School Violence

"That would be rape culture," Anna North at Jezebel reminds us. The kind "in which people are quick to deny or explain away a rape as soon as it's reported." Also, the kind in which "violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent... women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself" and "both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable as death or taxes," according to the authors of "Transforming a Rape Culture." For a stomach-churningly long list of other defining features, please see Melissa McEwan's "Rape Culture 101", or try Jaclyn Friedman's "This Is What Rape Culture Looks Like." Or, you could just read the local ABC station's coverage of what happened after those two witnesses intervened in the rape of a 12-year-old girl by a 14-year-old schoolmate.

Marquita Dones, "one of four paid site supervisors at El Cerrito's Portola Middle School," believes that the girl was too quiet to have been a real victim. "If she was being raped, why didn't she scream? Why did these students have to come up and tell us that somebody's down there?" she asked. Her colleague Mustapha Cannon added, "It was hormones going wild... I know the girl and I know the guy. I know... and I know the girl's family. I know for a fact that that girl could've knocked that guy out with one hand tied behind her back." So, despite neither of these people having been there when it happened -- and the fact that under California law, there is no such thing as consensual sex with a 12-year-old -- they're apparently confident that she must have wanted it. 

Obviously, the case hasn't gone to trial, and thus no one has been convicted of rape. But regardless of whether this kid is found guilty, the response of the security guards to the account of the girl and the witnesses is part of a disturbing pattern. Going back to McEwan: "Rape culture is victim-blaming... Rape culture is tasking victims with the burden of rape prevention. Rape culture is encouraging women to take self-defense as though that is the only solution required to preventing rape. Rape culture is admonishing women to 'learn common sense' or 'be more responsible' or 'be aware of barroom risks' or 'avoid these places' or 'don't dress this way,' and failing to admonish men to not rape." In light of the school security guards' comments, I think it's safe to add "Claiming that if the victim didn't scream, came from a questionable family, or would have been physically capable of fighting her attacker under normal circumstances, she must not have been raped" to that list. Also, "Cravenly covering your ass by claiming an alleged rape must have been consensual, when it was your job to make sure nothing like that happened."

For those inclined to look for a silver lining, the fact that two other kids did step in to stop and report this assault is encouraging. But as North says, for the young girl "It was probably too little too late." And the fact that the very authority figures charged with protecting students are now trotting out every victim-blaming cliche in the book to avoid responsibility is just one more outrageous example of how rape culture operates. "She probably wanted it" has become such a standard, accepted response to nearly any reported sexual assault, it's not even a surprise to hear it said about a 12-year-old who says she was raped in front of two witnesses who were moved to seek help for her. And sadly, infuriatingly, it won't be a surprise when that account is taken just as seriously as the victim's -- if not more so.

 

The fight that killed Derrion began as a dispute between boys from the Ville, the neighborhood surrounding Fenger, and Altgeld Gardens, the housing project where President Obama worked as a community organizer in the mid-1980s. Traditionally, students from Altgeld attended Carver High School, a five- to 10-minute walk away. The school is now a military academy, which draws students from all over the city and the suburbs. To make room, students from Altgeld were shifted to Fenger. That decision was made by Arne Duncan, who was then CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and is now Obama’s secretary of education.

On Oct. 7, Duncan and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder visited Chicago to discuss the killing and pledged $500,000 toward efforts to end youth violence at Fenger and its surrounding elementary schools. Parents at Altgeld Gardens want their children sent to Carver. On Tuesday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson rode a school bus to Fenger with students from Altgeld, promising to seek a meeting with Mayor Richard M. Daley, who has rejected the idea of reassigning students.

“The day that the city of Chicago decides to divide schools by gang territory, that’s the day we’ve given up the city,” Daley said.

The article below was written by a 17-year-old girl who lives in Altgeld Gardens and attends Fenger. She prefers to remain anonymous.

— Edward McClelland

I’ve been going to Fenger for four years. I’m a senior. I think that this is the worst that it’s ever gotten. It’s different gangs from different territories: They got 11-9, which is on 119th Street. 12-Trey, which is 123rd. They got the Ville, 11-Trey Crazy, and they got the Gardens. Ever since I’ve been going there my freshman year, I’ve seen people get stabbed in the school, I’ve seen people get cut in the face with a razor blade. Last year, the police Maced the whole hallway during a big fight. When I was a sophomore, the night before prom, a boy got shot. He was playing Russian roulette at his house.

The day Derrion Albert died, there was shooting outside the school early that morning. After school, I was at cheerleading practice. My best friend came in there and told my other best friend that her brother was out there fighting. It was kids from the Gardens and the Ville. The Ville is 111th. The fight happened on 111th. They got mad because kids from the Garden were in their neighborhood. Usually, the kids from the Garden take the bus, but they said they chose to walk that day.

When she left, they made an announcement on the intercom. They said “Everybody be safe. Don’t take the 111th Street route to Michigan [Avenue].” When I left school later on that day, I talked to some of the guys, and they told me that somebody got hurt, and we didn’t know who it was. A text was sent out that somebody died. The next morning, that’s when we saw Derrion on the news.

When we returned to school, people were treating kids from the Gardens differently. I was hearing rumors that somebody was going to shoot out the bus. People don’t know I’m from the Gardens, but every time I tell them, they say, “Oh, no, she a snake. She a snake.” Because of everything that happened. They say it’s our fault that he died. How they treated me before, it was just cool, calm and collected.

Kids from Altgeld Gardens will be hollering in the hallway, “We want Carver. We want it now.” They’ll just be playing. But I think that kids from the Gardens should go to Carver High, because that’s our neighborhood school. When I was in eighth grade, they sent me a letter that said, “You’ve been accepted to your neighborhood school, Fenger.” I’m like, “How’s Fenger our neighborhood, when Carver’s in walking distance?” A fight is going to happen anywhere, but our neighborhood wouldn’t have been in this if we weren’t going to Fenger.

Since Derrion passed away, the school has felt like prison. We have no freedom. You have to get monitored when you go to the bathroom. The lady stays there and holds the door. They have people patting us down, on the chest and in between the cleavage when we go into school every day. Last year, when I was there, none of this was happening. We had cellphones. You can’t have cellphones anymore. They take them and they return them at the end of the day.

