Columbine — Chapter no 28

28. Media Crime

The Trench Coat Mafia was mythologized because it was colorful, memorable, and fit the existing myth of the school shooter as outcast loner.

All the Columbine myths worked that way. And they all sprang to life incredibly fast–most of the notorious myths took root before the killers' bodies were found.

We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened. No Goths, no outcasts, nobody snapping. No targets, no feud, and no Trench Coat Mafia. Most of those elements existed at Columbine–which is what gave them such currency. They just had nothing to do with the murders. The lesser myths are equally unsupported: no connection to Marilyn Manson, Hitler's birthday, minorities, or Christians.

Few people knowledgeable about the case believe those myths anymore.

Not reporters, investigators, families of the victims, or their legal teams.

And yet most of the public takes them for granted. Why?

Media defenders blame the chaos: two thousand witnesses, wildly conflicting reports–who could get all those facts straight? But facts were not the problem. Nor did time sort them out. The first print story arrived in an extra edition of the Rocky Mountain News. It went to press at three o'clock on Tuesday afternoon, before the bodies in the library were found.

The Rocky's nine-hundred-word summary of the massacre was an extraordinary piece of journalism: gripping, empathetic, and astonishingly accurate. It nailed the details and the big picture: two ruthless killers picking off students indiscriminately. It was the first story published that spring to get the essence of the attack right–and one of the last.

It is an axiom of journalism that disaster stories begin in confusion and grow clearer over time. Facts rush in, the fog lifts, an accurate picture

solidifies. The public accepts this. But the final portrait is often furthest from the truth.

One hour into the Columbine horror, news stations were informing the public that two or more gunmen were behind it. Two hours in, the Trench Coat Mafia were to blame. The TCM were portrayed as a cult of homosexual Goths in makeup, orchestrating a bizarre death pact for the year 2000.

Ludicrous or not, the TCM myth was the most defensible of the big media blunders. The killers did wear trench coats. A small group had named themselves after the garment a year earlier. A few kids put the two together, and it's hard to blame them. It seemed like a tidy fit. But the crucial detail unreported Tuesday afternoon was that most kids in Clement Park were not citing the TCM. Few were even naming Eric and Dylan. In a school of two thousand, most of the student body didn't even know the boys. Nor had many seen gunfire directly. Initially, most students told reporters they had no idea who attacked them.

That changed fast. Most of the two thousand got themselves to a television or kept a constant cell phone vigil with viewers. It took only a few TV mentions for the trench coat connection to take hold. It sounded so obvious. Of course! Trench coats, Trench Coat Mafia!

TV journalists were actually careful. They used attribution and disclaimers like "believed to be" or "described as." Some wondered out loud about the killers' identities and then described the TCM, leaving viewers to draw the link. Repetition was the problem. Only a handful of students mentioned the TCM during the first five hours of CNN coverage– virtually all fed from local news stations. But reporters homed in on the idea. They were responsible about how they addressed the rumors, but blind to the impact of how often.

Kids "knew" the TCM was involved because witnesses and news anchors had said so on TV. They confirmed it with friends watching similar reports.

Word spread fast–conversation was the only teen activity in south Jeffco Tuesday afternoon. Pretty soon, most of the students had multiple independent confirmations. They believed they knew the TCM was behind the attack as a fact. From 1:00 to 8:00 P.M., the number of students in Clement Park citing the group went from almost none to nearly all. They weren't making it up, they were repeating it back.

The second problem was a failure to question. In those first five hours, not a single person on the CNN feeds asked a student how they knew the killers were part of the Trench Coat Mafia.

Print reporters, talk show hosts, and the rest of the media chain repeated those mistakes. "All over town, the ominous new phrase 'Trench Coat Mafia' was on everyone's lips," USA Today reported Wednesday morning.

That was a fact. But who was telling whom? The writers assumed kids were informing the media. It was the other way around.

____

Most of the myths were in place by nightfall. By then, it was a given that the killers had been targeting jocks. The target myth was the most insidious, because it went straight to motive. The public believes Columbine was an act of retribution: a desperate reprisal for unspeakable jock-abuse. Like the other myths, it began with a kernel of truth.

