Columbine, five years later

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 19:15:00 +0000

Brian Rohrbough is wearing a wire. It's a fancy digital rig, capable of capturing 22 hours of conversation before Rohrbough needs to fiddle with it again. He bought it, he says, when he became fed up with being lied to about the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history -- April 20, 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed his son, Daniel, along with 11 other fellow students, a teacher, and themselves at Columbine High School.

"I record everything," Rohrbough says here at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds in Golden, Colo., one Thursday morning late in February; it is yet another Columbine news conference, just two months before the fifth anniversary of the tragedy. "My format is mini-disk, but I have others."

The event at the fairgrounds is billed as an unprecedented gesture of openness for Columbine and, indeed, for every criminal case anywhere that has never gone to trial. In the interest of providing full disclosure and of quieting the howls of skeptics who still want further investigation, the new sheriff, Ted Mink, has ordered that all of the Columbine evidence, every bomb and bullet, be put on display for one afternoon of public viewing.

Salon.com > Peter Wilkinson

Columbine, five years later