Sheriff To Release Columbine Documents

The Jefferson County sheriff said Monday he would release nearly 1,000 pages of documents seized from the homes of the Columbine High School killers — but not the video and audio tapes the two teenagers made.

Deputies had seized journals kept by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, along with a videotape the gunmen made of themselves talking about their hatred for most people and their plan to attack the school.

Sheriff Ted Mink said the release of the documents could be delayed if Harris' and Klebold's parents decide to appeal. It was not immediately clear if they would.

Mink said he decided against releasing the tapes after the FBI, which conducted a review at his request, concluded they "could serve as a strong motivating influence for other adolescents to commit and/or attempt to commit similar acts of violence. The tapes provide instructional material for how to successfully plan and implement similar acts."

In a court filing Monday, attorneys for the sheriff's department said the tapes were "deeply disturbing" and Mink was "unwilling to be an accomplice" by releasing them.

"The tapes are a manifesto authored by Harris and Klebold, in which the two call out to other adolescents to commit similar heinous acts," the filing said. "Their dying wish was that these tapes would be distributed and spread across the Internet."

Harris and Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher at their high school before taking their own lives on April 20, 1999. It's been seven years since the killing, CBS' Terri Okita reports, and now that some of the community's wounds have begun to heal, groundbreaking can begin on a permanent memorial to honor the victims.

President Clinton was on hand last weekend to help announce the $2 million memorial project, which features two walls: one called the ring of healing; another called the ring of hope, Okita reports.

Among the documents to be released are messages Klebold and Harris wrote each other in yearbooks, but the filing says the bulk of the documents are "largely irrelevant and innocuous, consisting mostly of school work." The journal entries with bomb-making instructions will be withheld.

The gunmen's parents fought to keep the records private, saying they fear the material could inspire copycat crimes.

The Denver Post sued to force release of the material, and the Colorado Supreme Court last year left the decision to the sheriff.

Mink said the decision to withhold the tapes would be unpopular but was necessary.

"In truth, thousands of pages of documents and other evidence have been released over the years, and no one item has held the key" to lingering questions about the massacre, he said. "In my mind, no new insight the tapes might provide can justify the loss of just one life."