No Easy Answers (20 page)

Several parents found this objectionable. Brian Rohrbough, who had lost his son Danny that day, was so infuriated that he climbed Rebel Hill and posted signs on the crosses that read “Unrepentant Murderer.” After asking the police to remove the crosses and getting nowhere, Rohrbough enlisted the help of a few other parents and took them down himself, cutting them into tiny pieces and destroying them.

At first I was angry about that. The crosses weren't put there to honor Eric and Dylan; people were just paying their respects to the dead. However, looking back on it, I respect what Brian and the parents of the other victims were going through, too. Their sons had been murdered, and Eric and Dylan were responsible. For them, the situation was about as black and white as you can get. I realize now that crosses for Eric and Dylan should have been erected in a spot far away from those of their victims.

People ask me all the time whether Eric and Dylan should be forgiven for what they did. My response is absolutely not. Those two killed people. It doesn't get worse than that.

Will I always remember the good times with them? Absolutely. I'll always remember the bad times, too. They were my friends, and nothing will change that. But as far as forgiveness goes, that's not something I am prepared to do. What they deserve is remembrance. Not forgiveness. There's a difference.

SHORTLY AFTER THE COLUMBINE MASSACRE, A MEMORIAL SERVICE was held at Red Rocks Amphitheater on the north side of Denver. Our choir would be singing there, which meant this would be my first official school function since the shooting. I didn't want to go, but my parents convinced me that it would be good for me to see everybody again.

I arrived at the theater and went around backstage to sit with my friends in choir. That was the first time I heard it.

People were whispering about me.

This was different from Rachel's funeral, where people hadn't wanted anything to do with anyone who'd been friends with Eric and Dylan. These people were talking about me specifically. I heard the word “murderer” being thrown around.

There had been rumblings before. Through the grapevine, my brother had learned that at Matt Kechter's funeral, a few of the football players had been talking about getting together and coming after me. I figured they were just talking in the heat of the moment, so I didn't worry too much about it. But this was the first time I had heard people actually suggesting that I had somehow been in on what had happened.

No one said anything to my face. But as I sat there, I could hear whispers behind me. My name. Eric and Dylan. Questions. Suggestions that I knew something.

I tried to shut it out.

Standing in front of us on the stage, Principal DeAngelis told the crowd that there was so much love at Columbine, that we would get through this together. At the same time, I heard it behind me:

“Brooks is a murderer.”

The whispers were no longer conversational. They were directed at me. I was supposed to overhear them. And I didn't know what to say or do in response.

By the time superintendent Jane Hammond started her speech, I couldn't take it. I knew I was on the stage, in full view of everyone, but I didn't care. I stood up and left.

Less than two weeks after the shooting, my family got a call from the Columbine school counselor, Mr. Collins. Everyone was gearing up to head for Chatfield High School and finish out the year. The plan was that Columbine students would attend for one half of the day, and Chatfield students would attend for the other half. However, there were some people who wouldn't be welcome at any time.

“We believe it would be in Brooks's best interest not to return to school,” Collins told us on our answering machine.

My mom called back, demanding to know why. When she finally got through to Collins, he wouldn't clarify the school's wishes. He kept repeating, simply, “We just think it would be in Brooks's best interest not to return.”

I wasn't the only one to get that message. There were over a dozen kids, all friends of Eric and Dylan, who were asked not to return. Most of them took the advice.

I was ready to go back. However, to put it bluntly, the school made me an offer I couldn't refuse. They told me that if I agreed not to return, I would still graduate with passing grades in all of my classes.

I was failing a couple of classes at the time. To be guaranteed passing grades and a diploma, simply for staying at home—it just seemed to make more sense to accept the offer.

That's not to say that I never went back. Once classes started, I made a brief visit to Chatfield. I needed to see my friends again. When I walked in, the police, who were standing guard at the time, paid close attention to me.

The police had been interviewing Eric and Dylan's friends at length ever since the shooting. Sheriff John Stone was convinced that two kids could not have brought in by themselves the sheer amount of explosives found at the scene. There must have been accomplices, he kept telling the press, and that's why the police were talking to all of Eric and Dylan's associates.

I'd already been visited by detectives before I went to Chatfield. They kept asking about Eric's last words to me outside the school. They wanted to know what had made me walk away. At the time, I thought it was because they were trying to reconstruct Eric's movements. As I would later learn, their motives were much more complex.

My classmates knew that the police were interviewing guys like Nate and Zach and me. So it was assumed that we must be suspects. After all, if we were friends with Eric and Dylan, then we must have known that the attack was coming, right? Never mind that my little brother was shot at in the cafeteria. Never mind that Eric had threatened to kill me only a year before. As friends of the killers, some people's logic ran, we must have been killers, too.

Maybe I should have thought about that before I went to Chatfield, but at the time I just didn't care. I walked in, ignoring the cops who were
watching me. The guard gave me a visitor's badge and a bumper sticker with “We Are Columbine” written on it. Then I was given a two-officer escort to walk around the school.

Not only was the escort incredibly demeaning, but it reinforced the impression that I was guilty in some way in the minds of those who already suspected me. I was just digging my hole deeper. I didn't care at the time; I just wanted to see my friends. In retrospect, though, I shouldn't have gone through with it.

I didn't stay long. People didn't really talk to me. Kids I had called my friends were looking at me funny now. They didn't want me there.

In Littleton, I was making enemies left and right. But in the national media, the reporters just kept coming. I was doing interviews all over the place, from Fox News to the
Today Show
to Tom Brokaw. I would talk to three, sometimes four reporters a day.

Yet I never once did an interview for money. I never sold videotape footage of Eric or Dylan, like one of my classmates did. I wasn't looking to be famous. I just wanted people to understand what had happened, so I accepted a lot of interview requests.

