Humiliation and Revenge

Before he threw pipe bombs at them, Eric Harris threw McDonald's french fries at girls, during lunch hour in the parking lot at Columbine High School. Some of those young women would blush. Eric was smart and charismatic, they thought. If a fry was tossed in their direction, well, maybe he was interested. Jeni LaPlante, a senior, thought Eric was cute. So did another girl, a close friend of Eric's who wants to remain anonymous after being questioned by the FBI. She liked his friendly eyes and playful smile.

During his years at Columbine, though, Eric spent the majority of his time with a tall, gawky kid with a big beak and a Jay Leno chin named Dylan Klebold. Dylan often seemed sad, at least around people he didn't know well. He didn't talk much. On those rare occasions when he did, he addressed the floor. "He had a lot of pain — he told me that," says his friend Sarah Slater, 16. "I think that's part of the reason he snapped, or followed somebody like Eric. Knowing Dylan, I don't think he would ever do something like that without the influence of a kid like Eric. I've heard crazy stories about this Eric Harris kid: 'Stay away from him. He's no good.'"

Dylan tended to get weepy when he drank — at house parties or parties up in Deer Creek Canyon, in the foothills of the Rockies, which preside over Littleton, an upper-middle-class suburb south of Denver, a burb where no development is finished until the word "Knolls" or "Meadows" is written on a sign out front. The tears were about girls. Dylan wanted a girlfriend but didn't date much. His escort to the senior prom, Robyn Anderson, was a platonic friend. Uma Thurman was Dylan's dream girl.

Each boy had a nickname, used mainly by their intimates. Eric was known as Reb, short for Rebdoomer, after a character in Doom, the popular computer game at which he became an expert. Dylan was VoDkA, after his cocktail of choice.

On April 20th, as the world now knows, they killed twelve of their classmates, one of their teachers and themselves, in the worst school shooting in United States history. It is a tragedy that could have been prevented, because its perpetrators were teenagers, not professional criminals. They left fat clues wherever they went, especially Eric Harris, who was one angry, troubled eighteen-year-old.