Columbine — Chapter no 47

47. Lawsuits

Ten days before the first anniversary, Brian Rohrbough threw a Hail Mary.

The cops had been stonewalling, and litigation looked like the only answer.

Families could sue for negligence or wrongful death, and use the process to force out information. The verdict would be less important than discovery.

Should they sue? How could they know? It all rested on Jeffco's final report. If Jeffco released all the evidence, most families would be satisfied.

If Jeffco held back, they were going to court. No one had anticipated that the report would take this long. Way back in the summer of 1999, Jeffco had said its report was six to eight weeks away. It was April now, and officials were still saying they had six to eight weeks to go.

The investigators had wrapped up most of their work in the first four months, but Jeffco was skittish about presenting the information. Yet the longer they waited, the more leaks they risked, the more rebukes, and the higher the stakes to get every sentence right.

Even the school administration was frustrated. "We keep getting ready,"

Mr. D told a magazine in April. "I keep telling the community, 'OK, we're about two weeks away, we're two weeks away.' There's only so many times you can get so wound up saying, 'Oh, I'm ready now, I'm ready,' and then all of a sudden, 'No!' There's a level of frustration."

The delays were maddening, but a practical problem was also arising.

The first anniversary coincided with the statute of limitations. By delaying the report past April 20, 2000, Jeffco forced the families to trust them or sue. That was an easy choice. On April 10, the Rohrboughs and the Flemings filed an open records request demanding to see the report immediately–one last option to avoid a lawsuit. Since they were filing, they asked for everything, including the Basement Tapes, the killers' journals, the 911 calls, and surveillance videos. Rohrbough wanted to compare the

raw data to the narrative under construction by Jeffco. He predicted a

chasm.

"They lie as a practice," he said.

District Judge R. Brooke Jackson read the request. He said yes. Over furious objections from Jeffco, three days before the anniversary, he allowed the plaintiffs to read the draft report. He also granted them access to hundreds of hours of 911 tapes and some video footage. He agreed to begin reading the two hundred binders of evidence himself, but noted that would take months.

The ruling stunned everyone. But it was too little, too late. Fifteen families filed suits against the sheriff's department that week. They would add additional defendants later.

The Klebolds chose not to sue. Instead they issued another apology letter.

The Harrises did the same.

The lawsuits were expected to fail. The legal thresholds were too high. In federal court, negligence was insufficient; families needed to prove officers had actually made the students worse off. And that was only the first hurdle.

But the main strategy was to flush out information.

The one suit with a plausible chance came from Dave Sanders's daughter Angela. She was represented by Peter Grenier, a powerhouse Washington, D.C., lawyer. They charged that Jeffco officials went beyond neglecting Dave Sanders for three hours: they impeded his movement and prohibited others from getting him out of there. They deceived volunteer rescuers with false claims about an imminent arrival, to discourage them from busting out a window or taking him down the stairs. By doing so, the suit argued, Jeffco accepted responsibility for Dave and then let him die. In legal terms, they'd denied his civil rights by cutting off all opportunities to save him when they were not prepared to do it themselves.

The Rohrboughs and others followed similar logic. The library kids could have escaped easily, they said, unencumbered by police "help." It looked ugly. But legal analysts were skeptical about any case holding up. "It's going to be tough to ask a jury to say we know better than a SWAT team how to handle this situation," said Sam Kamin, law professor at the University of Denver.

In legal circles, the lawsuits had been expected, but their ferocity shook the community. The anniversary was overwhelmed by animosity again, and media were everywhere. Many of the Thirteen left town. The school closed

for the day and conducted a private memorial. A public service was held in Clement Park.

____

A few days after the anniversary, Judge Jackson ordered the sheriff's department to release its report to the public by May 15. He also released more evidence, including a video that drew a lot of heat. For months, Jeffco had referred to it as a "training video" created by the Littleton Fire Department. It was based on footage shot in the library shortly after the bodies were removed. It would be the families' first look at the gruesome scene. It would be "difficult" to watch, Jackson's ruling stated, but that was no reason to suppress it.

"There is no compelling public interest consideration that requires that the video or any part of it not be disclosed under the Open Records Act,"

Jackson wrote.

The next day, Jeffco began duplicating the tape and selling copies for $25. Spokesmen said the fee was to defray copying costs. The families were aghast. Then they saw the tape. There was no instruction, no narration, no attempt at "training." It was someone's ghastly attempt at commemoration: grisly crime scene footage set to pop music, Sarah McLachlan's "I Will Remember You." McLachlan's record company threatened to sue for copyright infringement. Jeffco removed the music. Sales remained strong.

