No Easy Answers (29 page)

As I read it, the anger built up within me. A year ago,
60 Minutes II
had uncovered the draft for a search warrant in 1998 that never was served; that was hard enough to learn about. But now, here was written proof that within a day of the shooting, they'd used the information my family had provided to search the homes of Eric and Dylan. They'd had all the variations of a Web address that they'd claimed they weren't able to access. They'd had specific quotes from the Web pages, including the death threats. They'd had everything. And while they were using this information to obtain search warrants, they'd called my family liars for claiming that we'd warned them. They'd pointed fingers at me as a possible suspect. They'd turned everyone against me.

And they knew. The whole time.

This was vindication, even more than the search warrant a year ago had been. But it didn't make me feel any better. I didn't want to see this information handed down now, when it wouldn't do any good anymore.

I wanted it used in 1998. I wanted Eric Harris caught.

I wanted Columbine never to have happened.

No matter what we learn about the police behavior that day, or what they did to me, or to my family—no matter how much vindication I might find—it will always be a hollow victory. Search warrants won't bring Danny Rohrbough back to life, or Rachel, or Kyle, or any of them. They won't give back Richard's ability to walk. They won't save Eric and Dylan from becoming what they became.

It's important to know the truth. It's important to keep going, and not to lose hope in the face of the police.

But it won't ever give us back what we lost that day.

EACH DAY ANOTHER MIND IN OUR WORLD IS CRIPPLED. ANOTHER child gives up. Another kid kills his friends, or himself. Many people say that this happens because the child loses hope.

People ask all the time why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did what they did on April 20, 1999. I believe it was hopelessness. They saw no real future for themselves, and no acceptance from those around them. They became self-hating. Then they started to hate those around them. Then they became angry, and then they became violent. Finally, in one insane, twisted moment, they believed they had power over a world that had kept them down.

Eric and Dylan came at Columbine from different places. Eric was mentally imbalanced. He had clear bipolar tendencies and was being treated with medication. He had a fascination with death, with firearms, and with rising above his tormenters, and his mental instability fueled that.

Dylan was angry with society, with the hand he had been dealt, and with a world where he couldn't go a day without being spat at, mocked, or told he wasn't good enough. He was made to believe that his dreams could never happen, and that the world would never get better.

This is the hopelessness that many kids in high school share.

What was unusual about Eric and Dylan was the way they withdrew from everyone else and fed each other's delusions. They kept their beliefs to themselves, figuring the rest of the world would never understand
them. They developed God complexes. What shreds of ethics they may have had left were destroyed as they retreated more and more into their own world.

Eric was probably the one who formulated the plan for attacking Columbine. Yet he and Dylan had become so close that it was easy for him to convince his friend. “We don't have to take this shit lying down,” I imagine them thinking. “These fucks don't deserve to live. They aren't even on our level. We understand what the world is about. They don't. Just think what kind of an impact we could have—what kind of a statement we could make—if we did this.”

To the rest of us, it sounds insane. Perhaps if Eric had said this when he and Dylan first met, Dylan would have thought it insane as well. But with the formation of that bond that only the closest of friends can know, Dylan came to look up to Eric. He trusted in him. He wasn't getting the answers he wanted anywhere else.

I knew Dylan long enough to know that he didn't start out as a monster. He became one. That's what makes his fate so scary.

The next Dylan could be your son. Your neighbor. Your best friend. Not some faceless, anonymous killer who comes out of the dark and snatches your loved ones. A regular person who faces the cruelty of the real world just like the rest of us—and in whom something erodes away over time.

It's too late to stop Eric and Dylan. But maybe if we realize what we're doing to one another and take action now, we can save the kids who would otherwise go down the same path.

Not all kids become hopeless at an early age like Eric and Dylan did. Some hold on to their ideals, and fight for change. I respect them
so much, because, as I learned, the political machine can prove a formidable challenge.

In the summer of 2001, I got a call from David Winkler of SAFE Colorado. SAFE (Sane Alternatives to the Firearms Epidemic) Colorado is a group of teenage activists based in Denver. They often make trips to Washington, D.C. to lobby senators and congressmen; Winkler told me they were planning such a trip for late July. Their purpose was to fight for a change in gun show legislation, one that would require all sellers to run background checks on customers.

I agreed to go along. This would be my first chance to visit the nation's capital as a lobbyist, meet with politicians, and get an up-close look at the political machine.

We were hit with disappointment once we arrived. One of our own state representatives, Republican Scott McIniss of Grand Junction, refused to so much as meet with us. His spokesman argued that because McIniss had met with members of the group two years ago—right after the Columbine shootings—and because SAFE Colorado had a different stance on guns than he did, he didn't care to speak with us on this trip.

“We feel their points are the same and our points are the same, so there's really not much more to discuss,” spokesman Blain Rethmeier told the
Rocky Mountain News
.

On the way to Washington, I'd talked with a lot of the SAFE Colorado kids. They were smart, idealistic kids who believed they could make a difference. Now they were being told that their own congressman wouldn't give them the time of day.

We did get to meet with other members of Congress. It was educational, to say the least. I had come for an up-close look at what the system was really like, and that's exactly what I got.

People talk all the time about how Washington is corrupt. It's not exactly a revelation. However, it's a different experience to be in the halls
of Congress, talking with a senator, when her aide informs her that one of her allies has suddenly switched his vote. She looks down and says under her breath, “Well, I wonder what he got.”

At one point I was in the room with two congressmen, and I overheard one of them talking with his aide. They were preparing a photo with members of the SAFE Colorado contingent. The congressman asked, “Did you make sure you have a mixed bag of races?”