In the first few hours, a shattered junior named Bree Pasquale became the marquee witness of the tragedy. She had escaped unharmed but splattered in blood. Bree described the library horror in convincing detail. Radio and television stations replayed her testimony relentlessly: "They were shooting anyone of color, wearing a white hat, or playing a sport," she said. "And they didn't care who it was and it was all at close range. Everyone around me got shot. And I begged him for ten minutes not to shoot me."

The problem with Bree Pasquale's account is the contradiction between facts and conclusion. That's typical of witnesses under extreme duress. If the killers were shooting "everyone," didn't that include jocks, minorities, and hat wearers? Four times in that brief statement, she described random killing. Yet reporters glommed on to the anomaly in her statement.

Bullying and racism? Those were known threats. Explaining it away was reassuring.

By evening, the target theory was dominating most broadcasts; nearly all the major papers featured it. The Rocky and the Washington Post refused to embrace the targeting theory all week, but they were lonely dissenters.

Initially, most witnesses refuted the emerging consensus. Nearly all described the killing as random. All the papers and the wire services produced a total of just four witnesses advancing the target theory

Wednesday morning–each one contradicting his or her own description.

Most of the papers advanced the theory with just one student who had actually seen it–some had zero. Reuters attributed the theory to "many witnesses" and USA Today to "students."

"Student" equaled "witness." Witness to everything that happened that day, and anything about the killers. It was a curious leap. Reporters would not make that mistake at a car wreck. Did you see it? If not, they move on.

But journalists felt like foreigners stepping into teen culture. They knew kids can hide anything from adults–but not from each other. That was the mentality: Something shocking happened here; we're baffled, but kids know.

So all two thousand were deputized as insiders. If students said targeting, that was surely it.

Police detectives rejected the universal-witness concept. And they relied on traumatized witnesses for observations, not conclusions. They never saw targeting as plausible. They were baffled by the media consensus.

____

Journalists were not relying exclusively on "students." The entire industry was depending on the Denver Post. The paper sent fifty-four reporters, eight photographers, and five artists into the field. They had the most resources and the best contacts. Day one, they were hours ahead of the national pack; the first week they were a day ahead on most developments.

The Rocky Mountain News had a presence as well, but they had a smaller staff, and the national press trusted the Post. It did not single-handedly create any of the myths, but as the Post bought into one after another after another, each mistaken conclusion felt safe. The pack followed.

____

The Jeffco Parks and Recreation District began hauling truckloads of hay bales into Clement Park. It was a mess. Thousands of people gathered at the northeast corner of the park on Wednesday, and tens of thousands appeared on Thursday and Friday. The snow had begun fluttering down Wednesday,

and the foot traffic tore the field to shreds. By Thursday it was an enormous mud pit. Nobody seemed to care much, but county workers scattered thick layers of hay in winding paths all along the makeshift memorials.

They didn't know it yet, they had no idea there was a name for it, but many of the survivors had entered the early stages of post-traumatic stress disorder. Many had not. It wasn't a matter of how close they had been to witnessing or experiencing the violence. Length and severity of exposure increased their odds of mental health trouble down the road, but long-term responses were highly varied, depending on each individual. Some kids who had been in the library during the shootings would turn out fine, while others who had been off to Wendy's would be traumatized for years.

Dr. Frank Ochberg, a professor in psychiatry at Michigan State University and a leading expert on PTSD, would be brought in by the FBI a few months later and would spend years advising mental health workers on the case. He and a group of psychiatrists had first developed the term in the 1970s. They had observed a phenomenon that was stress-induced but was qualitatively more severe, and brought on by a really traumatic experience.

This was something that produced truly profound effects and lasted for years or, if untreated, even a lifetime.

____

A far milder and more common response was also under way: survivor's guilt. It began playing out almost immediately, in the hallways of the six local hospitals where the injured were recovering. At St. Anthony's, the first week, the waiting rooms were packed with students coming to see Patrick Ireland. Every seat in every room was taken. Dozens of students waited in the hallways.

