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A Columbine Site is the property of the USA incorporated non-profit organization Semper Memento Inc. It was founded April 21, 1999 as a memorial site and quickly developed into an information outlet to present and preserve the truth about what happened on April 20, 1999, and why. Its purpose is to be a free resource to researchers, students, educators, and other interested individuals and groups who want to study the tragedy and learn from it. Check the blog on the main page for the most recent news.
This site is hand-coded HTML. No editors are used in the creation or maintenance of the site.
You can find a list of Frequently-Asked Questions (FAQs) here.
THE AUTHOR
This site is written and maintained by C. Shepard, an award-winning screenwriter and author. I graduated from Glendale Community College with Honors, receiving an Associate Arts degree with emphasis on Film and Forensics.
You won't find much about me on this website. This site is about the Columbine High School massacre: What happened before, during, and after the shootings and the people who were directly affected by it. I added this page because I've had so many emails over the years asking how and why I started this sprawling info hub.
So, what motivates me? Why did I start this site initially?
The very first version of this site was put up on a free webhost on April 21, 1999. It was a single-page dedication to the victims who were still anonymous at the time. I added names and yearbook photos as they came available to the public.
In 1999, the Internet was rudimentary; many news sites only updated weekly, if that, and rarely ran anything that wasn't local. In the days that followed mainstream media outside the area was covering the event. Rumors and speculation were presented as fact; television stations and corporate news sites were more interested in sensationalizing things than finding out what actually happened. The bulk of non-corporate websites running info about event were either hate-mongering sites that worshipped the shooters (complete with drippy bloodbars and flaming-text logos) or were generic memorials of flapping angel wings and candles with no substance or information. There was nowhere to find the actual story. No one had any solid information or answers.
I knew the true story was lurking out there so I started digging around, online and off. I lived one state over, so I had more access to Denver news than many others did at the time. I was also an IT tech and worked for an Internet service provider, so I knew a few ways of hunting up info that I put to use. I dug as deep as I could to get the real story that the media just couldn't seem - or didn't want - to piece together. I snooped around in the directories of Eric Harris' websites since they were still online at the time. I copied everything I could to my hard drive, till the webhosts pulled them down for good. I listened to what people who knew the shooters personally were saying about them. I visited forums and hackers' sites, hoax sites and newsgroups. I made contact with people who lived near the school at the time of the tragic event. Since I had contacts in Littleton, I was able to monitor news broadcasts in the area. Later, I gleaned more details from magazines and more factual newspaper articles, as well as from other researchers. The page grew and grew and grew.
The first "full" version of this website was an overview of Who, What, Where, When, and Why. As I amassed piles of information I spent 40+ hours a week reading and writing, to see the bigger picture. It's been like putting together a giant, depressing jigsaw puzzle. What's really astounding is it's been over two decades and I still haven't posted everything I found. I still work on the site regularly though I don't have nearly as much time as I used to. Perhaps by the time I'm retired, I'll have it all up. If not, it could be my Old Person Hobby.
For a while I was keeping the torch lit in the hopes Jefferson County would eventually release the infamous Basement Tapes to the public. Unfortunately, that final chapter in this tragic book of history was reportedly destroyed out of fear that copycats would find the recordings inspirational.
Over the years, there were a rash of Columbine-related media released. Now, most of the websites that sprang up have mostly disappeared. Only a handful of document dumps exist, and a page on Wikipedia that has been forged from so many excerpts of my site that the company finally asked for my permission to just leave the info there rather than continuously police it for things they had to remove.
Beyond a Columbine expert, who am I? I'm an artist, a writer, a performer, a parent, and a geek, amongst many other things. I never went to Columbine High School. I don't live in Littleton. I didn't know the shooters or their victims. As a kid I did attend a school very much like Columbine, and I came from a town that was similar to Littleton. I knew people just like the victims and I was friends with people who, in retrospect, were eerily similar to the shooters. It's all too easy for me to see something like the Columbine shooting happening where I lived. I have a strong interest in seeing this sort of thing avoided in the future. I devote time, energy, and money to intervention and awareness programs to help educate kids and adults on what they can do prevent school violence in their areas. I spend a lot of time doing charity work when I'm not writing or doing things with my family.
I do have my opinions about the events of and leading up to the shootings at Columbine but I try to censor my personal feelings out of the rest of the site, for the sake of presenting unbiased historical reference. I'm not interested in pushing an agenda. I just want to preserve the facts of the matter. And that's what this site is all about.