Columbine Shooters' Journals Released
Hundreds of pages of hate-filled diary entries, maps and documents released Thursday offer a chilling insight into the minds of the Columbine High School killers in the days and months before the 1999 massacre.
On a calendar entry dated the day of the attack, April 20, the time 11:10 is written across the top — an approximate reference to the time Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold pulled out their weapons inside the suburban high school.
Elsewhere in the calendar are notations including "get nails" and "get propanes, fill my clips" and "finish fuses."
The two heavily armed teenagers killed 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives in what remains the deadliest school attack in U.S. history.
More than 20,000 documents and videos have been released since the attack, and some of the details in the more than 930 pages of documents released Thursday by the Jefferson County Sheriff's office have been reported before.
Names, song lyrics and other parts of the documents were blacked out, including computer logons. Sheriff Ted Mink also decided against releasing videotapes the two gunmen made before the massacre over concerns they could encourage copycat attacks.
Among the documents is a school paper by Harris on Nazism — right next to an essay he wrote for a court-ordered anger-management class he attended after he and Klebold were convicted of breaking into a van in 1998.
"I believe the most valuable part of this class was thinking up ideas for ways to control anger and for ways to release stress in a non-violent manner," he wrote.Read the Columbine documents
(Warning: This file contains 946 pages and is very large.)
Entries in a journal kept by Harris' father, Wayne Harris, were also released Thursday. Some addressed threats made by his son against a classmate more than a year before the attack. Brooks Brown reported that Harris had threatened him sometime in early 1998.
"We feel victimized," Wayne Harris writes in the journal. "We don't want to be accused every time something happens. Eric is not of fault. Brooks Brown is out to get Eric. Brooks had problems ... manipulative con artist."
It is not clear whether Wayne Harris is expressing his own thoughts in each entry. His attorney did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Brian Rohrbough, whose son Daniel was among those slain, said he had not yet read the documents. He was struck by the fact that Wayne Harris had kept a diary tracking his son's problems.
"It tells you this kid was dangerous," Rohrbough said. "The premise that these are families that didn't know what was going on in their homes is completely refuted by this journal. They used all the influence they could muster to keep their kids out of trouble."
The documents were released after The Denver Post sued to force their release. The Colorado Supreme Court left the decision up to the sheriff's office, and the Harris and Klebold families did not challenge the decision.