Posted on 12/05/2001 1:23:30 PM PST by real saxophonist
WARNING: Graphic language! I'm serious!
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. "I'm Full of Hate and I Love It"
The secret writings of Eric Harris reveal the explosive rage of a young killer -- and his power to manipulate others.
BY ALAN PRENDERGAST
A year before the shootings at Columbine High School, Eric David Harris already had the plan worked out in his head.
He knew what time to attack the school in order to kill and maim the most students. He knew where he and fellow gunman Dylan Klebold, alias "V" or "Vodka," would park their bomb-laden cars, what they would wear ("all black"), and how they should act ("very casual and silent") as they hauled bags full of explosives into the cafeteria. And he knew how he wanted it to end.
"Sometime in April [1999] me and V will get revenge and will kick natural selection up a few notches," Harris wrote in his journal on April 26, 1998. "If we have figured out the art of time bombs beforehand, we will set hundreds of them around houses, roads, bridges, buildings and gas stations, anything that will cause damage and chaos...It'll be like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam, [video games] Duke [Nukem] and Doom all mixed together...I want to leave a lasting impression on the world."
Over the next twelve months, Harris refined his plan -- assembling an arsenal of bombs, acquiring guns and ammo, plotting the smallest details with an obsessiveness bordering on mania. He and Klebold never strayed from their course. Never mind that they both were in a juvenile-diversion program throughout 1998 for breaking into a van, or that Harris had been grounded by his parents for months (for drinking and bomb-making, he writes, as well as the van burglary), or that he was also the subject of a police investigation into Internet death threats. Adults were easy to fool, and Harris boasted in his journal of his ability to "BS so fucking well" to con and deceive all the stupid people around him who deserved to die.
"I am higher than you people," he wrote. "If you disagree I would shoot you...some people go through life begging to be shot."
Seized by police from Harris's room hours after the shootings, the killer's journal has been one of the darkest secrets of the Columbine investigation, its public release staunchly opposed by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office. Short excerpts dribbled out in briefings given to school administrators and were leaked to Salon.com in 1999. Last year the sheriff's official report quoted a few lines as well, including a statement that no one should be blamed for the massacre but Harris and Klebold -- a plea, in effect, to absolve police and school officials of any responsibility for the tragedy.
But that isn't Harris's primary message. The handwritten pages obtained by Westword offer hate, not absolution.
They ooze with contempt for cops and other authority figures, people Harris considered embarrassingly easy to dupe, which may be one reason why these writings have been suppressed so long. And they provide glimpses of a teenage terrorist who couldn't wait to carry out his violent fantasies, who was more virulently racist and more acutely psychotic -- batshit mad-dog crazy, in layman's terms -- than previously reported.
They also represent a lost opportunity to have prevented the shootings. Last week U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock threw out lawsuits filed by victims' families who claimed, among other things, that the sheriff's office had failed to adequately investigate death threats Harris made against classmate Brooks Brown. A year before the massacre, Brown's parents, Randy and Judy, had provided Jeffco with copies of pages from Harris's Web site in which he described detonating pipe bombs. The sheriff's office has said it didn't have enough evidence to pursue the matter. Judge Babcock noted that the "vague, rambling rants" on the Web site didn't include a specific threat to attack Columbine.
But the journal was highly specific. Had the police acted on the search-warrant request for Harris's home that an investigator had drafted in response to the Brown complaint, it's likely that officers would have found at least some of these writings, which feature detailed information about guns, explosives and strategy -- information the police didn't discover until they searched Harris's room hours after the massacre. Information they've kept under wraps ever since.
In the spring of 1998, while Randy Brown was trying desperately to get the police to take a closer look at Eric Harris, the precocious lad was hammering out his plans to slaughter Brown's entire family. He wanted NBK -- short for "Natural Born Killers," his name for the coming apocalypse -- to start with a visit to the Brown household. He and Klebold would "take our sweet time pissing on them, spitting on them, and just torturing the hell out of them," he wrote, before heading on to Columbine.