After the fight, everybody transferred their kids out of the school. Everybody. The majority of kids transferred out. I want to, but this is my senior year, and it will mess with my credits.

Even if they give the school $500,000, it’s not going to work. Kids are going to be kids. They are going to fight. They are going to argue. They can’t stop the kids from doing what they want to do. At the beginning of the year, they said they were going to transfer all the kids out that caused problems. But they aren’t doing anything about that. Nothing can stop violence. It’s going to happen.

I knew two of the kids that have been charged. They lived here in the Gardens. People say that they haven’t been into any violence. The Ville people was wrong for crossing the tracks. If the Garden people want to walk there, they should let ‘em. I walk from the school to Michigan every day, and I don’t have any problems. The kids from the Gardens crossed the tracks, and the kids from the Ville went after them. Also, if they go to Michigan, it’s one bus home.

Before this, we had to take two Chicago Transit Authority buses to get to school. It took 45 minutes to get to the school on the bus. Since the fight, the school has been sending buses to pick us up. It’s safer.

Mayor Daley is wrong when he says that sending kids from Altgeld to Carver will be letting the gangs decide school boundaries. I don’t like that man. That’s crazy. It isn’t any school boundaries. It’s safety. They’d better not give me no say so with him. I’ll tell him, “You don’t go to Fenger. You don’t know what’s going on. You’re putting Altgeld kids’ and innocent bystanders’ lives in danger by sending them to Fenger.”

Most of the kids at Fenger come from neighborhoods that are close by. The only out-of-area neighborhood is Altgeld. Ever since freshman year, every neighborhood has been getting into it with every neighborhood. Today at school, someone told me, “The Gardens dirty.” I responded in an angry manner, “The outside’s dirty. What place that you know isn’t dirty on the outside. When you walk in my house, it’s clean.”

Derrion's death has given Fenger a bad name. When I went to go fill out a job application at a restaurant, they looked at my application and they was like, “We’ll call you,” and when I went out the door, they threw it out. I heard them say, “Fenger’s ghetto.”

People aren’t gonna forget Derrion’s death. It’s going to make people change their minds about coming to Chicago. I think it had to do with Chicago not getting the Olympics. Derrion did not deserve what happened to him. My thoughts and prayers go out to his family. I hope these kids just come to their senses and realize they are killing our youth. This is our future.

The opinions of FBI psychologists and psychiatrists who reviewed the evidence suggest that she was right to focus her search for answers on Dylan's self-destructiveness. As "Columbine" author (and former Salon writer) Dave Cullen wrote in Slate on the massacre's fifth anniversary, experts have concluded that Harris was a psychopath -- his "pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and superiority read like the bullet points" on a diagnostic test -- but Dylan Klebold was "a more familiar type. He was hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal. He blamed himself for his problems." Which means that although the psychiatrists believe Harris was bound to become a violent criminal, "Klebold, they agree, would never have pulled off Columbine without Harris." If Dylan hadn't befriended a psychopath who focused his rage outward rather than inward, he "might have gotten caught for some petty crime, gotten help in the process, and conceivably could have gone on to live a normal life."

In the 10 years since the massacre, schools and parents have put a great deal of effort into trying to understand what happened and how such violence can be prevented. Recognizing mental illness like Dylan Klebold's and understanding the risk it can pose to others as well as the child himself is certainly one part of the strategy. Stopping the Eric Harrises of the world, however, the ones who simply have no conscience, involves other measures. That's where zero-tolerance policies about weapons in schools and threats of violence come in, and at first glance, they appear quite sensible. We hear the stories about teenagers being expelled and prosecuted for bringing guns to homeroom or writing essays describing their own massacre plots, and in light of what we know about school shooters' behavior prior to their crimes, those reactions don't sound so extreme.

But what about a 6-year-old boy who brings a Cub Scout-approved camping utensil, including a fork, spoon and small knife, to school to eat his lunch? Delaware first-grader Zachary Christie is currently being home-schooled by his mother and facing 45 days in reform school for that transgression of his school district's code of conduct. Says the New York Times, "[S]chool officials had no choice. They had to suspend him because, 'regardless of possessor's intent,' knives are banned." In 2007, the same school district "expelled a seventh-grade girl who had used a utility knife to cut windows out of a paper house for a class project." State law was changed last year to allow schools more discretion in expulsions, after a third-grade girl was expelled for a year because she brought a knife to class to cut her birthday cake. ("The teacher called the principal -- but not before using the knife to cut and serve the cake.") But because the law didn't address suspensions, it left no wiggle room with regard to Zachary's punishment. Or Kyle Herbert's -- the 13-year-old was ordered to reform school after a classmate "dropped a pocket knife in his lap," and is now, like Zachary, being home-schooled by his mother. One wonders what parents are supposed to do if they can't stay home with kids kicked out under the zero-tolerance policy.

Such policies exist for understandable and even admirable reasons: "Education experts say that zero-tolerance policies initially allowed authorities more leeway in punishing students, but were applied in a discriminatory fashion. Many studies indicate that African-Americans were several times more likely to be suspended or expelled than other students for the same offenses." Removing the authorities' discretion undoubtedly seemed an easier way to level the playing field than rooting out racism. Unfortunately, that means little kids get thrown out of school for carrying camping gear or being prepared to share birthday cake. And according to at least one expert, it's not worth it. Ronnie Casella, an associate professor of education at Central Connecticut State University, told The Times, "there is no evidence that zero-tolerance policies make schools safer."

What does, then? "[O]ther programs like peer mediation, student support groups and adult mentorships," according to education experts who spoke with the Times. In the decade since Columbine, "the rate of school-related homicides and nonfatal violence has fallen," alongside an overall decrease in crime. Despite several subsequent school shootings that made national news (and several others that didn't), the evidence suggests that some progress has been made. Susan Klebold's essay in O might be one more step toward understanding what went wrong and how to help kids like her son before they become dangerous. But I can't see how suspending innocent children, forcing their parents to choose between sending them to reform school and staying home with them, is making anyone safer. Giving authorities both greater discretion to enforce school policies and some anti-racism training, on the other hand, might just be an improvement. 