I tried to do some lobbying with a freshman representative. He wasn't there when I came to his office, but his aides talked to me. They were extremely honest about their stance on gun control. “Here's how it is,” one of them said. “We're brand new in this office; we still don't understand how Congress works. All I know is that what helped us get here is our gun stance, and we can't change that or else the National Rifle Association will take our funding away. So what else can we do?”

I appreciated that honesty, even if the message was pretty upsetting. Many other members of Congress wouldn't even talk to us, or else they dodged our questions.

After our first day of lobbying, I sat around talking with other kids from SAFE Colorado. They were so frustrated. Most of them were younger than me, and they were so full of ideals. They really cared. They wanted to bring about change.

The experience of seeing Washington in action had brought many of them down. They were realizing that this trip wasn't going to affect anything; the system was far too massive and corrupt for them to change. All that went through my mind was that this was the moment when their hope was being broken, like so many others before them.

That thought affected the hell out of me. I had seen enough hopelessness. It was time to prove that we could get something done.

I sat down with David Winkler and Ben Gelt, two other guys from the program. They felt the same way I did. After brainstorming, we came up
with an idea for a new project. Using their camera, the three of us wanted to find the top six senators and congressmen who were opposed to gun legislation and get interviews with them on tape. We could then put together a film about our experiences once we got home.

In particular, we thought back to Representative Scott McIniss, who had snubbed our group the day before. We were going to make him talk to us, one way or another.

The next day, Ben and I went to McIniss's office with Ben's video camera. We said we were making a movie about gun control, and that we wanted to get McIniss's comments on tape. They told us to sign in.

We knew McIniss was aware that SAFE Colorado was in town, and an article with my name had already appeared in the news; if I signed in as Brooks Brown, there was no way in hell that he'd talk to us. So I gave a fake name, and said nothing of our being involved with SAFE Colorado.

Unfortunately, someone in McIniss's office recognized me, because they tipped off the Congressman. He in turn called Mike Sprengelmeyer, a reporter for the
Rocky Mountain News's
Washington bureau. He told Sprengelmeyer that we were trying to perpetuate fraud.

The next morning, we were called into an emergency meeting with the heads of SAFE Colorado. John Head, the organization's attorney, told us we had disgraced them. He said what we had done was unprofessional, and that it wouldn't be condoned by SAFE. They told us to leave immediately. The three of us were given plane tickets, put in a cab, and sent home.

We were angry. Maybe we shouldn't have used a fake name, we thought, but we were honest with McIniss about why we were there. The questions we planned to ask were worthwhile. All we wanted was to finally get McIniss to talk to us, since he'd turned the group down before. Two other representatives we'd contacted were willing to talk to us on camera; we had a legitimate project.

Most of all, we were trying to change something for the other kids in the group. We wanted them to get something out of this trip after all.

David tried to explain our actions to the
Rocky Mountain News.
“The sad thing here is, the point was lost that we were simply trying to get the Congressman to explain his position,” he said. “Instead, they're seeing this as an excuse to throw out some students who are obviously committed.”

I agreed completely. We had all learned that as long as the jerks are in power, regular people have no influence. I had already learned that lesson from Sheriff Stone; now I had learned it in the halls of Congress. We'd learned it from the people who wouldn't talk to us. We'd learned it from the congressmen who had showed us firsthand how difficult it was to go against the system. We'd seen that money controls everything in Washington. We'd seen that for the individual who wants to bring about change, the political road is one roadblock after another.

I was frustrated. But I wasn't going to give up.

That same summer, I got my first chance to make an impact on the system. That chance came courtesy of filmmaker Michael Moore.

An in-your-face investigator, Moore developed his reputation in the 1980s with his landmark documentary
Roger & Me.
The movie was about Moore's attempts to meet with Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors, in the wake of a major factory closing in Michigan. After that, he worked on investigative-reporting shows like
TV Nation
and
The Awful Truth
, while continuing to make documentary films. He has also written two books:
Downsize This!
and
Stupid White Men, and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation
.

What I liked about Moore was his style. He doesn't play games with people or try to ingratiate himself. He simply tells people what's going on, in a tone with a humorous edge to it.

I first met Moore when he was filming a documentary about guns and youth violence, called
Bowling for Columbine.
He wanted to know if I would participate. I was more than happy to.

Several months later, I heard from him again. He called me up to say he was making a visit to Kmart's headquarters in Michigan to ask them to stop selling handgun ammunition in their stores. Eric and Dylan had purchased their ammunition at Kmart, so it made sense that Moore asked me if I wanted to come along.

I wasn't the only one; Moore invited two other Columbine students, Richard Castaldo and Mark Taylor, as well. The three of us flew in from Colorado in early June, 2001.

The next morning, we were picked up at the hotel and went straight over to Kmart's headquarters, where we met up with Moore and his film crew. We wanted to meet with the CEO of the company. Instead, Kmart sent down their head of public relations, a guy from buying, and a guy from risk management.

With Moore's cameras rolling, the three of us met with them and told our story. I talked about growing up with Dylan, and my last conversation with Eric. Richard and Mark talked about their injuries; Mark had been shot on the hill outside the school, not far from Richard. Both of them described the years of grueling physical therapy they'd undergone as a result of the shootings.

Both Richard and Mark still have bullets from Kmart lodged in them. Moore reminded the executives of this more than once, referring to my friends as “the Blue Light Special.” Richard and Mark even lifted up their shirts to show their scars to the executives.

Since we were dealing with a corporation, we didn't know what effect, if any, our words would have. Yet the Kmart executives didn't seem to resent our presence. None of them was a typical “corporate stooge.” They listened to us. One even had tears in his eyes as we told our stories.