"It's deeply disturbing," says Randy Brown of the journal pages he recently reviewed. "And Sheriff [John] Stone has known about this for more than two years. He knew that Eric wanted to kill my entire family, but he went ahead and treated Brooks like a possible accomplice anyway."
Not all of Harris's meticulous planning came to fruition.
The gunmen never mastered the art of the time bomb, and they ultimately decided against wearing the "custom shirts," with matching NBK emblems, that Harris envisioned. (On the day of the attack, Harris wore a T-shirt espousing "Natural Selection"; Klebold's T-shirt bore one word: "Wrath.") Many details, though, including the notion of lobbing bombs and firing at students outside, then heading inside to "pick off fuckers at our will," remained remarkably consistent throughout the months of plotting.
Mixed in with the nitty-gritty preparations for mass murder were grandiose fantasies about how far they could go. Maybe they could "hijack some awesome car" and "start torching houses" with Molotov cocktails. Steal a plane and crash it into New York City. Anything was possible, really; in his own sick head, Harris had transformed his estrangement from his classmates into a smug sense of superiority, which he regarded as both a blessing and a curse:
"I hate this fucking world...You may be saying, 'Well, what makes you so different?' Because I have something only me and V have, SELF AWARENESS...We know what we are to this world and what everyone else is...We know what you think and how you act...This isn't a world any more, it's H.O.E." Hell on Earth.
Although he denounced racism on his Web page, he embraced it proudly in his private journal. "I am one racist motherfucker," he announced. "Fuck the niggers and spics and chinks, unless they are cool, but sometimes they are so fucking retarded." But just because he was a racist didn't mean he discriminated; he also lashed out at "white trash p.o.s [pieces of shit]" who deserved to die, too. When you came right down to it, everybody deserved to die, except maybe ten people: "If I could nuke the world I would."
Harris uncorked his deepest, most venomous feelings in his journal. At the same time, he tried to strike a master-criminal pose, knowing that cops would be poring over his words some day. The result is a bundle of contradictions -- part Holden Caulfield, part Travis Bickel (sic). He boasts of the "big lies" he's told his parents:
"Yeah, I stopped smoking....No, I haven't been making more bombs." The big lie about the van break-in was that he was sorry "for doing it, not for getting caught."
He told quite a few lies about the January 1998 burglary, in which he and Klebold were busted and booked for helping themselves to electronic equipment sitting in a van parked in Deer Creek Canyon. As a requirement of the diversion program, he wrote a respectful letter of apology to the van owner: "My parents and everyone else that knew me was shocked that I did something like that. My parents lost almost all their trust in me and I was grounded for two months...I am truly sorry for what I have done."
He also wrote an essay for his court-ordered anger-management class that dripped similar sentiments: "I am happy to say that with the help of this class, and several other diversion-related experiences, I do want to try to control my anger."
Privately, though, he raged against the injustice of it all: "Isn't America supposed to be the land of the free? How come, if I'm free, I can't deprive a stupid fucking dumbshit from his possessions if he leaves them sitting in the front seat of his fucking van out in plain sight and in the middle of fucking nowhere on a Frifuckingday night. NATURAL SELECTION. Fucker should be shot."
Harris also chose to write about the van break-in for a school assignment; he called it "the most significant event that has changed my life." Although he expresses remorse for his actions, the "lesson" he derives from his arrest is to plan ahead: "That experience showed me that no matter what crime you think of committing, you will get caught, that you must, absolutely must, think things through before you act."
His teacher wrote enthusiastic comments in response to the paper: "You have really learned from this, and it has changed the way you think...I would trust you in a heartbeat."
He fooled his teachers, but not the ladies. Among his other preparations, Harris spent considerable energy in his last few months trying to get laid, with little success. The females he lusted after at Columbine seemed to sense that violence was his girl. One remarkable passage in the journal starts as typical adolescent drooling over babes he'd like to bag, but quickly devolves into an orgy of savagery:
"Who can I trick into my room first? I can sweep someone off their feet, tell them what they want to hear, be all nice and sweet, and then 'fuck 'em like an animal, feel them from the inside,' as [Trent] Reznor said...
