McFertz the Fish is Happy

Depressing.. sad... and long ( i wish my essay were this long)

Looking back, the clues were there. The obsession with weapons, war and death. The endless rounds of bloody computer games. The vicious rantings on the Internet.

Teachers at Columbine High School saw the signs in Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. In a violent video they made for class that showed them gunning down the school jocks. In Harris' creative writing essay about playing war, picking off the enemy from a safe distance.

Students saw the signs. They saw the two with clubs and knives. Heard their essays and poems about suicide and murder. Heard Harris talk at lunch about blowing up the school.

A gun dealer says they were trying to buy weapons. And police knew about the pair's one petty crime and about threats of violence Harris made on his Web site.

Plenty of blame is going around in the aftermath of Harris and Klebold's rampage at Columbine, which left 12 students and a teacher dead.

Police have blamed the parents. Some parents have blamed police and the school. And others are questioning a judicial system that saw nothing more than a pair of polite, contrite teen-agers.

So much about Harris and Klebold is still unknown. But what is known about the two -- the progression of their plot, their relationship, the efforts each made to conceal their plan -- paints a picture that seems inevitable in its whole, largely overlooked in its parts.

Problem is, no one saw it all.

"If you look at acts of violence, you'll find commments from friends, neighbors, acquaintances saying that this person was weird, he was odd, it was only a matter of time," retired FBI criminal profiler Jim Wright said. "All of a sudden -- when the act is over -- a lot of people knew it was going to happen."

Added Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas: "I suppose, in hindsight, all of us would do many things differently."

When Harris and four others walked into Mel Bernstein's El Paso County gun shop in the first week of March, he sized them up as punks. He chased them off when it became apparent that the one girl in the group was trying to buy guns for Harris -- who was underage but did all the talking.

"We get things like this all the time," said Bernstein's wife, Terry Flanell. "We can't call the cops every two seconds on a hunch."

Bernstein didn't know that Harris had been arrested with Klebold a year before, that they had just been released from their juvenile diversion program.

When the diversion officer had looked at Harris' and Klebold's performance in their community service and counseling programs, he described the pair as bright young men likely to succeed.

"He's anguished over what happened," Thomas said.

But the officer didn't know that Klebold's prom date had bought weapons at an Adams County gun show about four months before.

When a county magistrate placed the pair in a diversion program March 25, 1998, he didn't know about Harris' threats to kill classmates and detonate bombs, threats posted on his Web site.

That's where the lives of Harris and Klebold intersected: in front of a computer. They were die-hard gamers who loved the interactive bloodbath called DOOM, which arms players to the teeth and pits them against legions of homicidal demons lurking in an endless maze.

Harris always had top-of-the-line equipment, even when they first met as freshmen four years ago. Together, they gamed, they hacked, they created and modified programs. They found power through technology.

Their personalities meshed perfectly, too, yin and yang. Harris, more outgoing, the leader. Klebold, quieter, the consummate follower.

Even kids who didn't know them well could see it.

"I felt Eric seemed to always be the head," said Michele Fox, 18, who had a creative-writing class with the pair every day. "He was always in control."

For Harris, school was a snap. Articulate, intelligent, a good athlete who played on the school soccer team during his freshman and sophomore years.

He was never a discipline problem. Principal Frank DeAngelis didn't even know his name. "The Eddie Haskell of Columbine," one mother called Harris.

Klebold was a perfect sidekick. A big goofy kid, pasty-faced and uncoordinated. Very bright but very passive. Brooks Brown remembered Klebold as someone who looked to his friends for guidance from their first meeting as first-graders at Normandy Elementary School.

"I always had to say, 'We're going to go here to play. We're going down to the creek now,' or whatever," Brown said.

So friends have no doubt that when Klebold and Harris broke into a van to steal tools Jan. 30, 1998, Harris led the way.

And after Harris talked about making bombs, that's what they did.

