Columbine updates | 2006
January, 2006 -- Wayne Harris, father of shooter Eric Harris, petitioned the high court for a rehearing within the allowed 15-day period to make such a request. He didn't want the public to see what he wrote in his journal prior to the school shootings, maintaining the writings to be his private property.

March 29, 2006 -- A kindergartener brought a .22-caliber gun to school that he found by climbing up onto the washer/dryer in his home. He showed a friend the gun on the Whittier Elementary School playground, then put it into a friend's backpack. The gun was not loaded and the boy didn't make any threats. He was expelled from the school immediately.

April 25, 2006 -- As the nation remembered the 13 victims of the Columbine High School massacre, similar plots were being discussed in four small towns in four states - Alaska, Kansas, Mississippi and Washington.

The Alaskan seventh-graders, all around 13 years old, had the attack planned down to the smallest detail. The boys would first knock out the school's power and telephone systems, giving them time to stab and shoot teachers they didn't like and students who picked on them and then escape from the town of 1,600 just outside Fairbanks. Authorities said another child told a parent that rumors were circulating about a plot, and that parent went to police. Nine other students at the school, including at least one girl, were suspended for withholding information and weren't allowed to return to school until authorities completed their investigation.

Five boys in Riverton, Kan., were charged with threatening to carry out a shooting spree at their high school the previous Thursday, on the seventh anniversary of the Columbine massacre.

In Mississippi, two Pearl Junior High School students were arrested Sunday night and charged with making threatening statements about classmates on the web site Xanga and warning students not to go to school on May 1. Pearl Police Chief Bill Slade said the students used the name of Luke Woodham, who was serving a life sentence for a 1997 shooting rampage that killed his mother and two people at Pearl High School.

In Puyallup, Wash., 16-year-old brian Michael Evans was charged Monday in an alleged plot to shoot people at his school. In an instant message to a fellow student, the teen wrote about an attack and suicide "to finally go out in a blaze of hatred and fury," sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer said. The search of Evans' home also turned up a homemade bomb and a CD with instructions for making explosives, Troyer said. The teenager apparently wanted people to "feel his pain, and he wanted to be hated, not having earned respect in the past," Troyer said.

Authorities found caches of weapons and ammunition in suspects' homes in at least three of the plots.

July 6, 2006 -- Jefferson County Sheriff Ted Mink decided NOT to release the Basement Tapes to the public, though he had the power to. Instead, JeffCo released the Columbine documents, 946 pages of writings belonging to the shooters and their families, along with several reports. Wayne Harris' writings were included after the courts overturned his appeal.

August 31, 2006 -- After shooting his father, 19 year old Alvara Castillo opened fire on students at Orange High School, injuring two students and causing the high school and a nearby middle school to go into lockdown status. One student was grazed by a bullet and another was injured by glass shards from a window Castillo shot through. Police took Castillo into custody. As he was being loaded into the squad car, Castillo could be heard shouting: "Remember Columbine!".

September 29, 2006 -- 53-year-old Duane Morrison, a petty criminal who had a Denver address but had apparently been living in his battered yellow Jeep when he walked inside the school Wednesday with two handguns and a backpack that he claimed contained a bomb. Investigators did not immediately say what was in the backpack. During the siege, he took several girls hostage in a second-floor classroom. Morrison selected six girls as hostages and sexually assaulted at least some of them, authorities and witnesses said Thursday. Wegener said the assaults went beyond touching or fondling. Morrison eventually released four of the girls. While still holding two of the girls hostage, he soon cut off contact and warned that "something would happen at 4 o'clock," authorities said.

About a half-hour before the deadline, a SWAT team used explosives to blow a hole in a classroom wall in hopes of getting a clear shot at Morrison, but they couldn't see him through the gap. They blew the door off the hinges to get inside. Morrison fired at the SWAT officers, shot one of the girls as she tried to run away, and then killed himself. During the lightning-fast gunbattle, police said, they shot Morrison several times.

Back in July, Morrison was arrested in the Denver suburb of Lakewood after he failed to appear on a 2004 harassment charge in Littleton, Colorado. "He's a weird dude. It was a telephone harassment. He left some messages at a business in the city," Littleton police Sgt. Sean Dugan said.