Later that month, I got a phone call from Judy Brown, the mother of Dylan’s friend Brooks. Brooks and Eric had gotten into a fight at school, and Eric had thrown a snowball at Brooks’s car, damaging the windshield. Judy was furious and launched into a tirade against Eric, which perplexed me. It seemed to me that the boys shared responsibility for the incident, and I didn’t understand her impulse to get involved when they’d resolved it themselves. The ferocity of her hatred for Eric seemed like an overreaction to me.
Not long after the call from Judy, Tom got another call from the school. Four months after his suspension for hacking the locker combinations, Dylan had deliberately scratched the face of someone’s locker with a key. He was given an in-school suspension for a day and owed the school seventy dollars to pay for a new door. Tom went over to write the check. He asked the dean about the freshmen, certain that Dylan would not have lashed out without being provoked. The dean acknowledged they had a particularly “rowdy” group of freshmen, acting as if they “owned the place,” but assured Tom that the administration was dealing with it.
We talked with Dylan that night. Tom was irritated with him for destroying property and irritated with the school for charging so much money to repaint a locker door. Dylan gave Tom the cash he had on hand and promised to work off the rest of the debt by doing extra chores. I told Dylan he couldn’t allow the obnoxious behavior of others to upset him.
I don’t know whose locker Dylan scratched, or if it was simply the one in front of him when the destructive urge hit. I have read in the years since that the scratch read “Fags”—a slur I have also read was frequently leveled against Dylan and Eric in the hallways at Columbine—but we did not hear that from the school.
It is, of course, not ridiculous that a younger boy could bully an older one. I simply never imagined anyone would bully Dylan. My idea of the type of kid targeted by bullies was as unrealistic a stereotype as my idea of the kind of person who dies by suicide. The way he dressed and wore his hair was intended to set him apart from the preppy, affluent, suburban mainstream, but it was not outrageous. We also believed Dylan’s height would be intimidating, because he told us it was. Once, during sophomore year, Dylan said something to Tom about “hating the jocks.” Tom asked him if they were giving him a hard time, and Dylan answered with confidence: “They don’t bother me. I’m six four. But they sure give Eric hell.”
Since the tragedy, much has been written about the school culture at Columbine High School, and Dylan’s place in it. Regina Huerter, director of Juvenile Diversion for the Denver district attorney’s office, compiled a report in 2000, and Ralph W. Larkin independently confirmed many of her findings in his exhaustively researched 2007 book, Comprehending Columbine. Both researchers found Columbine High School was academically excellent and deeply conservative; that much we knew. But they also describe a school with a pervasive culture of bullying—in particular, a group of athletes who harassed, humiliated, and physically assaulted kids at the bottom of the social ladder. Larkin also points to proselytizing and intimidation by evangelical Christian students, a self-appointed moral elite who perceived the kids who dressed differently as evil and targeted them.
This research lines up with the many anecdotal stories we heard after the tragedy from kids who suffered physical and psychological abuse at the hands of their classmates at the school. One story in particular stands out. When Tom went to the sheriff’s department in the fall of 1999 to retrieve Dylan’s car from the impound lot, a county employee offered his condolences and told him how his own son’s hair had been set on fire by some other students while he was attending Columbine High School. The boy, who sustained fairly serious burns to his scalp, refused to allow his father to go to the administration because he was afraid it would make the situation worse. Shaking with anger as he spoke, though the incident was no longer recent, the outraged dad told Tom he had wanted to take the school apart “brick by brick.”
About five years after the massacre, I spoke with a Columbine High School counselor. He told me that, after an earlier, publicized bullying incident, the high school had implemented closer supervision of the student body, including teachers in the hallways between classes, and in the cafeteria at lunch. But we agreed it’s impossible to control what two thousand students are doing on a campus—or to know what those kids are doing to one another in the Dairy Queen parking lot. Despite the administration’s claim that steps were taken to stem conflict among students, their efforts fell short. For many people, Columbine High School was a hostile and frightening place even if you were one of the most popular kids, and Dylan and his friends were not. One of our neighbors told us her grown son’s reaction to the tragedy, a refrain we heard many times: “I’m just surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”
Both Huerter and Larkin claim teachers turned a blind eye to harassment and even violence in the hallways, either because they did not take it seriously—“kids will be kids”—or because they sided with the popular athletes doing the bullying. They cite instances where school administrators declined to take action, even after being informed of specific incidents. This isn’t as surprising as it would be now. Bullying wasn’t on the cultural radar in 1999: there weren’t federal laws against it or mandated school guidelines or New York Times bestselling books about queen bees and sticks and stones. Peer cruelty certainly wasn’t seen as the serious public health issue we now understand it to be.
Tom believes, as Larkin does, that the culture at Columbine was toxic, and a desire for revenge motivated the attack the boys launched on the school. Many experts disagree: despite Larkin’s claim that the propane bombs Dylan and Eric placed in the cafeteria were put under the tables where the jocks typically sat, they did not target popular kids or athletes during the attack, or anyone at all. (Of the forty-eight shooters profiled in Dr. Langman’s book School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators, only one of them specifically targeted a bully.) Furthermore, there is almost no mention of bullying in Dylan’s journal. If anything, he appears to have envied the jocks for their social comfort and ease with girls.
I personally fall somewhere in the middle. Bullying, however severe, is not an excuse for physical retaliation or violence, much less mass murder. But I do believe Dylan was bullied, and that along with many other factors, and perhaps in combination with them, bullying probably did play some role in what he did. Given Dylan’s temperament and core personality traits, it’s easy to understand why being bullied would have been especially hurtful to him. He hated to be wrong, and didn’t like to lose. He was extremely self-conscious and critical of himself. (Relentless self-criticism is, incidentally, another sign of depression.) He liked to feel self-reliant, and wanted to be perceived as someone who was in control. This sense of himself would have been badly eroded with each incident. Apparently, they were common.