Columbine reports
There were many warning signs that something wasn't right in Dylan and Eric's world. Several people saw some of those signs, but no one saw everything. The bloody events of 4-20-1999 took almost everyone by surprise. Perhaps it was too easy to overlook what seems obvious in retrospect. It was the boys' last year of school and they were smart guys. They were two weeks away from graduation. Why would they wait until they were at the brink of freedom from the school they hated so much to lash out? For reasons we will never truly understand, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold decided it was more important to blow up their school and broadcast their rage-fueled message than it was to migrate to the next phase of life.

The tragedy wants for a trigger event -- some major "last straw" event that set the killers off. But no single thing caused this. Instead, several influential factors have surfaced over the years. Most notably, Eric Harris was diagnosed with anger manangement issues. He was prescribed Luvox® (Fluvoxamine maleate) in early 1998. This drug has since been found to increase volatile behavior as well as thoughts of homicide and suicide, particularly in young people.

Over the years that they knew each other, Harris and Klebold were known to have caused all sorts of mischief together, including booby trapping the fence behind the Blackjack Pizza where they worked to ward off other teens who used a hole in the fence as a shortcut. They set off pipe bombs at the restaurant and even started a fire in the sink, resulting in Dylan's temporary suspension. He was hired back when the place needed help. Their antisocial behavior worsened toward the end of '98.

The gunmen made several 'Basement Tapes' that showed how unhappy and violent they were feeling, but these weren't discovered until after everyone was dead. On them they gloated about how their parents caught them with bombs and nearly caught them with their weapons. Yet time and again they were let to slip off the hook — so often that they said their parents "made some mistakes" and were easy to fool. The tapes weren't hidden. Neither were the supplies they used to make bombs. The barrel of a sawed-off shotguns was sitting on Dylan's dresser in plain sight when investigators searched his room. But the gunmen's parents did notice something was amiss: Eric's father, Wayne Harris, kept a diary detailing the times Eric had gotten into trouble with the law and with classmates. And when Tom Klebold got the call about the shooting, he went down to the school and told officers he thought his son might be involved.

Many things contributed to what happened, but it can't be said that no one knew the boys were having problems. Below are scans of several police reports filed over the years leading up to and following the shootings. The top links lead to the most recent reports, investigative documents having to do directly with the Columbine shooting.

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