"I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can. I want to gut someone with my hand, to tear a head off and rip out the heart and lungs from the neck, to stab someone in the gut, shove it up to their heart, and yank the fucking blade out of their rib cage! I want to grab some weak little freshman and just tear them apart like a wolf, show them who is god. Strangle them, squish their head, bite their temples in the skull, rip off their jaw...the lovely sounds of bones cracking and flesh ripping, ahhh...so much to do and so little chances."
Showing them who is god began to look easier after they bought firearms at a local gun show in December 1998.
"Today was a very important day in the history of R," Harris wrote. "Today along with Vodka and someone who I won't name, we went downtown and purchased the following: a double-barrel 12 ga. shotgun, a pump-action 12 ga. shotgun, a 9mm carbine, 250 9mm rounds, 15 12 ga. slugs, 40 shotgun shells, 2 switchblade knives, and a total of 4 10-round clips for the carbine. We...have...GUNS! We fucking got 'em you sons of bitches!"
"R" probably is short for Reb, Harris's nickname. But it could stand for "revenge" or "Robyn," as in Robyn Anderson, the "someone" Harris wouldn't name -- the eighteen-year-old classmate who served as straw purchaser for the two underaged gunmen that day.
The exultation of the shopping spree was clouded by one sad note.
"You know, it's really a shame," Harris continued. "I had a lot of fun at that gun show, I would have loved it if you were there, dad. We would have done some major bonding." But Harris was already in trouble at home for getting caught with a flask of whiskey; his major bonding over the next few months was with bombs and shotguns.
Harris made only one entry in the journal in 1999, two weeks before the attack:
"Months have passed. It's the first Friday night in the final month. Much shit has happened. Vodka has a Tec 9, we test fired all of our babies, we have 6 time clocks ready, 39 crickets, 24 pipe bombs, and the napalm is under construction. Right now I'm trying to get fucked and trying to finish off these time bombs.
"NBK came quick. Why the fuck can't I get any? I mean, I'm nice and considerate and all that shit, but nooooo...The amount of dramatic irony and foreshadowing is fucking amazing. Everything I see and hear I incorporate into NBK somehow...feels like a goddamn movie sometimes...
"I hate you people for leaving me out of so many fun things. And no, don't fucking say, 'Well, that's your fault' because it isn't, you people had my phone #, and I asked and all, but no no no no no don't let the weird looking Eric kid come along, oooh fucking nooo."
That is how the journal ends -- not with the howl of the wolf-god, but the whine of the pathetic geek who can't land a prom date.
And decides everybody deserves to die.
When the first SWAT officers entered the school library almost four hours after the shootings, they found a dozen bodies and one badly wounded girl. The two gunmen were lying in their own blood in a far corner, bombs and guns scattered around them. Klebold was on his back. Harris was crumpled up next to him, leaning against a blood-spattered bookcase.
The top of Harris's head was gone. When the coroner's people moved the body, a "mass of blood" fell out of the open skull and landed on the carpet where Klebold's body had been.
Although questions linger about Klebold's death -- gun in right hand, wound in left temple -- there was no doubt that Harris killed himself. He stuck a shotgun in his mouth and excavated the cranial vault. He blew his brains out.
It was as if, after blaming his misery on "all the fat ugly retarded crippled dumbass stupid fuckheads in the world," the snotty rich toadies and the bitches and the un-self-aware and all the other despised people who needed to be winnowed out, he'd finally elected to deal with the problem at its core.
On a day of obscene horror, it was his one decent act.
Solvay Pharmaceuticals Inc. makes the drug to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. The lawsuit filed Friday in U.S. District Court claims Solvay failed to warn Harris' doctor about side effects. "Such drugs caused Eric Harris to become manic and psychotic," the lawsuit states. Solvay's Web site warns that the drug may impair judgment, thinking or motor skills.