Patrick spent the first days in ICU. Most visitors were refused, but the kids kept streaming into the hospital room anyway. They just needed to be there.

"You have to realize that this was part of their healing too," Kathy Ireland said.

All day, some of them stayed, and well into the evening. The staff started bringing food in once they realized some of the kids hadn't been eating.

____

Patrick's situation looked grim. His doctors were just hoping to keep him alive. They advised John and Kathy to keep expectations low: whatever condition they observed the first day or two would be the prognosis for the rest of his life. John and Kathy accepted this. And they saw a paralyzed boy, struggling mightily to speak gibberish.

The medical staff chose to not operate on Patrick's broken right foot.

They cleaned out the wound and placed a brace around it. Why? his parents asked. There were more pressing concerns, they were told. And Patrick was never going to use that foot.

John and Kathy were devastated. But they had to be realists. They turned their attention to raising an invalid, and figuring out how to help him be happy that way.

Patrick was unaware of the prognosis. It never occurred to him that he might not walk. He viewed the injury like a broken bone: you wear a cast, you build the muscle back, you pick your life up where you left off. He knew it would be tougher than the time he broke his thumb. A lot tougher. It might take three or four times as long to recover. He assumed he would recover.

____

Patrick's friend Makai was released from St. Anthony's Friday. He had been shot in the knee alongside Patrick. Reporters were invited into the hospital library for a press conference, broadcast on CNN. Makai was in a wheelchair. It turned out that he'd known Dylan.

"I thought he was an all right guy," Makai said. "Decent, real smart."

They'd taken the same French class and worked together on school projects.

"He was a nice guy, never treated me bad," Makai said. "He wasn't the kind of person he's being portrayed as."

____

Patrick made improvement with his speech the first week, and his vitals began returning to normal. On Friday, he was moved out of the ICU and into a regular room. Once he had settled in, his parents decided it was time to ask him the burning question. Had he gone out the library window?

They knew. They just had to know if he did. Did he know why he was there? Was the trauma of the truth still ahead?

"Well, yeah!" he stammered. Were they just figuring that out?

He was incredulous, Kathy said later. "He looked at us like, 'How could you be so ignorant?'" She was OK with that. All she felt was relief.

____

That same week, Dr. Alan Weintraub, a neurologist from Craig Hospital, came to see Patrick. Craig is one of the leading rehab centers in the world, specializing in brain and spinal cord injuries. It's located in Jeffco, not far from the Irelands' home. Dr. Weintraub examined Patrick, reviewed his charts, and gave John and Kathy his assessment: "The first thing I can say to you is there's hope."

They were astounded, relieved, and perplexed. Later, the discrepancy made sense to them. The staffs had different expertise and different perspectives. St. Anthony's specialized in trauma. "Their goal is to save lives," Kathy said. "At Craig the goal is to rebuild them."

They began making arrangements to transfer Patrick to Craig.

____

By Thursday, students in Clement Park were angry. The killers were dead, so much of the anger was deflected: onto Goths, Marilyn Manson, the TCM, or anyone who looked, dressed, or acted like the killers–or the media's portrayal of them.

The killers were quickly cast as outcasts and "fags."

"They're freaks," said an angry sophomore from the soccer team.

"Nobody really liked them, just'cause they–" He paused, then plunged

ahead. "The majority of them were gay. So everyone would make fun of them."

Several jocks reported having seen the killers and friends "touching" in the hallways, groping each other or holding hands. A football player captivated reporters with tales of group showering.

The gay rumor was almost invisible in the media, but rampant in Clement Park. The stories were vague. Everything was thirdhand. None of the storytellers even knew the killers. Everyone in Clement Park heard the rumors; most of the students saw through them. They were disgusted at the jocks for defaming the killers the same way in death as they had in life.

Clearly, "gay" was one of the worst epithets one kid could hurl against another in Jeffco.

