On April 20th, 1999, 12th grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School. At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history until it was surpassed by the Parkland High School shooting in February 2018.
00:00:32.500She manages it. So check her out over there, guys. Hit me up over there as well.
00:00:37.160So Columbine High School Massacre, commonly referred to as Columbine, was a school shooting and attempted bombing that occurred on April 20th, 1999 at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, United States.
00:00:48.880The perpetrators, 12th grade students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered 12 students and one teacher.
00:00:55.48010 students were killed in the school library where Harrison Klebold subsequently committed suicide.
00:01:00.86021 additional people were injured by gunshots and gunfire was also exchanged with the police.
00:01:05.380Another three people were injured trying to escape.
00:01:07.780At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in U.S. history until it was surpassed by the Parkland High School shooting in February 2018.
00:01:14.720It is also the deadliest mass shooting in the state of Colorado.
00:01:18.080And, guys, I'm older, so I'm old enough to remember this.
00:01:21.700This happened when I was nine years old as a kid.
00:01:26.560School shootings were something that weren't heard of back then, guys.
00:01:29.480So, you know, sadly, in today's day and age, in 2023, they're all too common.
00:01:33.540But back then, guys, you know, when people had some semblance of what reality was, we didn't live in this clown world that we live in now, school shootings were a big thing.
00:01:44.180So mass shootings weren't a thing like that back in the late 90s.
00:14:19.000So I don't think they're going to say this in the documentary, but the plan of these guys was to, and I'll give more insight about them later.
00:14:28.500But the plan of these guys were to put, like, set up bombs inside the school and outside the school in each of the students' cars and, like, teachers.
00:14:37.640So the bombs inside the school will explode at 11 o'clock in the morning and the ones outside will explode at 12.
00:14:52.460So whenever the emergency cars and, like, the ambulances and the police cars will be already at 12 o'clock at the school, the other bombs will explode so everyone could get hurt and it will be, like, a complete chaos.
00:17:12.500The phone rings, and, you know, I had a caller on the other end of the line who stated that something was happening at Columbine High School.
00:17:40.200I got underneath the table with my buddy, Matt, and then my friend, Isaiah, he came and he sat next to me.
00:17:48.700Still lying paralyzed in the cafeteria doorway, 15-year-old Sean could do nothing but listen.
00:17:54.220Man, why Isaiah got to have the stereotypical look, God damn it?
00:17:57.040Do I got to be the one to say, well, I got to look exactly how he sounds.
00:18:01.220I can hear explosions going off upstairs, and I can hear people screaming, and I can hear gunshots just echoing throughout the school, and there's just chaos everywhere.
00:18:09.500I got every student in the library on the fly, and you better stay on the fly.
00:18:12.600We have paramedics, and we have fire, and we have police en route.
00:18:15.860We were just sitting down to lunch, and the tones went off for a reported possible drive by shooting near Columbine High School.
00:18:25.280My partner and I jumped into the medic unit and started heading towards Columbine.
00:18:32.940As we pulled up, several students running by, and one young gal had a bullet hole in her, I believe, right calf.
00:18:40.260After several minutes shooting and throwing homemade bombs in the corridor outside, Harrison Klebold now approached the library entrance, where the teacher was under the desk, on the line to 911 dispatch.
00:18:53.200I remember trying to get her to close the doors and lock them, to keep everyone in.
00:18:56.980Is there any way you can block the doors so no one can get in?
00:19:37.900Dylan Klebold was born in Colorado and at the time of the shooting was living in his parents' designer home in a desirable natural area just outside the town.
00:19:47.340Dylan's parents, they were intellectuals and artists at heart.
00:19:50.420They had met at Ohio State University in the art program.
00:20:01.720You know what time it is with that one, man.
00:20:04.320Sometimes you need to slap the hell out of your kids, man, to keep them from being losers.
00:20:09.200And, you know, these guys, obviously, even though they never had violence, well, at least that kid, never, even though he never had violence in his childhood, he ended up enacting violence on others, man.
00:20:24.520He was a decorated Air Force test pilot.
00:20:27.540It required them to bounce around a bit from city to city as his father would get transferred, but lived in normal, middle-class neighborhoods, not living in the inner city and subject to gangs or drugs or violence.
00:20:39.500It did affect Eric, however, always having to move to another school, make new friends again.
00:20:51.320Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were both deeply into computers and both complained they were victims of bullying by sporty students known as jocks.
00:20:59.320After settling in the Columbine area, Harris became friends with Klebold and, as such, also hung out with Dylan's friend, Brooks Brown, but it would not always be a smooth relationship.
00:21:13.560He had thrown a snowball at Brooks' car and cracked the windshield and a kid came up and said, here's Eric's backpack.
00:21:19.100I took it while he was throwing the snowballs.
00:24:13.080A lot of times, what I've noticed with serial killers and mass shooters, all this stuff, if you guys have been watching the show, these guys, a lot of times, guys, they need to...
00:24:24.280What they end up doing is they dehumanize the victim.
00:24:27.760And they do this by playing games, by looking at them as animals, you know, people like Ted Bundy, guys like Jeffrey Dahmer, etc.
00:24:34.840They would do their best to not develop a relationship with the victim.