To muckraking Chippewa journalist Bill Lawrence, the press constraints in Red Lake come as no surprise. He lived there as a child and returned after law school. In 1970 and 1978, he ran losing campaigns to become a tribal official -- he insists the elections were rigged -- and has been an outspoken critic of tribal governments. He now lives in Bemidji, 30 minutes outside Red Lake.

Following the American Indian movement of the late 1970s, Lawrence founded Native American Press/Ojibwe News, the first independent newspaper of the tribal region of northern Minnesota. Lawrence has devoted most of his adult life to digging up dirt on corrupt tribal politicians and shedding light on news neglected by both the tribal and the mainstream press. Because of his laissez-faire attitude toward journalistic decorum and his heavy use of anonymous sources -- 80 percent are anonymous, Lawrence told Salon -- he has a lot of critics among Native American journalists. Despite his efforts to elucidate what he considers systemic problems in the tribal system of self-government, the reservations of north-central Minnesota remain isolated places, unfamiliar to the society around them.

In the wake of the Red Lake school shooting, the question whether tribal press constraints allow troubles on reservations to go unnoticed is resurfacing, even as some Native Americans are concerned the shootings will make the outside world focus unfairly on problems at Red Lake, like poverty and violence, that are shared by many other rural areas. Lawrence spoke to Salon from the Ojibwe newsroom in Bemidji. When reporters make their way to his part of the world and complain about the closed society, he tells them, "Welcome to Red Lake."

The Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 established that the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution also apply to Native Americans living on reservations. In your experience, how have tribal courts interpreted the act with regard to freedom of the press?

There's practically none. They don't want people allowed in there, and that's the history.

Tribal governments fund tribal publications. Is this analogous to the relationship National Public Radio has to the U.S. Congress?

Red Lake is considered a closed reservation. Tribal governments fund these tribal newspapers and they hire the editors, and if they write something they don't want written, they're out. I get practically no advertising; we survive selling papers and subscriptions. There's a huge cry for change, or else I never would have been able to survive. Ojibwe News has been confiscated a number of times when [tribal officials] don't want something out, or they'll buy out all the papers. Any stories that we write we have to depend on other people to furnish us with the facts, and anybody who writes for me knows they're facing retaliation.

Retaliation? From whom?

Retaliation from the tribal officials. People are afraid of losing their jobs, their houses; this happens every day. We have no rights. I have to use anonymous sources for 80 percent of the things I write. I can hardly find a person who lives out there to write for me. Occasionally I have, but they mysteriously get a job with the tribe. The tribe spends on their newspapers three times what I spend to put it [Ojibwe News] out weekly.

What do you think about the mainstream coverage of the shootings at Red Lake?

The media floods in, then they leave and it's forgotten, but it doesn't really end. I asked a friend who lives up in Red Lake how it's been and he said, "These reporters are like crabs that crawl all over you."

Will the national media spotlight on the shootings improve anything at Red Lake?

It's certainly bringing a lot of focus and attention to the problems, but how long it's going to last is a good question. Once you get to the freedom-of-the-press rights, you're getting at the basic issues here. If we don't have freedom of the press, what kind of government do we have? This is one of the issues I've campaigned for, for 37 years.

I'm a real realist about this business -- I guess because I've been in it so long. We'll probably have more [shootings] before anything happens. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm hopeful it will bring attention, but I'm doubtful things will change.

Is it right to attribute the Red Lake High School tragedy to problems on the reservation?

The conditions are so much more adverse than what you'd expect to see anywhere else. Horrific as this incident was, we knew something was going to happen. The cause of these events will stay there, festering. This kid wasn't a product of the reservation; he moved there from the Twin Cities. We've seen an exodus back to the reservations because of the gambling and the new money, but a lot of people leave again because of the drugs and the alcohol and the violence.

You have expressed on many occasions that the status quo of sovereignty is failing Native Americans. Why should reservations be subject to the same laws as U.S. citizens?

We're U.S. citizens. Why shouldn't we? Just because we're on a reservation? I'm a U.S. citizen, but I'm only a member of the Red Lake band [of Chippewa Indians]. And that's a major distinction. Our constitution should provide for us wherever we are in this country.

Ropes separate the evidence tables from the viewers, museum style. Anybody who leans over to get a better look at Klebold's muddy sneakers, maybe, or the television sets whose screens were blasted out by bullets, is shooed back by a sheriff's deputy. People speak in whispers. Some sponge away tears using tissues provided. They loop around the two big rooms, once, twice, three times. If the instruments of mass murder are impossible to ignore, they take on a larger, even more disturbing significance when the victims are teenagers and one of their favorite teachers, Dave Sanders.

"I work full time now," says Erin Walton, who, with others, tried in vain to save Sanders, offering up her sweatshirt to absorb some of the blood seeping from his neck. She was 15 then. She didn't go on to college. "It's hard me to think about going back to school," she explains. "I can't be in a room with big windows."

"Brian still cringes when he hears the sound of a helicopter," says Bob Warnier, stepfather of Brian Anderson, then 17, who was shot three times in the chest and survived. Brian decided not to come to the fairgrounds today.

Before the viewing ends at 4 p.m., 975 people pass through the evidence rooms, many of them former students, survivors, and friends and relatives of the dead. Absent, as they have consistently been in the five years since the massacre, are Wayne and Kathy Harris, Eric's parents, and Tom and Sue Klebold, who raised Dylan. Although they live in the same Littleton-area homes they occupied on April 20, 1999, they have contributed virtually nothing to the public's understanding of who their sons were and why they killed. The Harrises and Klebolds denied requests for interviews for this story, but plenty of people are willing to talk about them. "They're scared. They're terrified," a friend of the Klebold family says of Tom and Sue. "Sue Klebold looks like a skeleton dipped in wax. They're sick and tired and depressed all the time. A lot of people in Littleton wanted their blood."

