Columbine: Chapter 28 Summary & Analysis

The Trench Coat Mafia was “mythologized” and continues to color the way the public thinks of Columbine. Though “we remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the TCM snapping and tearing through their school hunting down jocks,” Cullen insists that “none” of that is true, and neither did the attacks have any connection to Marilyn Manson, Hitler’s birthday, or the desire to slaughter Christians. Though no reputable sources or experts on the case believe any of these myths anymore, much of the public still does, and Cullen attempts to explain why. 

Just hours into the coverage, the media had assigned the blame for the attack to the TCM, “a cult of homosexual Goths in makeup orchestrating a bizarre death pact for the year 2000.” Though journalists, Cullen says, were mostly careful, using “disclaimers like ‘believed to be’ or ‘described as,’” the problem with the coverage was “repetition.” Addressing the rumors repetitiously, however carefully, created an enormous impact that the media was largely “blind” to. Though the media assured the public that the “kids” were informing them of the facts, the kids were actually being informed by the coverage they saw on TV, creating a self-sustaining spiral of confusion.

Explaining the shootings as “targeted” was “reassuring” because it addressed the “known threats [of] bullying and racism.” The shooters, however, were not targeting any specific social or ethnic group—their aim was total, indiscriminate annihilation.

The third major problem with the coverage, Cullen writes, was the media’s role in equating “student” with “witness.” All two thousand students “were deputized as insiders” by the media, adding more acutely to the confusing and conflicting reports. 

As “many survivors” descend into the early stages of post-traumatic stress disorder, Cullen considers that “some who had been in the library [were] fine, while other who had been off[-campus] would be traumatized for years.” Witnessing violence directly had nothing to do with the atmosphere of trauma in Columbine. Students are also gripped by survivor’s guilt, and pack the hospitals where their classmates are recovering in order to be close to the wounded.

Patrick Ireland’s doctors focus on helping him regain brain function, and do not bother to operate on his injured foot. Patrick’s parents are told he’ll never walk again, but Patrick remains unaware, assuming he will make a full recovery. His speech begins to improve, his vitals stabilize, and he is moved out of the ICU to a regular room. His parents ask him if he was the boy who tumbled out of the library window, and he tells them that he was. A neurologist from Craig Hospital, one of the “leading rehab centers in the world,” helps the Irelands make plans to transfer Patrick there, reassuring them all that there is “hope.”

As students begin to move past grief and towards anger, some of them begin telling the press that the killers were “outcasts, freaks, [and] fags.” Cullen observes that “gay [is] one of the worst epithets one kid could hurl against another in Jeffco.” Most of the media “carefully sidesteps” rumors of the boys’ homosexuality, instead seizing on rumors of their obsession with Gothic culture. Some report, accurately, that the “morose [Goth] community is quiet, introverted, and pacifistic,” attempting to dispel the Goth connection. The media then moves on to probing the “outcast” angle, focusing on “bullying and alienation,” again falsely reporting that there were “long-simmering rivalr[ies] between the TCM and [Columbine] athletes.” Though the details are accurate—there were indeed tensions between these two groups—Eric and Dylan were a part of neither, and the media’s “conclusions [were] wrong.”

No evidence supports the theory that bullying led to the Columbine massacre, though it was an issue at Columbine. Frank DeAngelis insisted he was “unaware” of this fact. His “unusual rapport with the kids created a blind spot.” One student tells Cullen that her “Goth friends” hated their time at Columbine, citing Mr. D’s perhaps accidental “preference” for supporting athletics. Reports of Columbine as a “toxic” place begin to emerge, and it becomes characterized as a school “terrorized by a band of restless jock lords.” Columbine begins to “embody everything noxious about adolescence in America,” and Cullen, citing Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, stays that “by observing an entity, you alter it”; meaning that in the weeks following Columbine, the community was so deeply scrutinized that it became picked apart “beyond all recognition.”