Episode Transcript
Amanda: April 2099 started out like any other day. It was a Tuesday. The weather was warm. The sky was slightly overcast. The world turned like it normally would. Husbands and wives said goodbye for the day. Parents kissed their children and wished them a good day at school. People were commuting to work. Life felt normal. But in just a few short hours, the world would change forever. 13 innocent people would lose their lives in what would come to be known as the worst school shooting in history. At least for a while, until that title was given to another. Rachel Scott. Daniel Rorbo, William. Dave Sanders. Kyle Velasquez. Stephen Kernel. Cassie Burnell. Isaiah Scholes. Matthew Ketcher. Lauren Townsend. John Tomlin kelly Fleming. Daniel Moser and Corey Deputer. Hey there, all you true crime fans. I'm Amanda.
Kori: And I'm Kori.
Amanda: And this is Colorado crime. Thank you all for being here with us today. This episode is going to be a little different for us. This is a heavy episode. We won't be including our usual joke of the week. Our typical upbeat jargon will be more somber. Our chatter will be more focused on the case we're discussing. We will be discussing some very difficult topics like guns in schools, mental health, suicide, bullying, and the murder of children. As always, listener discretion is advised. This episode is airing the day after the 24th anniversary of the Columbine massacre. Yesterday, 24 years ago, 13 innocent people and their killers left this world. They woke up expecting the day to be the same as the rest. They would be one day closer to summer break, one day closer to graduation, one day closer to the rest of their lives. But for our 13 victims, the next day never came. Our 13 victims died that day at their high school. They would go on to live in infamy not for the changes they made or the greatness they achieved, but for the sheer fact that they were victims of something that we never imagined would be so prevalent in common 24 years later. This episode is dedicated to those 13 people the world lost that day and the families who are left to continue on without them.
Kori: Since 1999, there have been 377 school shootings. According to a report that was published on January 23, 2023, 114 people have been killed in school shootings. That report only included shootings through May of 2022. Since the beginning of 2023 alone, there have been 14 school shootings that resulted in injuries or death, the most recent being a private Christian school in Nashville where three students and three adults were killed along with the shooter. Scratch that. We wrote this part of the script just a few days into April, and we already have to correct these numbers. On April 6, 2023, a 16 year old student was injured when a firearm accidentally discharged on a bus. In those 14 shootings, ten people have been killed. Florida, virginia, maryland, nashville, indiana, michigan, minnesota, iowa, oklahoma, texas and colorado. The youngest shooter was a six year old boy in Virginia who shot his teacher. He was six. I'll let you all come to your own conclusions onto where that young child procured a gun. But we can all agree he didn't buy it from a gun dealer.
Amanda: So, yeah, we're mad, we're scared and we're frustrated. Our children should not be afraid to go to school. Parents should not be afraid to send our children to school. And I'm sure you're thinking that if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn't taken guns into Columbine High School that warm April morning, it would have been someone else's kid. And the sad thing is that you'd probably be right. But that's the problem with that kind of thinking. Is it correct? You bet. Your asset is. But can't we strive for better? More education, longer background check times, more in depth background checks but mostly banning the sale of assault rifles? The first recorded school shooting was the Pontiacs Rebellion School massacre on July 26, 1764, where four Native American men entered the schoolhouse, shot and killed schoolmaster Eno Brown and killed nine or ten children. Only two children survived. The first known mass shooting in the US. Where students were shot was on April 1991 when 70 year old James Foster fired a shotgun at a group of students in the playground of St. Mary's Parochial School in New York, causing minor injuries to several of the students.
Kori: You can look back throughout history and see that it's riddled with school shootings typically no more than one per year. But these shootings were carried out with handguns or shotguns. It was Eric and Dylan's revenge on their classmates with an assault rifle and pipe bombs that changed typical teen angst into full on war. Before we can discuss what happened that fateful day we need to go back to where it all began. The two boys turned monsters. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Eric Harris was born April 1981 in Wichita, Kansas. His father was an Air Force pilot and moved the family several times during his childhood. He seemed the happiest in New York. He played baseball there, made several friends and seemed to be a typical child. Eric's dad received a transfer in 1993 and the family moved to Littleton and called that their new home. Eric lived with his father, Wayne his mother, Catherine and older brother, Kevin. He planned on joining the military and following in his dad's footsteps when he grew up. Eric attended middle school at King Carl Middle School where he met Dylan.