Beyond Littleton, the Columbine shootings became a defining cultural moment, the inspiration for two acclaimed novels; a Gus Van Sant film, "Elephant," winner of the top award at Cannes this year; and Michael Moore's Academy-award winning "Bowling for Columbine." Every interest group, it seemed, wanted to claim the massacre for itself as a horrifying example of what can occur when its message is ignored. Some of the many born-again Christians in and around Denver felt a school shooting on this scale was the sort of thing that happens when the Ten Commandments aren't displayed in a high school. Gun-control groups weighed in when it became clear that the some of the weapons Harris and Klebold carried had come from that American shame, the unregulated gun show. For a time, some cried racism because the pair murdered one of Columbine's few black students, Isaiah Shoels. And the fact that Harris and Klebold had been bullied seemed to prove, at least to those advocating stricter codes of conduct in high schools, the deadly menace that unchecked bullying can create.

Everybody's message was essentially the same: What happened at Columbine could have happened at any high school in America, and we must all be prepared. And yet much about Columbine remains unexplained. Even five years later, no one can conclusively say why a couple of sheltered, upper-middle-class teenagers became murderers or how a community can best heal itself after a tragedy of this magnitude, let alone precisely what steps to take to prevent a similar massacre in the future. For all its public importance, Columbine remains a private tragedy, and its survivors differ hugely over what it meant and how best to move on.

The quest for answers continues, led by parents like Rohrbough, who lost a child, and Randy and Judy Brown, a couple whose son, Brooks, had been close to Dylan Klebold since childhood and friendly with Eric Harris. The search has been contentious, and like other recent major cases (JonBenet Ramsey, Kobe Bryant) investigated by small-town Colorado investigators, this one is dogged by the hobgoblins of incompetence and rumors of a coverup. Uncovering the truth became a crusade for Rohrbough, something he worked at every minute he could break free from his job installing high-end stereos in cars. But it doesn't appear to have erased the grief he feels over the death of his son, who was shot outside the school that April morning.

Some of Rohrbough's throbbing anger has been directed at law enforcement, some at the Jefferson County School District, and some at the Harris and Klebold families. Police interviewed Tom and Sue Klebold, but the results were never revealed. Wayne and Kathy Harris, unable to work out an immunity deal, refused to talk. "Who are these people who feel that they don't owe society anything?" says Judy Brown. "They owe society a lot."

Then, about nine months ago, all four of the killers' parents were deposed as part of civil lawsuits filed by some of the victims' families. But in a highly unusual decision, a Colorado magistrate ordered the deposition transcripts to be destroyed, and a federal judge barred any of the plaintiffs who witnessed the depositions from talking about them. Some of the material gathered, Rohrbough told me, "would be rather large news," the sort of stuff "people have never heard, are not expecting, and would be shocked to find out."

Other hints that the parents knew how dangerous their sons were have recently surfaced. At the evidence presentation in February, for example, were snippets of Wayne Harris' journal. In a green stenographer's notebook Harris had made notes about his suspicions that Eric had damaged a neighborhood tree with eggs and toilet paper, cracked the windshield of Brooks Brown's car with a snowball, and made harassing phone calls to the Brown home, a short distance from the Harris home in Littleton. Reviewed by investigators, the complete journal, a sort of diary of the father of a madman, has never been made public.

"As the years have gone by and we've unpeeled the layers, there is no possibility that either the Klebolds or Harrises didn't have very adequate information about what their kids were capable of," Rohrbough insists. "They rolled the dice. They decided, these kids are almost out of school -- once they get out they'll go their separate ways and we'll be done with it."

In January 1998, Harris and Klebold were arrested for breaking into a van and placed in a juvenile diversion program, but they continued to pal around together. That perplexes Rohrbough. "If your kid was caught breaking into a van with another kid, would you allow him to continue hanging out with that other kid at all hours of the night, running together, never knowing where they were, at 3 in the morning?" he asks. "These things don't make sense for a reasonable person. Bad parenting, yeah. Wicked families, absolutely, in my opinion."

Rohrbough also blames the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department for looking away from the menace Klebold and Harris had become. At its fairgrounds press conference, the department revealed that it had had no fewer than 15 contacts with Harris and Klebold in the two years leading up the killings. Besides the complaints about snowballs, prank calls, and the burglarized van, the police had been called twice about a Web site Harris had created, in which he threatened death and destruction. On the site, he openly discussed the testing of pipe bombs that he had built and named Atlanta, Pholus, Peltro and Pazzie. "Each has a 14' mortar shell type fuse," Harris wrote, at the age of 15. "Now our only problem is to find the place that will be 'Ground Zero.'" (In the days immediately after the shootings, Sheriff's Department officials would deny that they knew these Web pages even existed).

Not until 2001, two years after the shootings, did the Jefferson County sheriff's office reveal that in 1998 it had prepared a search warrant -- never executed -- to search the Harris home, a move that might well have prevented the bloodbath. And, only in February 2004 was it revealed that the earliest of the 15 contacts police had with Eric Harris dated back to 1997. This report had been mysteriously lost until late last October, when it was discovered tucked into a binder notebook left behind at the department by a departing deputy.

Rohrbough and other parents also remain exasperated with Jefferson County school officials, who conducted an investigation of their own almost immediately after the carnage, then compiled a 200-page report. It remains secret, however, because lawyers for the district have asserted attorney-client privilege. And much of what's in it may be lost to survivors forever, since an astonishing 80 percent of the 150 staff members on duty during the shooting have moved on.

The Columbine principal, Frank DeAngelis, told me he understood the district's action and, furthermore, worried that the report's release might "re-traumatize" those who were interviewed. Not surprisingly, Rohrbough disagrees. "They used taxpayer money to investigate and now they're claiming it's attorney-client privileged. They're hiding behind it. Someone close to this investigation told me a few years ago -- that's how I first learned about it -- 'You better get a copy of this. You won't believe what it contains.' I think I know what it contains, but I can't tell you. Anyone with decency would release it."

"The aftermath of Columbine should have been about the kids. It never has been about the kids. Not for one moment has it been about the kids."