Eric and Dylan's friends generally shrugged off the stories. One of them was outraged. "The media's taken my friends and made them to be gay and neo-Nazis and all these hater stuff," he said. "They're portraying my friends as idiots." The angry boy was a brawny six-foot senior dressed in camouflage pants. He ranted for several hours, and he was soon all over the national press–sometimes looking a bit ridiculous. He stopped talking. His father began screening media calls.

A few papers mentioned the gay rumors in passing. Reverend Jerry Falwell described the killers as gay on Rivera Live. A notorious picketer of gay funerals issued a media alert saying, "Two filthy fags slaughtered 13 people at Columbine High." Most significantly, the Drudge Report quoted Internet postings claiming that the Trench Coat Mafia was a gay conspiracy to kill jocks. But most major media carefully sidestepped the gay rumor.

The press failed to show similar deference to Goths. Some of the most withering attacks were reserved for that group: a morose-acting subculture best known for powder-white face paint and black clothes, black lips, and black fingernails, accented by heavy, dripping mascara. They were mistakenly associated with the killers on Tuesday by students unfamiliar with the Goth concept. Equally clueless reporters amplified the rumor. One of the most egregious reports was an extended 20/20 segment ABC aired, just one night after the attack. Diane Sawyer introduced it by noting that unnamed police said "the boys may have been part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement and that some of these Goths may have killed before." It was true, Goths had killed before– as had members of every conceivable background and subculture.

Correspondent Brian Ross described a double murder committed by Goths and two ghastly attempts in graphic detail. He presented them as evidence of a pattern: a Goth crime wave poised to sweep through suburbia and threaten us all. "The so-called Gothic movement has helped fuel a new kind of teenage gang–white suburban gangs built around a fascination with the grotesque and with death," he said. He played other examples, as well as a horrifying 911 tape of a victim calling for help with a knife still protruding from his chest. "Hurry," he pleaded. "I'm not going to last too much longer." Ross described the killers in that case as "proud, self- proclaimed members of the Gothic movement, and like the students involved in yesterday's shootings, focused on white extremism and hate."

The only real problems with Ross's report were that Goths tended to be meek and pacifist; they had never been associated with violence, much less murder; and, aside from long black coats, they had almost nothing in common with Eric and Dylan.

Where it avoided snap conclusions, much of the reporting was first rate.

The Rocky passed on most of the myths, and it, the Post, and the Times ran excellent bios on the killers. On TV, several correspondents helped survivors convey their stories with empathy, dignity, and insight. Katie Couric was a particular standout. And several papers tried to rein in the Goth scare. "Whatever the two young men in Colorado might have imagined themselves to be, they weren't Goths," a USA Today story began.

"The morose community, much too diffuse to be called a movement, is at its heart quiet, introverted and pacifistic… Goths tend to be outcasts, not because they are violent or aggressive, but the opposite."

Thursday, a young Goth from a nearby school showed up in Clement Park. Andrew Mitchell was a striking sight, standing alone in a foot of snow. Black on black on white on white. Jet-black hair cut long on top, shaved on the sides, bare skin above his ears. A silver-and-blue support ribbon pinned to his black lapel. The densely packed crowd parted. A ten- foot perimeter opened up around him. Reporters rushed in.

"Why are you here!" one demanded.

"To pay my respects," Mitchell said. Then he offered a plea: "Picture these kids, for years being thrown around, treated horribly. After a while you can't stand it anymore. They were completely wrong. But there are reasons for why they did it."

Mitchell was wildly mistaken about the killers' lives and their intentions.

But it was already the pervasive assumption. The massacre brought widespread tales of alienation out into the open. Salon published a fascinating piece called "Misfits Who Don't Kill." It consisted of first- person accounts from rational adults who had shared similar fantasies but lived to avoid them. "I remember sitting in biology class trying to figure out how much plastic explosive it might take to reduce the schoolhouse–my biggest source of fear and anxiety–to rubble," one man wrote. "I scowled at those who teased me, and I had fantasies of them begging me for mercy, maybe even with a gun in their mouths. Was I a sick person? I don't think so. I'm sure there were thousands of other students who had the same fantasies I did. We just never acted on them."