The American Psychiatric Association defended Luvox in 1999, saying a decade of research found little relationship between the use of antidepressants and destructive behavior. Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded 26 people before taking their own lives on April 20, 1999. The plaintiffs are seeking damages in excess of $75,000 each. Victims' families have also filed lawsuits against the sheriff's department, school officials and three men who worked at a gun show where the gunmen got some of their weapons. Some families have reached settlements with the gunmen's parents and people who helped provide the weapons.
by Peter R. Breggin, M.D.
On April 29 the Washington Post confirmed that Eric Harris, the leader in the Littleton tragedy, was taking the psychiatric drug Luvox at the time of the murders. On April 30 the same newspaper published a story quoting expert claims that Luvox is safe and has no association with causing violence. In fact, Luvox and closely related drugs commonly produce manic psychoses, aggression, and other behavioral abnormalities in children and young people.
Luvox is a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) that is approved for children and youth (up to age 17) for use in the treatment of obsessive compulsive disorder. However, doctors often give it for depression, since it is in the same SSRI class as Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil.
According to the manufacturer, Solvay, 4% of children and youth taking Luvox developed mania during short-term controlled clinical trials. Mania is a psychosis which can produce bizarre, grandiose, highly elaborated destructive plans, including mass murder. Interestingly, in a recent controlled clinical trial, Prozac produced mania in the same age group at a rate of 6%. These are very high rates for drug-induced mania--much higher than those produced in adults. Yet the risk will be even higher during long-term clinical use where medical supervision, as in the case of Harris, is much more lax than in controlled clinical trials. These drugs also produce irritability, aggression or hostility, alienation, agitation, and loss of empathy.
Reports suggest that Eric Harris may have had a relatively good family life. If so, it adds to the probability that he was suffering from a drug-induced manic reaction caused by Luvox. The phenomenon of drug-induced manic reactions caused by antidepressants is so widely recognized that it is discussed several times in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association and many times in The Physicians' Desk Referenc
What a waste of skin.
Too bad he didnt decide to just off himself quietly.
His parents have a LOT of explaining to do.
All of this went on for a YEAR !
And they never had a clue ?
Hell, he was giving every sign that he was unstable and prone to violence.
Natural selection indeed....
They KNEW???? Someone should have quit her job pronto and kept a 24-7 watch on this kid.
The only difference between Klebold and me is that I had a great time in high school, had a conscience, was not terribly angry, got a fair number of dates, wouldn't have hurt a fly, did well in classes, didn't steal any motor vehicles, didn't ask anyone to purchase a firearm for me, didn't kill anyone, never kept an angry journal, didn't have racist feelings, had no anger towards women, barely even was in any fights, and was developing a pretty decent sense of humor.
Other than that, we were identical.
My lawyer advised me against continuing this discussion. Sorry. :o)
Oh no, the bloody $cientologists are at it again.
You know that they have medication for those problems, don't you?
Dear Friend of Education,I'm outraged at the audacity of public school authorities and the intrusiveness of their agenda!
Let me explain.
I had the opportunity to meet Columbine survivor Mark Taylor, his mother and a former member of the Colorado State School Board at the Denver airport last month, just after the second anniversary of the Columbine massacre.
Mark has left public school and has been on home study since he was shot seven times and left for dead. I talked with him long into the night about his recovery and his schooling. He told me of the intense pressure put on him to return to Columbine High School. I was apalled as I heard him recount how one school authority told him...
"If your mom is the problem, money can be found to hire a lawyer to sue her so you can return to Columbine. . .
Marshall Fritz
President
Alliance for the Separation of School and State
No way, jose. "Vodka" was most likely an adult who taught them how to construct bombs. 2 teenagers did not haul 60 bombs into that school overnight. 2 teenagers and a group of men, (feds IMHO) hauled in the bombs and did the shooting. Some Columbine witnesses report seeing as many as eight gunmen.
Just like in showbiz, the show can't go on without the "stagehands".
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