Because of his friendship with Klebold and Harris, and his actions on April 20, Brooks Brown, a tall, rangy and proud member of the high school's outsider crowd, became one of the most controversial figures to emerge from the crisis of Columbine. Brown and Harris fell out sometime in 1999, after Brooks' parents complained to police about Eric's threats against their son, and Harris put Brooks' name on a "hit list" he maintained on his personal Web site. But on the morning of April 20, when Brown encountered Harris headed into the school, locked and loaded, Harris did not kill him. "Go home, Brooks," Brown recalls Harris saying. "I like you now."

The first time I saw Brown, a couple of days after the shootings, in the cafeteria of a hospital near Littleton, he looked like a zombie. Brown had just left the intensive care unit, where his friend Lance Kirklin was recovering from multiple gunshot wounds. Much of Lance's face had been shot off.

Brown's life, too, would soon change forever. On May 4, 1999, Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone appeared with reporter Dan Abrams on NBC. "I'm convinced there are more people involved," Stone said. "Brooks Brown could be a possible suspect." Abrams asked about the Harris Web pages. Stone scoffed, saying these were a "subtle threat," and denied that the Brown family had ever reported them to the police in the first place.

The Browns interpreted Stone's remarks as an attempt to intimidate them and shut them up, but they refused to be muzzled. Countless press interviews and public records requests later came vindication. Documents surfaced that proved that county sheriff's deputies had indeed visited the Brown home several times prior to April 20, 1999, to hear their complaints about Eric Harris' Web site.

Now 23, Brown has moved into a suburban development close to Littleton with his girlfriend of four years, Meagan Fishell, 21, a mortgage loan specialist. A chain smoker with green hair, and a devoted fan of the band Insane Clown Posse, Brown can be found most days in his basement, tinkering with computers, and acting as webmaster for a couple of youth-oriented Web sites. He delivered pizzas for Domino's for a month, the only regular job he's held in the last few years.

One unseasonably warm evening in February, Brown fired up another in a long series of Camel Turkish Jade Lights and settled into a beanbag chair in the basement. We ate Chinese food and drank A&W root beer. Brown was still recovering from six fillings he had earlier in the day, which had required eight shots of Novocain. That much painkiller, it became clear, hadn't dulled his anger toward Jefferson County officialdom.

Although his parents harbor some anger at the Klebolds and Harrises, Brown himself seems not to. In fact, six months after the killings, he says, Brown drove up to the Klebold home, in the wooded foothills outside Littleton. Dylan's parents were there. Sue Klebold served Brown some strawberry shortcake. "I was chilling with Tom and Sue, and we talked about all the different lies the sheriff was telling, and Tom said, 'You know who would be great to get out here? Michael Moore. Go on his Web site -- it has his e-mail. I can't do this because our lawyer won't let us. But that would be awesome.' I sent Michael Moore an e-mail and said, 'I'm this kid from Columbine, you might have seen me on the news. I'd really like to talk to you for a couple of minutes and see if you'd want to come out and do a movie on Columbine.' So Tom Klebold's the reason 'Bowling for Columbine' happened."

Brown would go on to co-write a thoughtful book, "No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine," which describes widespread bullying at the high school. In a culture of exclusion, loners were singled out for verbal and physical abuse by a coterie of jocks with a swelled sense of entitlement. Brown also assisted Moore with his film, some scenes of which were filmed in and around Littleton. Though Brown admires the film, he feels that Moore didn't give him enough credit for shooting footage used in the movie. "He or the people around him are users," says Brown, who says he was promised an assistant producer credit but received only a simple "thank you."

Columbine became the centerpiece of Brown's life, the driving force behind a constant battle to defend himself and make the world understand what life was like inside Columbine High School in the bloody spring of 1999. The usual post-traumatic conditions presented themselves. Brown struggled with depression, he says; he'd sleep all day one day, then stay up for three. Empty bottles of Southern Comfort 100 and Jack Daniels piled up around the house. "Anything I could get my hands on I would drink and drink and drink." He recently quit drinking, he says, a sign of his recovery.

"I wrote off a lot of my friends after Columbine, and most of my friends wrote me off. Immediately after Sheriff Stone said that I was a possible suspect, a lot of my friends just didn't even want to be seen with me. People would scream out the window of their car that I was a murderer or they'd tell me to get out of here before they killed me. And no one wants to be around that." No evidence of Brown's involvement in the massacre was ever produced, but that didn't stop Columbine administrators from banning him from the high school after he graduated in the spring of 2000. "They thought I was going to kill somebody," he says.

Meanwhile, Brown thinks school officials turned a blind eye to jock-led bullying, which Brown believes led to the tragedy. "For a year after Columbine, the administration said there was no bullying at Columbine," he says. "They just said it never was. Then the governor created a commission that said there was bullying at Columbine. So they came out and said, 'Well, we've solved the bullying problem.' That's the brilliant doubletalk they did for three years, and that was long enough and now no one really pays attention anymore."

Brown lit another cigarette. "It's like beating your head against a wall, trying to get things changed. It's painful. It's so stressful and depressing."

Brown and Lance Kirklin drifted apart. Brown became closer to Richard Castaldo, who was shot outside the school and paralyzed. He's the kid in "Bowling for Columbine" who accompanies Michael Moore to the Kmart headquarters and persuades them to stop selling ammunition. Castaldo has Kmart bullets inside him to this day, courtesy of Dylan Klebold.

"About a month ago I gave up on the whole Columbine thing," Brown says. "I'm done with what happened that day. I've come to terms with what Eric and Dylan did. People are dead, although I don't quite fully understand why yet." His basement is the center of his life now, and his computers.

Brown says he empathizes with Richard Jewell, the Atlanta security guard wrongly fingered by the FBI for the Olympic bombing. "There are people who will believe anything that is told them and won't research it themselves. And to them I say, 'Enjoy church.'"

We go outside, to Brown's gray Mercedes Benz 300e, and head east, past an interminable stretch of gas stations and convenience stores lit by neon. He talks about his choice to finally go on with his life and leave Columbine questions behind. "I've slept pretty well since making that decision. I have energy again." He makes a turn into a wooded area. "Rachel's grave," he says, "is just up the road a bit."