The more animosity reporters sensed, the deeper they probed. What was it like to be an outcast at Columbine? Pretty hard, most of the kids admitted.

High school was rough. Most of the students in Clement Park were still speaking confessionally, and everyone had a brutal experience to share. The "bullying" idea began to pepper motive stories. The concept touched a national nerve, and soon the anti-bullying movement took on a force of its own. Everyone who had been to high school understood what a horrible problem it could be. Many believed that addressing it might be the one good thing to come out of the tragedy.

All the talk of bullying and alienation provided an easy motive. Forty- eight hours after the massacre, USA Today pulled the threads together in a stunning cover story that fused the myths of jock-hunting, bully-revenge, and the TCM. "Students are beginning to describe how a long-simmering rivalry between the sullen members of their clique [the TCM] and the school's athletes escalated and ultimately exploded in this week's deadly violence," it said. It described tension the previous spring, including daily fistfights. The details were accurate, the conclusions wrong. Most of the media followed. It was accepted as fact.

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There's no evidence that bullying led to murder, but considerable evidence it was a problem at Columbine High. After the tragedy, Mr. D took a lot of

flak for bullying, particularly since he insisted he was unaware it had gone on.

"I'm telling you, as long as I've been an administrator here, if I'm aware of a situation, then I deal with that situation," he said. "And I believe our teachers, and I believe our coaches. I turned my own son in. I believe that strongly in rules."

That may have been part of his downfall. Mr. D did believe that strongly in the rules. He held his staff to the same standard, and seemed to believe they would meet it. His unusual rapport with the kids also created a blind spot. It was all smiles when Mr. D strode down the corridor. They sincerely warmed at the sight of him, and sought to please him as well. Sometimes he mistook that joy for pervasive bliss in his high school.

Personal affinities also obscured the problem. Mr. D knew he was drawn to sports. He worked hard to offset that by attending debate tournaments, drama tryouts, and art shows. He conferred regularly with the student senate. But those were all success stories. Mr. D balanced athletics and academics better than overachievers and unders.

"I don't think he had a preference on purpose," a pierced-out girl in a buzz cut and red tartan boots said. "He's got a lot of school spirit, and I think he aims it in the direction he's most comfortable with, like school sports and student congress." She saw DeAngelis as a sincere man, making a tremendous effort to interact with students, unaware that his natural inclination toward happy, energetic students created a blind spot for the outsiders. "My Goth friends hated the school," she said.

____

The crowds in Clement Park kept growing, but the students among them dwindled. Wednesday afternoon they poured their hearts out to reporters.

Wednesday evening they watched a grotesque portrait of their school on television. It was a charitable picture at first, but it grew steadily more sinister as the week wore on. The media grew fond of the adjective "toxic."

Apparently, Columbine was a horrible place. It was terrorized by a band of reckless jock lords and ruled by an aristocracy of snotty rich white kids in the latest Abercrombie & Fitch line.

Some of that was true–which is to say, it was high school. But Columbine came to embody everything noxious about adolescence in America. A few students were happy to see some ugly truths about their high school exposed. Most were appalled. The media version was a gross caricature of how they saw it, and of what they thought they had described.

It made it difficult for social scientists or journalists to come to Littleton later, to study the community in-depth and see what was really going on.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle had played out in full force: by observing an entity, you alter it. How bad were the Columbine bullies? How horribly were the killers treated? Every scrap of testimony after day two is tainted.

Heisenberg was a quantum physicist, observing electron behavior. But social scientists began applying his principle to humans. It was remarkable how similarly we behaved. During the third week of April, Littleton was observed beyond all recognition.

The bright side is that a tremendous amount of data was gathered in those first few days, while students were naive, before any developed an agenda.

Hundreds of journalists were in the field, and nearly as many detectives were documenting their findings in police reports. Those reports would remain sealed for nineteen months. Virtually all the early news stories were infested with erroneous assumptions and comically wrong conclusions. But the data is there.