Authors: Brooks Brown Rob Merritt
Eric was a very serious person. You didn't screw with him. I knew that from last year, when he'd posted messages on the Internet about how badly he wanted me dead. We had made peace afterwards; I thought all of that was behind us now. But maybe those memories were coming back to unsettle me all over again.
Whatever the reason, somehow I knew that Eric was not one to be antagonized any further at this moment.
I didn't say anything else. I walked across the parking lot back down to Pierce Street, still holding the same cigarette I had lit when I walked out of class. I tried to just keep smoking like nothing had happened. Yet deep down, I knew that something was wrong, and that it had to do with Eric.
Was he going to play a prank? Mess with the school's ventilation system? Shoot paint balls? Set off a pipe bomb in the parking lot?
I saw an image of Bart Simpson flushing a lit firecracker down the toilet right before Principal Skinner brings his mother in to use the facilities. It had always made me laugh in the past. For some reason it didn't now.
I finished the cigarette and tossed it. I tried to forget about Eric for a moment and decide whether I was going to skip fifth hour or not.
Then I heard a loud crack in the distance.
I looked around. Funny, I thought, that almost sounded like a gunshot. I looked to my left. On the other side of Pierce, there was a whole block of housing construction going on. Had I just heard a nail gun? Maybe. The pounding of nails will echo everywhere. You can't pinpoint where it came from when it's that loud.
I heard a few more cracks. They sounded different from nails. Couldn't be sure. Then I heard something much louder than what had come before.
That wasn't any goddamn nail.
In that instant, I knew something horrible was happening. Panic washed over me, and without even thinking about it, I started moving. I didn't know what was going on, but somehow I knew I had to get as far away from there as possible.
I heard more loud cracks. Something that sounded like explosions. A bomb. I wasn't walking anymore. I was running on Pierce Street, wanting in that instant to get as far away from Columbine as possible.
One block. Another. Loud noises coming from behind me, sounds I knew meant unimaginable horror.
I reached a little green generator next to the sidewalk and sat down for a moment. I could just barely see the front edge of Columbine, at the top of the hill in the distance, and I could still hear the shots.
“All right—gotta figure out what I'm doing—gotta figure out what I'm doing—”
I had no idea what I was going to do.
I tried to calm myself down. Maybe it's a prank, I thought. Maybe it's exactly what I thought before. Maybe Eric tossed a couple of pipe bombs, scared the teachers, and now he's hiding behind a few cars in the parking lot, laughing his ass off.
If it was a prank, and I ran to someone's house and started screaming that there were bombs and explosions going off at Columbine, what would be the first thing they'd do? Call the cops. If I was wrong, what would happen then? I'd get slapped with a fine. Nailed. You get in trouble real bad for making false reports in Littleton.
Besides, I thought, maybe I didn't hear anything. Maybe I'm just losing it. Maybe if I just get up and walk back, I'll see that nothing happened and everything's all right.
Jesus. I didn't know what the hell to think.
But I couldn't stay there on that generator, out in the open. I knew that.
I got up and kept moving away from the school. I was three blocks away from Columbine when I reached a concrete bicycle underpass that goes right under Pierce Street. I jumped down off the sidewalk and disappeared into it.
I'd gone down here to smoke with friends in the past. I'd never done it to try to protect myself.
My hands were shaking as I pulled out another cigarette. I had to clear my mind.
I replayed everything from the past ten minutes. The explosions. The shotgun blast. It had to be a shotgun blast. Had to be, had to be . . . I thought back to my conversation with Eric. Had I missed something? A detail, something sticking out of his bag? Anything?
And then it hit me—the sick realization.
Eric.
Son of a bitch.
I suddenly remembered all the articles I'd read about Jonesboro and Pearl and Paducah, and Kip Kinkel and Michael Carneal and Luke Woodham. I remembered those times when we'd laughed in speech class that Columbine was next. We'd said that if any school was ripe to get shot up, it was ours.
Now it was happening, and my friend was behind it.
Oh, man. No. No. Jesus, Eric, what the hell are you doing?
