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by Evan Long
This is a picture of two dead boys in a high school library. The picture, like all pictures, has a thousand words behind it, many of
which have not yet been spoken. There are other pictures related to this one as well, pictures too numerous to fit in this space of
other individuals injured by the boys in the first, individuals injured emotionally and physically, and some even fatally so. The
people of the world were told many, many times that the boys shown in the first picture acted alone in harming the other
individuals. The purpose of this article is to clarify the perceptions of the people of the world regarding the events of the April 20,
1999 attack on Columbine High School.
Officially, the attack began at 11:20 and ended at 12:08. Officially, fifteen were killed, including the two attackers. Officially, they
used a total of 99 bombs and fired 329 rounds. And officially, no one but Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold participated in, assisted
with, or had any specific foreknowledge about the attack. Almost every detail of the Sheriff's Official Line on the Columbine
shooting, a. k. a. "Sheriff's Office Final Report on the Columbine High School Shootings," can be called into question by a study
of the court-ordered releases of government documents related to it.
Perhaps the most salient is that of the numerous witnesses reporting three to ten black-clad shooters inside the halls of the
school, many were able to identify at least some of them by name as trench coat students other than Harris and Klebold or to
describe them distinctly as having been neither of the two. According to these witnesses, the violence at the school was
perpetrated by a variety of attackers who can be grouped into roughly a dozen profiles, including:
Eric Harris
A second-tier member of the trench coat group, Harris was allegedly found dead and photographed in the CHS library. He was
raised at Plattsburg Air Force Base in New York, was seeing a psychiatrist and taking SSRI antidepressants. Police knew of
death threats he'd published on his web site but did not investigate further.
Dylan Klebold
Klebold was said to have been "tied at the hip" with Harris and was widely reported to have been "goofy-looking" and socially
awkward, yet had a female companion and at least half a dozen friends. Like Harris, he began to wear a trench coat in his
sophomore year at the school.
Chris Morris
Morris was the reported leader of the trench coat group in the 1998-99 school year. According to one, he was a "mean kid" who
talked with regularity about constructing explosives. He was brought before a special CHS panel for pulling knives on students
and was reportedly spotted in the north hall of the school with a handgun during the attack.
Robert Perry
Like Harris and Klebold, Perry was reportedly a member of the trench coat B-team who left CHS in January 1999 but spent a
significant amount of the school day on the campus anyway. He was similar in appearance to Klebold but with notably bad acne
and was reportedly witnessed on the west side of the school where the shooting is alleged to have begun.
This attacker was spotted by several students in the science hall of the building with a shotgun. According to one girl, he was
muscular with a "chiseled face." She even produced a sketch of this attacker, who was reported to have appeared to have been
in his 30's.
Named by name in one interview, this attacker wore camouflage pants and a trench coat. He was seen first bringing a heavy-
looking duffel bag into the school and then wielding a shotgun.
"The Splatterpunks"
All three of these individuals wore camouflage pants that afternoon in Clement Park, where they had gathered to watch the
carnage and where, according to a bystander, they verbally displayed foreknowledge of the attack and a moral alignment with
the attackers. They were "detained" but released by law enforcement that day.
A pudgy male was reportedly seen by many witnesses wearing a white tee and blue jeans on the west side of the school,
tossing a bomb onto the roof from a group of three attackers.
A shooter in a black trench coat on the west side of the school was reportedly described as having been 5' 9" or 5' 10" in height
with a "very round face" and having been "neither Harris nor Klebold."
A shooter, 5' 6" in height with ear-length hair, was reportedly spotted running through the Columbine cafeteria in a black jacket
firing a weapon.
An attacker was reportedly also spotted in the cafeteria wearing a red or orange shirt and black baggy pants. According to
statements attributed to one witness, this attacker spoke German.
"Joe"
Several witnesses reportedly overheard an attacker yell, "Joe, where are you?" At least one gunman was reportedly described
as a class of '98 student, and a Joe Stair, reportedly at CHS that morning, was one of the most prominent Trench Coat Mafia
members of the previous year at Columbine.
"The Rooftop Gunman"
Witnesses noted a gunman on the roof, a location to which neither Harris nor Klebold officially traveled.