Harris and Brown were friends as well but had a falling-out. Harris vandalized some houses and blamed Brown. Then Harris chipped Brown's windshield with an ice chunk, and the two didn't speak for more than a year.

But Klebold cared enough about Brown to alert him to death threats on Harris' Web site.

"He was really looking out for me," Brown said. "That's the way he was. An extremely good kid."

Harris was another story.

Brooks Brown's mother, Judy, told Jefferson County authorities about Harris' Web site, where he talked about test-firing pipe bombs. A detective found Harris' arrest record, but that information never made it to the district attorney's office, which could have put the two together.

A sheriff's deputy assigned to the school passed Judy Brown's report to a Columbine dean. Where it went from there is unknown.

The Browns never told the Harrises about the Web site, and their son dismissed it as Eric talking tough. Judy Brown took solace in the fact that Klebold, whom she didn't think capable of violence, was Harris' best friend.

Just six days before Brown turned over the Web site to authorities, Harris and Klebold appeared before Jefferson County Magistrate John DeVita on the break-in charge.

DeVita had words of advice for Klebold, who was getting B's and C's in school. "I bet you're an 'A' student if you put the brain power to the paperwork," he told him.

But DeVita questioned Harris more closely. He doubted that Harris was really a first-time offender, and he told him so.

"First time out of the box and you get caught. I don't believe it," DeVita told him. "It's a real rare occurrence when somebody gets caught the first time."

The hearing, at which both were placed in a diversion program, took all of 10 minutes. An innocuous case among the hundreds that come before DeVita. Two courteous kids who had part-time jobs and did their chores.

Within weeks, Harris began the diary in which the Columbine plot would take form.

During the 10 months that Klebold and Harris were on diversion, they would attend anger-management classes and counseling. They cleaned up a recreation center as part of their community service.

"They really were unremarkable," said Dave Kirchoff, the center's coordinator.

At the same time, they used the money they earned making pizzas to buy their guns and build their bombs. Klebold ran the sound for the school's fall show. And they played a lot of DOOM.

The two were discharged from the diversion program Feb. 3 with glowing, nearly identical report cards.

"Eric is a very bright young man who is likely to succeed in life."

"Dylan is a bright young man who has a great deal of potential."

At school, the pair didn't particularly stand out. The so-called Trench Coat Mafia had scattered after some of its members graduated in 1998. Harris and Klebold were on the group's fringes, at best, students say. They weren't into the white-faced, black-eyed look of the Goth crowd, and they hated the dark music of Marilyn Manson.

Even the pair's fascination with Nazism wasn't obvious to everyone.

"They did not wear Nazi stuff. They did not wear German flags. They were not gay. They did not wear makeup," said Columbine senior Dustin Gorton, a friend of both. "There's so much information coming out about them that just isn't true."

Even when the two wrote their violent, morbid poems and essays, some classmates saw it as nothing more than creative license fueled by teen-age angst.

"It's a creative-writing class," Michele Fox said. "You write about what you want. Shakespeare wrote all about death."

But on the Internet, Harris' veneer of normalcy fell away.

His Web pages reflect a soul-searing level of hatred, frustration and powerlessness, the invective of a person driven crazy by everyday life. Country music. Zippo lighters. People who cut in line. R-rated movies edited for cable.

"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!?" Harris asked in one rant. "People who think they can forecast the weather!!! Like just the other day, this punk i know was saying 'Yeah tomorrow we are gonna get like, 2 feet of snow in just a few hours. They were saying its gonna be the biggest snow in ten years.... And that day we get an inch of snow.... I feel like getting a baseball bat, breaking it over his head, and then STABBING him with the broken end!!!!"

Harris -- who was in therapy and reportedly taking Luvox, commonly prescribed for obsessive-compulsive disorders -- told his diversion officer he especially enjoyed his anger-management class. His own little joke.

It's unknown whether Wayne and Kathy Harris ever saw their son's Web site. Unknown whether Klebold's parents knew about it, either.