____

Brian Rohrbough had broken through Jeffco's armor. Judge Jackson kept ordering releases. In May, he unleashed all the 911 tapes and a ballistics report. For a while, everything he read, he released. The killers' families tried to stop him. On May 1, they filed a joint motion to keep materials seized from their homes private. That would include the most vital evidence: the journals and the Basement Tapes.

Jeffco released its report on May 15, as ordered. The focus of the package was a minute-by minute timeline of April 20, 1999, in great detail.

It dramatically illustrated how fast everything happened: just seven and a half minutes in the library, all the deaths and injuries in the first sixteen minutes. How convenient, critics said. The cops' report was dedicated to illustrating that the cops had never had a chance.

As expected, the report ducked the central question of why. Instead, it provided about seven hundred pages of what,how, and when. The logistics were useful, but they were hardly what people had been waiting for.

There were three paragraphs about advance warning by the Browns: one paragraph summarizing and two defending. The department claimed it had been unable to access Eric's Web site, despite the fact that officials had printed the pages, filed them, and retrieved them within minutes of the attack on April 20, and had cited them at length in the search warrants issued before the bodies were found. But a year after the murders, Jeffco was still suppressing the file and the search warrants. So the families suspected a lie, but they couldn't prove it.

Jeffco was ridiculed for its report. Officials seemed truly bewildered by the response. Privately, they insisted they were just acting the way they always did: building a case internally, keeping their conclusions to themselves. Communicating the results was the prosecutors' role. It wasn't their job. They still couldn't grasp that this was not any normal case.

____

As the battles intensified, compassion fatigue set in. Hardly anyone said it out loud.

Chuck Green, a Denver Post columnist and one of Denver's nastier personalities, broke the ice. He stunned the families with a pair of columns, charging them with "milking" the tragedy.

They had gotten millions, he wrote. "It has been an avalanche of anguish never before witnessed, yet the Columbine victims still have their hands out for more."

The Parents Group was caught unaware. They'd had no idea. They were more stunned by the support for Green's ideas. "All of us are sick and tired of the continued whining," a reader responded. Another said those sentiments had been circulating for quite a while–"whispering in small circles, amongst clouds of guilt."

It was out in the open now.

____

The anniversary also offered a window of political opportunity. Tom Mauser had been energized at the NRA protest and devoted himself to the cause. "I am not a natural leader, but speaking out helps me because it carries on Daniel's life," he said. Tom took a one-year leave of absence to serve as chief lobbyist for SAFE Colorado (Sane Alternatives to the Firearms Epidemic). They supported several bills in the Colorado legislature to limit access to guns for minors and criminals. Prospects looked good, especially for the flagship proposal to close the gun-show loophole. It was narrowly defeated in February. A similar measure bogged down in Congress.

So a week before the anniversary, President Clinton returned to Denver to encourage survivors and support SAFE's new strategy: to pass the same measure in Colorado with a ballot initiative.

Colorado Republican leaders rebuked the president and refused to appear with him. Republican Governor Bill Owens supported the ballot initiative but refused to attend an MSNBC town hall meeting hosted by Tom Brokaw until President Clinton left the stage, midway through the show.

The visit appeared to force a little movement in Washington. Just before the meeting with Brokaw, House leaders announced a bipartisan compromise on gun-show legislation. But it had been a year already, and there was still a long way to go.

Tom Mauser kept fighting. At a rally the same week, SAFE spread 4,223 pairs of shoes across the state capitol steps–one for each minor killed by a gun in 1997. Tom took the sneakers off his feet and held them up to the crowd. They had been Daniel's. Tom took to wearing them to rallies. He needed a tangible link to his son. And they helped the shy man connect Daniel to his audience.

May 2, the governor and attorney general–the state's most prominent Republican and Democrat–put the first two signatures on the petition for the Colorado ballot initiative. It required 62,438 signatures. They gathered nearly twice that many.

The measure would pass by a two-to-one margin. The gun show loophole was closed in Colorado.

It was defeated in Congress. No significant national gun-control legislation was enacted in response to Columbine.

____

The season ended well. On May 20, the second class of survivors graduated. Nine of the injured crossed the stage, two in wheelchairs. Patrick Ireland limped to the podium to give the valedictory address.

It had been a rough year, he said. "The shooting made the country aware of the unexpected level of hate and rage that had been hidden in high schools." But he was convinced the world was inherently good at heart. He had spent the year thinking about what had gotten him across the library floor. At first he assumed hope–not quite; it was trust. "When I fell out the window, I knew somebody would catch me," he said. "That's what I need to tell you: that I knew the loving world was there all the time."