Christ
, I thought.
Get it together. Come on. What if I'm the only one who knows? What if the cops don't have a name? I've got to find a phone. I have to get out of here
.
I heard police cars driving overhead as I hurried back out from the underpass. I looked out across the empty lots, to where the closest house was, several hundred yards away.
Then I heard it. I turned around just in time to see a massive barrage of police cruisers, a dozen of them if not more, thundering north on Pierce toward the school with sirens wailing. If I needed any further confirmation that this was real, I found it when I saw half the police force of Jefferson County descending on Columbine.
I ran to the first house I saw and started hammering on the door. Nothing. I ran for the next one and did the same thing. I don't know if I was yelling through the door or not. It didn't seem to matter.
As I ran to the next one, I saw a woman getting into her car with her daughter. She looked like she was rushing.
“I need your phone!” I yelled to her. “Please let me use your phone!”
“No, no,” she said, hurrying into her car. “I have to leave.”
With that, she barreled out of there. I think I scared her.
As she left, I saw two other women outside the house. One of them was Mrs. Taylor; I knew her daughter Anna, a very sweet girl who had been in several classes with me over the years. Her mother recognized me—and saw the look on my face.
“What's wrong?” she asked.
“I need to use your phone.” I was breathing hard, sweating, scared out of my mind. She asked me why.
I said I didn't want to freak her out, but that I thought there had been a shooting at Columbine.
Mrs. Taylor stayed calm. “Okay,” she said. “You lie down. Lie on your back. I'll go get the phone. You just try to relax for a second.”
I sat down, burying my head in my lap. Then I lay back with my arm over my face, trying to regain my composure. I still didn't know for sure what was happening. I still felt panicked.
Mrs. Taylor gave me the phone. I called my dad at work.
“Have you heard anything on the news?” I said.
“No,” he replied. “Why? Brooks, what's going on?”
“Well, first of all, I want you to know that I'm all right. I'm out of the school and I'm fine.”
“Okay. . .”
“Dad, I think Eric's shooting up Columbine.”
There was a pause on the other end. “What?!”
“Dad, something's going on,” I continued. “I don't know what to do.”
“I'll be there in ten minutes! Where do you want me to meet you?”
I looked down the street, trying to place my own location.
“I'll meet you by Steve's house on Upham Street. I'm right by there.” Steve was my drum teacher, so my dad knew where he lived.
“Okay. Ten minutes, Brooks. Thanks.”
My dad hung up and I handed the phone back to Mrs. Taylor. I thanked her, and apologized if I had panicked her. I knew her daughter was in choir right now.
That was when I realized.
My brother's still in there
.
My little brother Aaron, two grades below me, was also a student at Columbine. He and Eric didn't get along. If Eric was still in the school, and he came across my brother … I felt terror overwhelming me all over again.
I started walking toward Steve's house. A lot of cars were already driving by; the first thing I did was look among them for people I knew.
First I saw Mr. Johnson and Mr. Bath, two of my teachers from Columbine, and waved them down. They pulled over and asked me why I wasn't in class. They were laughing.
I just blurted out what I thought: Eric Harris was involved in a shooting of some kind. They both became very quiet.
“You know, he's in my psychology class,” Mr. Johnson said after a beat.
Mr. Bath asked if I was okay. I told them yeah, and they said they would see me later. Then they drove off. I kept walking, until my friend Ryan Schwayder drove up in his Jeep Grand Cherokee.
“Hey, Brooks,” he said. “What's going on? We tried to go back to school and they've got the road blocked off.”
I didn't answer him. I just opened the door, threw my book bag into the back of the Jeep and jumped in. Inside were two other Columbine students, Matt Houck and Deanna Shaffer.
Ryan took one look at me and instantly became concerned. “What's wrong?”
I tried to explain, but I was talking too fast for them to understand. Ryan kept asking me to slow down. I took a couple of deep breaths, and asked Ryan to drive closer to Columbine, so I could get a better look.
“Why? What's wrong?”
I took a moment. “There's a shooting at the school.”
For two seconds, dead silence filled the Jeep.