Late last year, researchers for the Simon Wiesenthal Center found a Web page signed by the Trench Coat Mafia, with links to sites urging anarchy.

"We see hundreds of sites like this every day," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, who coordinates the center's study of hate groups. "At the time, there were no threats being made. It certainly didn't say wait until April 20 and name a school because obviously we would have called the authorities."

Picking the dangerous needle out of the haystack of the Web is getting harder all the time, Cooper said. Last year his center tracked 1,400 hate sites. In April 1995 they had identified one.

"Look, being a loner in a high school is as old as the first high school," Cooper said. "The bomb-making information has been around for a long time. But the convergence of all this stuff and the marketing of it on the Web -- this didn't exist five years ago. But it sure is now. Front and center."

DOOM, Harris and Klebold's favorite game, appeared in late 1993 and took interactive, 3-D action to a new level.

The concept, one of DOOM's creators has said, came down to this: "Kill everything and get out alive." One episode is called "All Hell Breaks Loose." Another: "Knee-deep in the Dead."

One of the game's slogans: "DOOM -- where the sanest place is behind a trigger."

Players can hunt and kill together -- or each other -- from their own home computers across the street or across the world. And there are millions of players: More than 17 million copies of DOOM and its sequel have been downloaded worldwide.

"Violence in movies and TV and video games heightens aggression for some people some of the time," former FBI profiler Gregg McCrary said. "But they don't cause the crime. It's how people react to them that matters. Some people are moved to violence by the Bible."

The National School Safety Center has created a profile of the kid most likely to commit school violence, based on the profiles of kids who already have. The 20-item checklist includes drug abuse, tantrums, threats, depression, truancy, cruelty to animals and a fascination with weapons and violence that spills over into schoolwork.

But profiles like that have problems, former FBI profiler Wright said, because they tend to apply to a lot of kids who never become violent.

"It's like stereotyping, and stereotyping causes you to have tunnel vision," he said. "It's like throwing a big net out there and a lot fit the profile. But only a small portion are going to be guilty of what you're trying to catch in the first place."

And there's no guarantee you still won't miss the kids most likely to kill.

Like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who spent the two years, the two months, the two weeks before the killings living outwardly normal lives.

Two weeks before, a soccer league had asked Harris to play for its team, but he turned them down. "I've got stuff I've got to take care of," he said.

Two weeks before, a girl rear-ended Klebold's black BMW. She was shaking and crying, afraid of what he might do, because she knew he was associated with the Trench Coat Mafia.

But Klebold wasn't upset. "Don't worry about it, it's all right," he told her.

The week before, Klebold and his father visited the University of Arizona, where Klebold planned to study computer science.

On the Thursday before, Harris' long-time dream of becoming a Marine came to an abrupt end. After meeting with his parents and a recruiter April 15, Harris was rejected because he had been on psychiatric medication.

The Friday before, Harris read a story during creative-writing class about playing war with his brother, mowing down the enemy. Later that night he and Klebold showed up for their evening shift as cooks at Blackjack Pizza, where they were considered model employees.

The Saturday before, Klebold went to the prom with friend Robyn Anderson, who had bought guns for the pair. Klebold and Harris showed up at Columbine's after-prom party. "They were both in pretty good spirits, going with the flow," classmate Thaddeus Boles said.

Sometime that weekend, Thomas Klebold got an odd feeling about his son. Dylan seemed stressed out. His father made a mental note to talk to him. He never did.

Sometime that weekend, neighbors heard glass being shattered in Harris' garage -- making shrapnel for bombs, authorities now suspect. The ruckus disturbed kids playing in the nearby cul-de-sac.

The Monday before the shootings, Harris and Klebold grabbed lunch at McDonald's with Brooks Brown, who had patched up his differences with Harris.

On the last day of his life, Harris showed up for a 6:15 a.m. bowling class, as usual.

On the last day of his life, Klebold told his mother goodbye in a way that sounded oddly final to her.

Only later did it make sense to her, when nothing else did.