00:24:38.340John Wayne Gacy, all these guys, so that they can more effectively kill the individual, aka their prey, because they will look at them as just an animal.
00:24:46.940They wouldn't look at them from a human standpoint.
00:24:49.500And a big part of these guys playing, oh, yeah, peekaboo, and, you know, just shooting people indiscriminately, etc., is they're trying to remove that human factor so it'll be easier for them to kill.
00:24:59.740No, and also, it's something that they haven't mentioned here.
00:25:04.340They were fans, like lovers of the video game Doom.
00:25:11.160So, I don't know if they mentioned this earlier.
00:25:13.080Real quick, for some of you guys that are wondering, Doom is an old first-person shooter from the 90s where you run around and you kill monsters.
00:25:35.880So, they opened a block, and it was supposed to be, like, extra levels developed by them for the video game Doom.
00:25:43.580So, it was, like, a theme block, like a Doom theme block that they made, right?
00:25:48.680But later on, they just turned that block to be a super hateful of society block.
00:25:56.860So, they started putting all these videos that you see here of, like, them shooting and, like, joking around and, like, messing with guns and stuff.
00:26:04.300They started uploading those videos and also, like, making videos hating on people.
00:26:10.000And one of those people was this guy, Brooks, that is, like, was friends with one of them.
00:26:15.300So, they were friends with him, and then it wasn't, like, a good relationship.
00:26:20.720So, they started making videos hating on him, and later on, this guy found the block, and he was the one who told the authorities.
00:26:31.440And I'll let you know, because I want to know what the documentary says.
00:31:01.320When we turned him into the police, Eric was into pipe bombs, and he was talking about it on his website.
00:31:06.560There was actually a search warrant drawn up, but then was never taken before a judge to search Eric's house.
00:31:12.900That was never followed up on because there was another series of murders in the town where the person investigating sort of went off that case for a while and never picked it up again.
00:31:20.720But Harrison Klebold's plan involved something much worse than homemade pipe bomb grenades, as Sean Graves, still paralyzed and bleeding half inside the cafeteria door, was about to experience.
00:31:31.620I started hearing the gunshots getting closer, and that's when I realized that they were coming down the stairs in the cafeteria.
00:31:53.340But every time there was a shot, and then one of those larger booms went off, I flinched.
00:32:01.700Harrison Klebold's killing spree had not just been planned as a shooting.
00:32:04.920Before they had opened fire that morning, they had placed two large explosive devices in the canteen.
00:32:11.340They had been timed to explode at 11.17 a.m., and the two students had planned to wait outside to pick off any survivors fleeing the scene.
00:32:19.360Eric Harris had even gone so far as to study how many people were in the cafeteria at any given time during the lunch hour.
00:32:25.360So he set those bombs to go off when he would have the mass casualty.
00:32:28.940Approximately 450 is what he was estimating, and we had 455 kids down there.
00:32:33.180The bomb's timers had not worked, which is why Harris and Klebold had begun their killing spree with their guns.
00:32:40.840However, they'd not given up on their dream of blowing up the school.
00:48:07.280Students, both just weeks away from graduating, to have such disdain for human life.
00:48:12.460These two kids did not come out of their mother's womb hating what happened from the time they were born to the time that they carried out this horrific act.
00:48:20.360One thing that is erroneous is to talk about why they did this, implying that it was for the same reasons.
00:48:27.440They were two basically different guys.
00:48:29.560In my colloquialisms, I would say Eric Harris was filled with anger, with rage.
00:48:35.840He wanted to hurt other people and didn't care if he died.
00:48:39.400Dylan, on the other hand, I believe, was hurting inside and at various times wanted to die because he felt so bad he just saw no reason to keep on living.
00:48:47.100People who studied these called them dyads, and there's a long history of Bonnie and Clyde, Leopold and Loeb.
00:48:52.180And very often, most often, you have a stronger person and a weaker person.
00:48:55.740In this case, Dylan had incredibly low self-esteem, needed somebody to validate him, make him feel good about himself.
00:49:02.880Some consider bullying at the school to be the primary factor.
00:49:06.700Once you hate the bullies and no one does anything to defend you, you hate the people in the class that don't say anything.
00:49:11.540You hate the teacher that doesn't say anything.
00:49:13.220You hate the counselors that allow it to happen.
00:49:14.680They, in essence, end up hating the school, not just the bullies.
00:49:18.240They hate the school, and they want to kill the school.
00:49:20.860I think that they didn't see that they had a lot going for them.
00:49:26.620And that isolation and then exposure to a lot of negative influences in their life that they chose to focus on, I think really took them towards a darker and darker place.
00:49:36.700Harris was the dominant person who inspired the Columbine massacre.
00:49:41.500And I think Clebo went along to get along.
00:49:43.980It was that chemistry that created this insane circumstance where they were able to kill lots of people with moral impunity.
00:49:53.440For the Columbine teachers, students, and parents, life would never be the same again.
00:53:22.600Groups of students and teachers hiding in offices and other areas of the school begin calling family members, police, and media agencies from their cell phones.
00:53:31.420Suspects reported still inside school and firing more shots.
00:53:35.180Authorities report pipe bombs found in the area.