At Chapel Hill Cemetery, about 25 minutes from Columbine High School, Brown stops the Benz. Although only two of the victims, Rachel Scott and Corey DePooter, are buried here, side by side, 13 crosses have been constructed in a shallow semicircle, one for each of the dead. Flowers have been left, and photographs and cards: a smaller version of the massive makeshift memorial that grew up outside the school in the days immediately following the shootings, as well as around Rachel's red Acura Legend, parked in the Columbine lot near Clement Park. To many, Rachel's car became the most enduring Columbine shrine. Mourners left flowers and balloons.

A beautiful young woman with a wide smile and perfectly white teeth, a junior who dreamed of a career in the theater, Rachel Scott was going places. She and Brown took regular smoking breaks together outside school. It was during one of those breaks that Scott, 17, lost her life.

"Rachel was in a miscellaneous group," Brown recalls, in the dark. He visits Chapel Hill a couple of times a month, at night usually, or around sunrise, when the place is officially closed. Rachel Scott was Brooks Brown's kind of person, the kind of socially agile, multidimensional teenager Dylan and Eric might also have liked if they hadn't been so blinded by their hate. "Rachel was Christian, but she wouldn't hang out with the Bible thumpers," Brown explains, a fresh Camel between his fingers. "She was good-looking, but she wouldn't hang out with the hot girls. She worked two jobs in order to be able to buy herself nice clothes, but she wouldn't hang out with the rich kids. She just hung out with people who were smart. That's all she cared about."

Klebold killed her anyway. "Two shotgun blasts, boom, right to the back at about five feet. She was gone pretty quick," Brown says, as he drops some smokes on the ground. "I leave them here because the last time I saw Rachel she had a cigarette."

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A few months ago, around the time Brooks Brown cut back on his drinking and began to try to put Columbine behind him, Richie Castaldo's life finally took a big positive turn, too. Castaldo moved out of his mother's house, where she'd been seeing to his every need, into a small place of his own in a working-class neighborhood in Englewood, Colo., with a cat, Maceo, named after a Jane's Addiction song. He began taking some business courses at Metropolitan State College of Denver two days a week and playing bass in a band, Danger Girl.

For most of the past five years, Castaldo lived at home while he adjusted to life in a wheelchair. Castaldo has no feeling from the middle of his chest down, thanks to a Dylan Klebold bullet that hit his T4 vertebra and shattered his spinal cord. His friend, Rachel Scott, lay dead beside him. Three shots hit Castaldo's left arm, and caused nerve damage in his left hand; he took eight bullets altogether. A pipe bomb thrown in his vicinity failed to detonate. "I didn't know Eric or Dylan at all. I saw them in the hall a couple of times," says Castaldo, who'd played saxophone in the Columbine High marching band. "I didn't even know their names. I don't think they ever said two words to me."

Castaldo backed his oversize brown van down his driveway one afternoon last February and slid into Englewood traffic. "This took me a long time to learn," he says, as he operates two hand controls, one for the steering wheel, one for the accelerator and brake. "My balance gets screwed up. Sometimes, when I turn, I have to lean into it, a little bit like you do on a motorcycle."

Castaldo takes a left turn, past Swedish Hospital, where he spent two months recovering from his injuries. Another two months in a rehabilitation facility followed, and prescriptions to stop the seizures he was having. After a year, some but not all of the movement in his left hand returned, and Castaldo took up the bass. "There are some notes that are kind of hard to play. That hand is still numb in a few areas." He's got a cool idea for the demo he's working on. He wants to sample a sound few people will have heard before -- the throaty mechanical whirr made by the lift that carries him and his wheelchair into his Chevy van.

Castaldo has been thinking, lately, as the fifth anniversary comes around, about exactly why Harris and Klebold did what they did. Even now, he realizes, it's hard to come up with solid reasons. Maybe it's impossible and there will only be individual theories. "Most kids get picked on in high school. I think they kind of fed off of each other, too. It probably started off as a joke, like 'Oh, yeah, let's just go and kill everybody.' Then, 'Let's go get the guns' and they're like, 'OK, I guess we have to do this now because we got the guns. No one's stopping us. It's too easy now.' That's what I imagine it being like."

Likewise, Pat Ireland, another badly injured survivor, has no answers for why Harris and Klebold turned violent, and he's almost stopped looking. Ireland was "the boy in the window," the wounded Columbine student who hung and then tumbled out of the library window, a scene caught on tape and beamed around the world, perhaps the grimmest public image created in the moments following the tragedy. The young man who answers the door to an off-campus apartment in Fort Collins, Colo., 90 minutes north of Denver, is a strapping fellow of 6 feet, 3 inches who moves easily and speaks in complete sentences and paragraphs, and for a moment, I think I've come to the wrong address.

Ireland was paralyzed on his right side for months after the attack. He walked again in June 1999, though he'll always carry a bullet in his brain from Klebold's shotgun. "There were cognitive issues and speed-of-processing issues," Ireland says, "and some speech and visual problems." Months of rehab and tutoring followed. The speech problem cleared up, although short-term memory can still be a bit of a problem. "Sometimes I have to think things through a little bit more, take a little bit more time."

Ireland enrolled at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, a business finance major. He'll graduate this May, then take a job with an investment firm or maybe enroll in grad school, get an MBA. None of this, he hopes, will take him too far away from his girlfriend, a fellow student and an aspiring model whom he has been dating since freshman year.

I ask what sort of emotion Ireland feels now, five years later. Anger? Relief? Regret? "I'd say a lot of pride," Ireland says right away. "I'm proud of my high school and the fact that I spent four years there. Some people asked me if I would transfer, and there would have been no way. I love that place. And I'm proud of all I've accomplished since then. I was on track to be valedictorian and I finished that up." His GPA: 4.0.

"Some people go through things like this and their whole view on life changes drastically. I haven't changed a whole lot. I still have the same interests and the same groups of friends and the same family values."

Ireland told me he doesn't spend much time following the Columbine investigations. He didn't travel out to the fairgrounds press conference in February. "I try not to dwell on that," says Ireland. "What's done is done. It's better to look forward."

Another student who survived that day, Sam Granillo, is equally sanguine. With some friends, he hid in a room off the Columbine cafeteria as Harris and Klebold unloaded. Granillo still seemed terrified, a day later, when I interviewed him at his home in Littleton.