Then Deanna's hands went to her face, and she started crying. Ryan's entire body just sank in his seat; I could literally see the energy escape him.
“Oh, God,” Matt said quietly.
I tried to explain about seeing Eric, and what he had said to me. “Oh, man, I think he had a duffel bag with him,” I said.
I asked Ryan if I could use his phone to call 911. Almost like a zombie, he handed it to me. I called the police and told them I had information about what was happening.
They seemed to have trouble transferring my call at first. I wound up getting forwarded to the Arapahoe County office. As this was happening, all of us looked up to see multiple helicopters descending on our school.
The battery started dying on Ryan's phone. He let me climb over into the driver's seat and plug the phone into the lighter adapter to get power, while he stood outside with Deanna, quietly holding her.
Arapahoe County put me through to Detective Kirby Hodgkin, and I started rattling off information. I told them about Eric skipping class that day, what he'd said to me in the parking lot, what kind of car he drove, and what he was wearing.
“He looked like an Army cadet,” I said.
I said Eric had just turned eighteen a few weeks ago, and that he'd talked in class about buying guns, saying he “couldn't wait to turn eighteen”
so he could legally purchase one. I mentioned that we'd had a falling-out several years before. I didn't think to mention the Web pages.
While I was still on the phone with them, my dad pulled up next to us. “We're getting the hell out of here right now!” he yelled.
I didn't know what had my dad so spooked. He later told me that he'd heard a report on the radio saying the shooters had already left the school on foot. My dad was afraid that Eric was walking around in the same neighborhood as us. With guns.
I said, “Fine! Fine!” I didn't even take time to change places with Ryan. He and Deanna jumped back in the car, and with me behind the wheel, we took off behind my dad.
We headed back out to Pierce Street and floored it the rest of the way to our house, not caring that we were probably pushing sixty, sixty-five miles per hour on residential streets. I was still on the phone, so I explained the situation to the detective at Arapahoe County. He took my address and said that an officer would come out later that day to interview me further.
My dad and I tore around the last few corners leading to our house. He pulled up on the sidewalk, and I parked right behind him—just as my brother Aaron came running out of the house to meet us.
Thank God, I thought. I was so happy to see him safe.
When my dad came to get me, he already knew Aaron was okay. After he'd talked to me, Aaron had called to let him know he had made it home. My dad knew I was the only kid he still had to bring to safety.
Aaron told me that he and his friends had run like hell to get out of the school, made it to his car, and then come home. He didn't tell me how he'd been sitting in the cafeteria when it started, just a few tables away from a propane bomb that had somehow failed to detonate. Or how he'd run through the auditorium, being chased by the gunmen, bullets flying over his head, hearing the girl behind him get hit and scream, “I'm shot!” I would learn about that much later.
All we knew was that we were safe at home. Far away from the horror that was still unfolding at Columbine High School.
“Brooks, I like you now. Get out of here. Go home.”
Those wound up being Eric Harris's last words to me.
Five minutes after I spoke to him, he was hurling pipe bombs at my friends, firing shotgun blasts at my brother, and murdering innocent students—students whose biggest worries before that moment had been midterm tests and college applications.
Yet what I didn't know at the time was that Eric wasn't alone in his mission. His best friend Dylan Klebold was with him, firing off bullets right next to him, hunting and killing—and laughing about it.
Dylan. One of my closest friends since first grade.
Soon, Eric and Dylan would kill themselves in the library, denying any of us the chance to question them. I'd never be able to sit down across from the guy I used to throw snowballs at in elementary school and ask him why he had wanted to kill all those people who had done him no wrong whatsoever.
The hell that Eric and Dylan would create at my high school that day would go on to haunt their families, the families of the victims, and parents and students throughout our community and the world. It would destroy my life, as comments from the sheriff would lead to accusations that I was somehow involved in the plot.
Worst of all, it left me struggling with the knowledge that not only were my classmates dead, they had been murdered by one friend I'd known since childhood—and another who had let me walk away only a few minutes beforehand. And I would never be able to ask them why.