Columbine: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

Before noon, an investigative team had already been assembled. Kate Battan is named the lead investigator, and, from student reports, has identified the shooters as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and begun compiling information about both of the boys. She sends detectives to each of their homes. Eric’s parents are “uncooperative” and attempt to refuse the police entry, but the cops insist. In Eric’s room, their team finds a stash of ordnance: sawed-off shotgun barrel, ammo, fireworks, and materials for building bombs on nearly every surface. 

The Klebolds are “much more forthcoming” and “communicative,” assisting the police by describing their son’s social life and past. The police find pipe bombs in the house, and both Tom and Sue are “shocked,” insisting that their son was happy, and that they would have known if something had been wrong with him.

Supervisory Special Agent Dr. Dwayne Fuselier (FUSE-uh-lay) is the first FBI agent to arrive at Columbine. Though he is a veteran agent and “one of the leading hostage negotiators in the country,” he is only there because his son, Brian, is a Columbine student. Fuselier offers his services to Jeffco officials, though, and they accept. The first step of negotiating, Fuselier knows, is to determine if the situation is a hostage or nonhostage situation—the situations are vastly different. Hostage-takers often act rationally and issue demands, whereas nonhostage gunmen find no meaning in human lives and “typically issue no demands.” Jeffco officials have labeled Columbine a hostage situation when Fuselier arrives on the scene, and all major news outlets are reporting it as such; Fuselier, though, knows that what he is heading into is “much worse.”

Both the public and the detectives on the scene believe that the attack is a “large conspiracy”—they feel it is too big to just have been orchestrated by the two gunmen. One of Eric and Dylan’s friends, Chris Morris, was home playing video games at the time of the attack. He called himself in to 911, “scared” by the knowledge he possessed—that Dylan and Eric owned guns and had recently been “messing” with pipe bombs. The police take Chris into custody, believing he “looks the part” of a conspirator.

Though media and witnesses both describe the shooters as a unit—a they—Fuselier knows that “multiple gunmen demand[s] multiple [negotiation] tactics.” He knows already that there may be two very different motives at work in the attack—one for Eric, and one for Dylan. As reports of the shooters as loners and outcasts continue to emerge, witnesses from the school describe the shooters as members of the Trench Coat Mafia—a group of “Goth” students at Columbine “associated with death and violence.” This claim is false, but the story, which is “bizarre,” spreads like wildfire.