CHS is surrounded by an elementary school, a public library, and public parks including Weaver Park, where two male
witnesses noted an attacker crouched with a shotgun on their way off of the campus.
In all, statements from some hundred individuals would be referenced either directly or secondhand in the documents indicating
the presence of additional gunmen.
The interviews which constitute the sources of those profiles generally took place between April and August 1999, when almost
everyone at Columbine High School plus additional individuals were interviewed by police and FBI. The curious thing about the
interview portion of the "investigation," however, was that between approximately September and November 1999, a peculiar
phase was established which might be referred to as the "Autumn Sweeps." The distinguishing feature of this round was that
they tended to serve no other purpose than to take aside the witnesses who had indicated a likelihood of shooters other than
Harris and Klebold and to attempt to coerce them into endorsing the official narrative. To illustrate:
A behind-the-scenes look at this scenario may be found in the news articles of independent journalist John Quinn, who wrote in
1999 that
"Columbine witness Chris Wisher told to [him] repeatedly that other gunmen were DEFINITELY involved; and law
enforcement ["]investigators["] are coercing witnesses into making their stories conform to the two "lone" gunmen
theory."
While even Wisher is reflected in his Autumn Sweeps interview as chalking up his observations of additional gunmen to a vivid
imagination, not all of the witnesses are recorded as having recanted, and the summaries of the interviews with those who
reportedly refused to accept the official line betray the particularly persistent tactics used against them to stamp their stories out.
To illustrate:
"I asked Ashley if she believes she could have made a mistake
on her identification of [redacted] and she told me
that she did not believe she made a misidentification. [...]
She told me that the party she saw was approximately 25 to 30 years old,
had a thick muscular neck and muscular build
and that Eric Harris was too scrawny to be the party she observed.
In the years prior to the attack, the CHS trench coaters were doing enough LARPing, or live action role playing, at the school
that when the shooting broke out, some of the witnesses reportedly thought it was just another mock attack or a quote, "paintball
incident". Also, the senior class had reportedly been playing a running game of "Annihilation" involving a "Secret Santa"-type list
of players who had to be "killed" by other players. According to reports, the game was being played by two hundred members of
the student body and one of the rules of the game was that it could not be played on school grounds or at school functions.
Some of the attack-themed videos which Harris and Klebold created, such as the relatively well known "Hitmen for Hire", were
admittedly created for school, while others, which allegedly describe their motivation for the attack, have not yet been released.
By the time of Harris' and Klebold's arrest for breaking into an unattended van and stealing electronics equipment, one of the
head school disciplinarians acknowledged that, in his opinion, Harris was "on the edge of (losing) control", and many of the
lesser known Trench Coat Mafia members had been brought up on drug or weapon complaints. A series of conferences
between the staff of Columbine High and lawyers hired by the school district after the attack put a damper on what would and
would not be revealed about the school's knowledge of and possible hand in planning the attack but could some or more of
Harris' and Klebold's alleged confession tapes, which are reportedly funny, have been not actually created in reference to the
shooting, but to an imaginary plan partially encouraged or even scripted by members of the faculty in order to seal Harris and
Klebold in a lie?
"If there's any way in this [******] up universe we can come back as ghosts,
we'll haunt the life of any one who blames anyone besides me and [Dylan Klebold]".
If the Columbine attack was an event pulled off with direct adult assistance, most of the sociological analysis of its causes would
be fundamentally flawed, much more concrete blame than "it's society's fault" remains to be laid, and many of those actually
responsible would have been found among the school staff, law enforcement and other authorities involved. Assuming these
principles to be accurate, one might ask, how aware were Eric and Dylan of the trap being set for them and if you had been in
either of their places, would you have been able to sense it, yourself? This is the kind of question we must consider if we are to
survive and thwart this oncoming age of chaos, however long it lasts, why accurately determining whom to trust is important and
exposing and circumventing those who serve the system is vital. If there are ten thousand of the system servants against the
billions of the rest of us, it's an easy match even with all of their technology and toys. If we refuse to stand up for one another
and act out when necessary, however, then it's not ten thousand against six billion but ten thousand against one six billion times
over. That's an easy match as well and that's what they're counting on.