>This evening I have been tearing through the new book "Columbine" by Dave Cullen, interrupted only by brief breaks. 300 pages into it and will finish it after this post. (It helps to know how it turns out, right? .... but not so fast, it isn't actually that kind of book). I am not a catastrophe obsessive, just read two good reviews of this book and decided to break the fiction routine. John Rebus would surely forgive me <g>. With occasional cringe-worthy prose accidents, I think this is a book that deserves reading.
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We heard part of an interview with Cullen the other day. (We were driving and eventually got out of range of the station.) (Hour 2 of 4/17/09 for http://www.whyy.org/91FM/radiotimes.html.)

What we heard was fascinating.

>One of the most striking things is how many of the things we thought we knew about Columbine were wrong.
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>The killers struck out against school bullies: false.
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>They targeted jocks: false.
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>Trench coat mafia: false.
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>That Cassie Bernall was a Christian martyr who was confronted by her killer under a desk in the library, and asked whether she believed in God. She said yes and he shot her dead. False.
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>A book called "She Said Yes" went straight to the bestseller list after the massacre, and multiple evangelical movements ensued. The preacher who delivered her eulogy went on tour to spread the good news. Just one problem: Cassie never said that, according to multiple eyewitnesses in police records that were suppressed for years. It is a particular black mark on the Rocky Mountain News that they knew this for a long time and sat on it to avoid offending their readers.
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>The true story has only come to light after years of outright lying by the Jefferson County sheriff's department. They screwed up the entire response, from the moment the first 911 calls came in from frantic students and teachers inside the school, through their reticence to go into the school until 3 hours after the killers had committed suicide, and then more insidiously into the apparent coverup. I suppose they acted as well as they could, from the POV of a non-participant.
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From the part of the interview I heard, it wasn't so much a screw-up as misinterpreting what they were seeing. They thought there were many more shooters for reasons that sound pretty credible.

Tamar