Granillo gives off a Zen-like calm, today, at the age of 22. He tried film school in Boulder, dropped out, and moved back in with his mother. At a comfortable cafe in Englewood, the sort where reading and conversation matter more than running up a big bill, Granillo can be found most afternoons, making coffee.

"Every time I went back to the school," says Granillo, "it just seemed like I was going back over a story I already knew. Everyone was pretty calm and cool by the following fall. The summer after the shootings gave kids time to sit and think. It didn't take much time for the school to go back to the way it was."

For some who experienced Columbine, like Brian Rohrbough and Randy and Judy Brown, the past five years have been a time of anger and reexamination. For others, for some of the victims, like Richie Castaldo and Sam Granillo and Pat Ireland, the years have been a time to develop an incredible resilience in the midst of all the heated debate.

Ireland's negligence lawsuit against the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department, for allegedly failing to rescue him sooner, was settled last month for $117,500. A lawsuit filed by Dave Sanders' daughter, against Jefferson County officials, was recently settled for $1.5 million. Only one suit remains pending, filed by the family of Isaiah Shoels, an 18-year senior at the time of his death.

In their important book on antisocial behavior in children, "High Risk: Children Without a Conscience," Dr. Ken Magid and Carole McKelvey present a chart that lists 20 traits commonly found in a psychopathic child. Eric Harris seemed to have every one of them: from pathological lying and a grandiose sense of self-worth to juvenile delinquency, a knack for manipulation, and a tendency never to express remorse. Whether his parents know this, even in 2004, remains to be seen.

Early on, when he was still hospitalized, Pat Ireland and his mother found themselves discussing the shooting. His mom was furious at Eric and Dylan. Pat wasn't. "I told her, 'Please forgive them. They were confused. They didn't know what they were doing.' And at that point she knew that I would be OK and not have a bunch of hate inside me."

I asked, "Do you think there's been a coverup?"

"I don't know," Ireland replied. "I don't really care."

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At the February fairgrounds press conference, while no public official would admit to a coverup, one speaker did concede that Jefferson County authorities might have done more to prevent the Columbine shootings. "There should have been a search warrant executed on that house," said Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar, referring to the Harris home, which had been turned into a bomb factory. Why wasn't a search warrant executed? An assistant district attorney, Salazar said, didn't think there was enough evidence for probable cause, despite Harris' hate-filled Web site. Who was that prosecutor? Salazar, now running for Congress, had not been able to find out. And so it goes with Columbine.

Salazar distributed a new report, another in an unending series of reports about the tragedy. Another minor bombshell: On page 32, a sheriff's deputy, John Hicks, explains how a senior officer told him to talk to the press, right after the shooting, about what the department knew, or in this case didn't know, about the two shooters beforehand. "Hicks knew he would not be able to tell the truth, so he refused," the report states. "Shortly after that, Hicks was denied permanent promotion to sergeant and told that he would never be promoted under the current administration."

Then Randy Brown, Brooks' father, took the podium, his hands shaking with anger. "The only way to honor these children is to get the truth out and not let this happen again," Brown shouts. "So if you're a policeman, do your job."

Eric Harris had written in his journal, found in his room after his death, "There is nothing that anyone could have done to prevent this. No one is to blame except me and VodKa." Brian Rohrbough thinks that's just another Columbine myth. Still, at the fairgrounds press conference, his body mike stuck to his skin as usual, he seemed happy to receive the limited validation that Salazar's report offered. Of course, it's too little too late. "It's a beginning," Rohrbough tells me. "And they think it's an ending."

The grind houses are gone now that Times Square has been cleaned up by Disney, among others. But the spirit of the grind houses lives on in the art house. At least three or four times a year now, a foreign or indie movie appears whose main selling point is the same gore-and-sex combo that used to lure audiences into the grind houses. Theaters no longer pass out barf bags as they did for "Mark of the Devil," but the ads for Gaspar Noé's "Irreversible" made sure to mention the couple of hundred audience members who stormed out of the film's Cannes screening during the nine-minute unbroken-take rape scene. The gruesome climax of Noé's previous movie, "I Stand Alone," was preceded by a flourish right out of William Castle, a blinking red "WARNING!" sign that alerted moviegoers, "You have 30 seconds to leave the theater." Essentially, this is the same "Can You Take It?" come-on that exploitation producers used to promise grind-house patrons that their movie delivered the dirty goods.

Headlines were always good fodder for the grind house. But 30 years ago a movie like "Survive!" (about the Andes plane crash where surviving soccer players cannibalized their dead teammates) or "Guyana, Cult of the Damned" (about the Jonestown massacre) went straight to drive-ins and second-run houses. Today, Gus Van Sant's "Elephant," which is more or less about the Columbine High School shootings, wins the Palme d'Or at Cannes and is selected for the New York Film Festival.

"Elephant" is too austere, too formalized, to satisfy the exploitation crowd. Most of the movie consists of endless tracking shots, as cinematographer Harris Savides' camera simply follows characters through the (strangely unpopulated) halls of a suburban high school. What gives "Elephant" the air of an exploitation movie is the gut-squeezing sensation you get watching it. As in movies like "Boys Don't Cry" or "The Accused," "Elephant" exists in an atmosphere of queasy anticipation of the atrocity you know is coming at the end. And with the exception of one cafeteria scene, there seem to be only about 10 or 12 people in the entire school, so we know that the characters we're watching are the very ones who are going to get it. Sure enough, the massacre comes on schedule.

It would be crediting "Elephant" with too much depth to call it Van Sant's examination of Columbine. It's more like his Columbine art project. Van Sant's xerox copy of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" seemed like nothing so much as a gigantic Cindy Sherman installation, and something similar characterizes "Elephant." The film has been described as naturalistic, but the look and the blankness of the atmosphere is very achieved. It may be true, as has been charged, that the French loved "Elephant" because it conforms to their idea of America as a mindless, gun-ridden charnel house. The movie, though, is too dead to be a diatribe.

