releases over the next year; in November 2001, officials described a huge stack as “the last batch.” More than 5,000 pages more came by the end of 2002, and 10,000 in 2003—in January, February, March, June, and three separate times in October.

Halfway through all that, in April 2001, district attorney Dave Thomas inadvertently mentioned the smoking gun: the affidavit to search Eric’s house more than a year before the massacre. Jeffco had vigorously denied its existence for two years. Judge Jackson ordered it released.

The affidavit was more damning than expected. Investigator Guerra had astutely pulled together the threads of Eric’s early plotting, and had documented mass murder threats and the bomb production to begin realizing them. The purpose of the cover-up was out in the open. Yet it continued for several more years.

Finally, in June 2003, the search warrant Kate Battan had composed on the afternoon of the massacre came out. It demonstrated conclusively that Jeffco officials had been lying about the Browns all along—that they knew about the warnings from the beginning, and the “missing” Web pages were so accessible they’d found them in the first minutes of the attack.

Anger and contempt kept rising. A federal judge finally had enough. He ruled that Jeffco could not be trusted even to warehouse valuable evidence. He ordered the county to hand over key material such as the Basement Tapes to be secured in the federal courthouse in Denver.

Agent Fuselier beat Mr. D to retirement. Six months after the massacre, the investigation was largely complete. Fuselier continued studying the killers, but he transitioned back to his role as head of domestic terrorism for the Colorado-Wyoming region. Few Americans had heard of Osama bin Laden, but a life-sized WANTED poster of him greeted visitors to the FBI branch office. Fuselier saw enemy number one’s picture every morning as he got off the elevator on the eighteenth floor.

“He’s a dangerous man,” Fuselier told a visitor. The Bureau was determined to stop him.

Fuselier also resumed training hostage negotiators and went back on call for serious incidents. Two years later, he concluded one of the most notorious prison breaks in recent history. The Texas Seven had escaped a maximum-security facility and embarked on a crime spree. The ringleader was serving eighteen life sentences—he had nothing left to lose. On Christmas Eve 2000, they stole a cache of guns from a sporting goods store and ambushed a police officer. They shot him eleven times and ran him over on the way out, to be sure he was dead. He was. A reward was posted: $500,000.

The gang kept moving. On January 20, 2001, they were spotted in a trailer park near Colorado Springs. A SWAT team captured four of them, and a fifth killed himself to avoid recapture. The two holdouts barricaded themselves in a Holiday Inn. It took Agent Fuselier’s team five hours to talk them out. They were fixated on corruption in the penal system, so Fuselier arranged a live interview on a local TV station at 2:30 A.M. A cameraman came inside the room so the holdouts could see they were actually broadcast live. Both convicts then surrendered and were sentenced to death. All six survivors await lethal injection in Texas.