Leaked Columbine documents

Westword (Denver), 6 Dec 2001

"I'm Full of Hate and I Love It"

The secret writings of Eric Harris reveal the explosive rage of a young 
killer -- and his power to manipulate others.
BY ALAN PRENDERGAST

A year before the shootings at Columbine High School, Eric David Harris 
already had the plan worked out in his head.
He knew what time to attack the school in order to kill and maim the most 
students. He knew where he and fellow gunman Dylan Klebold, alias "V" or 
"Vodka," would park their bomb-laden cars, what they would wear ("all 
black"), and how they should act ("very casual and silent") as they hauled 
bags full of explosives into the cafeteria. And he knew how he wanted it to 
end.

"Sometime in April [1999] me and V will get revenge and will kick natural 
selection up a few notches," Harris wrote in his journal on April 26, 1998. 
"If we have figured out the art of time bombs beforehand, we will set 
hundreds of them around houses, roads, bridges, buildings and gas stations, 
anything that will cause damage and chaos...It'll be like the LA riots, the 
Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam, [video games] Duke [Nukem] and Doom all 
mixed together...I want to leave a lasting impression on the world."

Over the next twelve months, Harris refined his plan -- assembling an 
arsenal of bombs, acquiring guns and ammo, plotting the smallest details 
with an obsessiveness bordering on mania. He and Klebold never strayed from 
their course. Never mind that they both were in a juvenile-diversion 
program throughout 1998 for breaking into a van, or that Harris had been 
grounded by his parents for months (for drinking and bomb-making, he 
writes, as well as the van burglary), or that he was also the subject of a 
police investigation into Internet death threats. Adults were easy to fool, 
and Harris boasted in his journal of his ability to "BS so fucking well" to 
con and deceive all the stupid people around him who deserved to die.

"I am higher than you people," he wrote. "If you disagree I would shoot 
you...some people go through life begging to be shot."
Seized by police from Harris's room hours after the shootings, the killer's 
journal has been one of the darkest secrets of the Columbine investigation, 
its public release staunchly opposed by the Jefferson County Sheriff's 
Office. Short excerpts dribbled out in briefings given to school 
administrators and were leaked to Salon.com in 1999. Last year the 
sheriff's official report quoted a few lines as well, including a statement 
that no one should be blamed for the massacre but Harris and Klebold -- a 
plea, in effect, to absolve police and school officials of any 
responsibility for the tragedy.

But that isn't Harris's primary message. The handwritten pages obtained by 
Westword offer hate, not absolution. They ooze with contempt for cops and 
other authority figures, people Harris considered embarrassingly easy to 
dupe, which may be one reason why these writings have been suppressed so 
long. And they provide glimpses of a teenage terrorist who couldn't wait to 
carry out his violent fantasies, who was more virulently racist and more 
acutely psychotic -- batshit mad-dog crazy, in layman's terms -- than 
previously reported.

They also represent a lost opportunity to have prevented the shootings. 
Last week U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock threw out lawsuits filed by 
victims' families who claimed, among other things, that the sheriff's 
office had failed to adequately investigate death threats Harris made 
against classmate Brooks Brown. A year before the massacre, Brown's 
parents, Randy and Judy, had provided Jeffco with copies of pages from 
Harris's Web site in which he described detonating pipe bombs. The 
sheriff's office has said it didn't have enough evidence to pursue the 
matter. Judge Babcock noted that the "vague, rambling rants" on the Web 
site didn't include a specific threat to attack Columbine.

But the journal was highly specific. Had the police acted on the 
search-warrant request for Harris's home that an investigator had drafted 
in response to the Brown complaint, it's likely that officers would have 
found at least some of these writings, which feature detailed information 
about guns, explosives and strategy -- information the police didn't 
discover until they searched Harris's room hours after the massacre. 
Information they've kept under wraps ever since.

In the spring of 1998, while Randy Brown was trying desperately to get the 
police to take a closer look at Eric Harris, the precocious lad was 
hammering out his plans to slaughter Brown's entire family. He wanted NBK 
-- short for "Natural Born Killers," his name for the coming apocalypse -- 
to start with a visit to the Brown household. He and Klebold would "take 
our sweet time pissing on them, spitting on them, and just torturing the 
hell out of them," he wrote, before heading on to Columbine.

"It's deeply disturbing," says Randy Brown of the journal pages he recently 
reviewed. "And Sheriff [John] Stone has known about this for more than two 
years. He knew that Eric wanted to kill my entire family, but he went ahead 
and treated Brooks like a possible accomplice anyway."

Not all of Harris's meticulous planning came to fruition. The gunmen never 
mastered the art of the time bomb, and they ultimately decided against 
wearing the "custom shirts," with matching NBK emblems, that Harris 
envisioned. (On the day of the attack, Harris wore a T-shirt espousing 
"Natural Selection"; Klebold's T-shirt bore one word: "Wrath.") Many 
details, though, including the notion of lobbing bombs and firing at 
students outside, then heading inside to "pick off fuckers at our will," 
remained remarkably consistent throughout the months of plotting.