There were two things that my family wanted people to understand: first, that there had been clear warning signs beforehand, and second, that Columbine High School was a much worse place than everyone was letting on.

We were telling people the truth, and we were resented for it.

The police were already under the microscope as it was. They were being criticized for not responding quickly enough to the shootings, making high estimates of the dead before any numbers were released, leaving the bodies in the school overnight, taking too long to reach the wounded, and leaving parents to learn about their children's murders in
the newspaper instead of calling them to tell them. So they were playing the game of damage control right from the start, trying to make people believe that there was no way they could have seen this coming, that no one knew how deal with it, that there had been no warning.

Now from out of the blue comes this Brooks Brown kid, talking about some report he filed a year ago about Eric Harris threatening his life and building pipe bombs and vandalizing his neighborhood.

They knew I wasn't lying. They knew the media was listening to me, and the pressure on them was increasing. If they were to keep my story out of the spotlight, they had to discredit my family, and fast.

Sheriff Stone found a way.

I was with my parents when the call came. NBC reporter Dan Abrams told us he had just conducted an interview with Sheriff Stone and wanted to give us a chance to respond before it aired. Within hours, we were sitting with Abrams in front of a TV monitor.

“I'm convinced there are more people involved,” Stone had told NBC. “Brooks Brown could be a possible suspect. Mr. Brown, as well as several others, are in the investigative mode.”

When Abrams inquired about Eric's Web pages, Stone dismissed them as a “subtle threat,” nothing more. Such things wouldn't have been prosecutable, he said. He also dismissed my parents' claims of having reported them in the first place, asking why my parents would have “allowed” me to be friends with Eric Harris if they thought he was dangerous enough to report to police.

“Why did Eric Harris warn Mr. Brown to leave the school on the day he was starting all the shooting?” he said. “Is this a smoke screen?”

My parents were furious. My dad lashed out at the sheriff, saying if anyone was trying to create a smoke screen, it was him.

“He should be ashamed of himself,” my dad said of Stone. “They're looking for a scapegoat. They're going to get sued and they know it, and they're looking for someone to blame it on.”

As for me, I sat there in complete disbelief, staring at that image of Sheriff Stone on the TV. I didn't know what to say.

Stone's allegations first appeared on NBC, but it didn't take long for them to appear in other media outlets. Shortly after his television appearance, the Jefferson County sheriff repeated his suspicions to
USA TODAY.

“I believe Mr. Brown knows a lot more than he has been willing to share with us,” Stone told the newspaper. “He's had a long-term involvement with Harris and Klebold, and he was the only student warned to stay away from the school on the day of the shooting.”

On May 6, the
Denver Post
reiterated Stone's claim that Brooks was a “possible suspect” and that Brooks's statements had been “inconsistent.”

Stone offered no evidence to back this assertion during his interviews, although Jefferson County Undersheriff John Dunaway offered an explanation to
Westword
reporter Alan Prendergast nearly a year later. According to the article, Dunaway claimed there were “plenty of reasons” to suspect Brooks.

“This Brown person is telling us that he is in direct personal contact with Harris moments before the killings begin,” Dunaway told Westword. “And Harris tells him that he likes him and that he should leave the school. Then he shows up in a class photo with Harris and Klebold, and they're all pointing fingers at the camera, as if they had guns.”

The comment was a reference to the “goofy” class photo that the Columbine High School class of 1999 had posed for. Yet, in Dunaway's eyes, this sort of evidence perfectly justified Stone's remarks to the media.

If Stone's comments were an attempt to discredit the Brown family—as they believe—then it was an extremely effective ploy. It wouldn't take long for Brooks to learn just how much damage the sheriff had caused.

Reporters showed up at my house soon after that first broadcast. They wanted to know my response.

I reiterated my parents' claim that the accusation was just a smoke screen. I reminded reporters that there was no evidence against me. I said that neither the FBI nor the district attorney was calling me a suspect. I said Stone was making himself look bad.

That was my public face. Away from the cameras, Stone's words were destroying my life.

There were already people at school who believed I had something to do with the killing, just because I had been friends with Eric and Dylan. Now people in the community were questioning my innocence, too. People who had been undecided, or who had known nothing about me before, suddenly saw me as “that guy who the police think was in on it.”

Shortly after the NBC report, I was walking through a parking lot with Trevor Dolac when a girl leaned out the window of her car and started shouting at me.

“You fucking murderer!” she yelled. “Get the hell out of here!”

Once I was at a stoplight when a car full of Columbine students pulled up next to me and started screaming “Killer!”

Others didn't call me names, but still kept their distance. One night I was with my cousin at the drive-through window of Dairy Queen. It was fairly late, and there weren't any other customers in line. When I pulled up, the employee at the window took one look at me and his eyes got real wide.

He gave us our order without saying another word to me. As we were pulling away, I saw him go to the doors and lock them. He stood there staring at us until we drove away.

Those sorts of things started happening with more frequency as the days progressed. I'd be walking along and hear “asshole” or “killer” yelled at me from passing cars. After a while, I learned to tune it out.

I was having trouble sleeping. I was having trouble eating. I wondered if at some point Stone would move this witch hunt to the next level and have me arrested.

I felt helpless.

The police were pressuring me to take a lie-detector test about my involvement in Columbine. I would have been willing, except that people around me immediately advised against it. A lie detector is a sensitive piece of equipment. Administrators of the test wrap a sensor around your chest to time your breathing. They put pulse sensors on each finger. They look for places where your heart skips a beat during a response, or your breathing becomes shallow, to determine whether you're lying.

My family still feared that the police were trying to put the blame on me, and didn't trust them to administer the test fairly. If I took the test, and their administrator made any adjustments to the machine to make me fail or even seem evasive, it would ruin me.