Van Sant doesn't depict the suburban high school and middle-class homes with anything approaching loathing; he'd have to work up some passion before he could loathe anything. He and Savides are going for an avant-garde anthropological look. They shoot the interiors as airless dioramas. Van Sant gets something of the texture of high-school life -- the sense of suspended time, the boredom -- but he never goes beneath the surface. Compared to Frederick Wiseman's 1968 cinema-vérité documentary "High School" (which appears to have been one of Van Sant's models), "Elephant" offers nothing of the interactions of high school, the feelings of students trying to be themselves in the face of petty authority. This is the type of movie that inevitably gets praised as being a corrective to the Hollywood view of high school. But nothing in it rings as true as the best moments in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" or "Carrie" or the early seasons of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

The cast of "Elephant" comprises actual high-school students with no professional acting experience, culled from various schools in Portland, Ore. They are not called on to give performances, because Van Sant isn't interested in exploring teenagers as much as in fetishizing them. The camera lavishes more attention on one boy's blond surfer hair, or on the clothes the kids wear, than on the kids themselves. The characters here serve the same purpose as the furnishings in the school and the kids' middle-class homes: They're static details in Van Sant's composed frames. This preoccupation with texture means that Van Sant has nothing to tell us about why events like Columbine happen.

To be fair, he's not required to do so, and any filmmaker who gives us reasons for the inexplicable risks trivializing it. In last Sunday's New York Times, Van Sant told Karen Durbin that assigning the blame for school killings to rap or video games is "a way of scapegoating ... The movie is about avoiding that, by just observing the last day, where you see evidence of different things that hopefully spur your own imaginings about the meaning of the event." But to successfully work in that way takes a richer, more articulate approach than Van Sant's faux naturalism allows for. Van Sant took the title of the movie from the late English filmmaker Alan Clarke's film on violence in Northern Ireland. Clarke said he meant the title to refer to the elephant in the room that nobody speaks of. If "Elephant" is Van Sant's way of talking about the roots of high school violence, it would have been better if he'd shut up.

It may be that he shows us a scene of one of the killers being bullied, or shows them playing violent video games and ordering guns from the Internet, or assembles them in front of a TV documentary on Hitler, for the express purpose of discounting those "reasons" as convenient excuses. But with no emphasis put on anything, with every scene given the same listless weight -- which is to say, no weight at all -- those scenes appear as warning flags. How else are we to interpret a point-of-view shot from one of the teenage killers mowing down characters on a computer screen, and then an exact repeat of the shot when he turns his gun on his fellow students? There is no other way to interpret it except as the character's inability to distinguish reality from video games.

"Elephant" is in a line of descent from "troubled teen" movies like "River's Edge" and "Kids," pictures that are designed to appeal to both the hipsters in the art house audience and Op-Ed writers who never miss a chance to bloviate on a pressing social problem. But there are moments where Van Sant goes well beyond alarmism and straight into a sort of mindless bigotry. If a straight filmmaker had shown us the two killers kissing in the shower before they embark on their killing spree, he would have been accused of using the old homophobic idea of gays as suppressed killers.

There should be plenty of ways to read the scene: as the two wanting some human contact before dying, as simple teenage experimentation. The kiss between the two boys in "Y Tu Mamá También" proved that two males kissing on-screen could denote something other than homosexuality. (What Alfonso Cuarón intended to say in that scene was that in the heat of the moment, sex is sex.) It's pretty clear that the only reason the kiss exists in "Elephant" is that Van Sant couldn't resist watching two teenage boys make out. The voyeuristic way the scene is shot -- through a fogged shower door -- emphasizes that. Again, because he stays so rigorously outside the characters, Van Sant has eliminated all potential meanings except the most obvious.

A straight filmmaker without Van Sant's indie cred (however much diminished by the likes of "Good Will Hunting" and "Finding Forrester") also wouldn't get away with the misogyny of a scene where we see three catty, popular girls pick at their lunch and then -- punch-line alert! -- go into the bathroom, where they make themselves vomit.

Such a director surely wouldn't get away with the treatment of the movie's sole black character. This tall, silent young man appears late in the movie to help kids scrambling out of a classroom window to escape the shootings. Then, for no discernible reason, he is drawn back toward the sounds of gunfire. Nothing in his face registers why he's going back; there's no indication of a determination to help, of morbid curiosity, of anything. He simply walks toward the sounds and, about a minute after he's been introduced, is shot dead. Van Sant may have intended a comment here on the expendability of black characters in movies, but he simply apes the conventions of the sacrificial black -- and with considerably less distinction than black supporting characters are allowed even in Hollywood junk. (Watching the scene, it's also hard not to think that school shootings didn't become a hot topic until it was white kids killing other white kids.)

There's a big difference between a filmmaker who sets out to resist easy judgments and one who simply reproduces events without putting any thought into them. When the killings eventually come they are shown to us in as blasé a fashion as everything else. Van Sant's defenders may claim that he's trying to show us the affectlessness of the teen killers. But depicting the attitudes of even the worst characters does not prevent a filmmaker from taking his own attitude toward them. It may look as if Van Sant is exercising discretion when two characters who have taken refuge in a meat locker back out of the frame and we see two hanging sides of beef while the kids are gunned down. But in Van Sant's scheme, the beef has as much distinction as the kids. This, I think, is what finally marks "Elephant" as a true exploitation movie. It's not that Van Sant is getting off on the killings or asking us to get off on them, but that he is simply using a real-life tragedy as fodder for his little art movie, and that he hasn't even done the thinking that would allow him to say there are no answers for these killings.

The moment that most sticks in my craw comes right after the first killing in the school library. We've watched one of the characters, an aspiring photographer, wandering the halls and grounds taking pictures of his classmates. Right after the first head goes splat, Van Sant cuts to this boy raising his camera and snapping a picture of the corpse.

Since no psychology is supplied for any of the characters or events here, the boy's sudden cynicism makes as much sense as anything else in "Elephant." But how did Van Sant have the stones to include it? When a director who has been trying to regain the art-house cachet he lost with a string of commercial projects makes use of the murder of high school students and then has the nerve to criticize a character for opportunism -- when he distances himself from actual violence and suffering and substitutes aesthetics for exploration -- it's not the characters on-screen who are divorced from reality.