Amanda: Dylan Klebold was born September 11, 1981 in Lakewood, Colorado. To Thomas and sue. Three years before Dylan was born, the couple welcomed a son named Byron. The family lived an upper middle class lifestyle and attended church regularly. Dylan played baseball, soccer and T ball with his friend Brooks Brown. During elementary school. Dylan was accepted into the challenging high intellectual potential student program for gifted children. According to the reports, Dylan was highly intelligent as a young child. Middle school was difficult for Dylan as he was painfully shy and quiet. Brooks Brown was a friend of the boys who lived down the street from Eric. Him and Eric even rode the same bus. Dylan introduced the boys to Nathan Dykeman, and the four boys became a close knit group. Life seemed to be pretty normal for the boys. When they entered high school, the boys were closer than ever and even began working together at Blackjack Pizza. Eric was eventually promoted to shift leader. The boys shared many interests, including technology, guns and their bowling class journals. They would routinely write in a place the boys could feel seen and heard and like their true selves, the saying.
Kori: Opposites attract could not have been truer for the boys. Eric was described as charismatic, nice and likable. Dylan was painfully shy and awkward. He was fidgety and nervous and rarely opened up to people. By junior year, there was an obvious shift in the boy's behavior. Eric was quick to anger and threatened people with bombs. He was fascinated by war and often wrote about killing people he didn't like. The typical shy and quiet Dylan changed too. Now he was short tempered and was suddenly prone to outbursts of anger. One thing that didn't change was the boy's love for the video game Doom. The boys played it over a private server connected to their personal computers. Eric went by the name Reb, which was short for Rebel, and Dylan went by Vodka. Eric even started his own website, where the boys would post videos of the pipe bumps they were creating. After the shooting, the website was removed and preserved for the FBI. The boys were inseparable and often kept to themselves. Aside from these few details, not much is known about the boys friendship. It is believed that Harris depended more emotionally on Dylan than the other way around. But according to journal entries Dylan wrote, he seemed to seek validation from Eric. The boys began to feed off each other, and their blind hatred and rage.
Amanda: Only grew once in high school, the boys found a love for the theater. They joined the production crew and helped with the lighting for school plays. The boys went on to create several movies, and one might have even depicted what was yet to come. Hitman for Hire was a movie the boys produced as an ad for Eric's economics class. The boys can be seen wearing trench coats similar to the attire they wore in the Attack extorting money for protecting jocks from bullies. The video depicts the boys walking the high school campus and shooting bullies outside. Some felt this was potentially a dress rehearsal of sorts. That wasn't the first time the boys had shown their violent ideations in school. On January 17, 1999, just months before the shooting, eric turned in a paper for his creative writing class, eric's teacher said, quote yours is a unique approach and your writing works in a gruesome way. Good details and mood setting. End quote. Nowadays, that kind of approach to a school project would get you suspended if not expelled. But Eric wrote that before the world knew how much hatred could live within a teenager, before the world saw innocence taken in front of our very eyes, before the world saw what two teenage boys could do with a little bit of time and a few assault rifles.
Kori: Aside from their outside behavior, the boys didn't do much to draw attention to themselves. That was, until they decided to break into a van and steal some computers and electronic equipment. On January 20, 1998, the two boys were arrested after a Jefferson County deputy saw them parked near a park entrance after hours. When he stopped the boys and asked them if he could search their vehicle, he discovered the stolen property and the boys were taken into custody. The boys were charged with mischief, breaking and entering, trespassing and theft. They both left good impressions on juvenile officers who offered to expunge their criminal records if they agreed to attend a diversion program which included community service and psychiatric treatment. Harris was required to attend anger management classes, where, again, he made a favorable impression. The boys probation officer discharged them from the program a few months ahead of schedule for good behavior. Regarding Eric, it was remarked that he was, quote a very bright individual who is likely to succeed in life, end quote. While Dylan was said to be intelligent. But quote needs to understand that hard work is part of fulfilling a dream. End quote. If only someone knew the horror these boys were planning. In May, Eric wrote a letter to the owner of the van expressing how sorry he was for any inconvenience he caused, but followed it up with a journal entry expressing his annoyance, writing, quote Why shouldn't we, the gods, have a right to break into a van that some ************ left in the middle of nowhere. End quote.
Amanda: Speaking of journals, both boys kept journals over several years. Eric wrote mostly of his hatred for the world and society, things that annoyed him, his admiration for Adolf Hitler and Nazism, people who made his infamous unreleased **** list, and life as a teenage boy. Dylan's, however, reflected more of that of a depressed, self loathing kid who was tiptoeing around the idea of suicide. He referenced him and Eric as Godlike and more highly evolved than every other human. Page after page was filled with love notes to an unnamed Columbine student. Dylan confessed his love for her over and over. It was almost obsessive. As the boys got closer and closer to NBK, they used their journals to document their plans and ever growing hatred but never really gave an explicit motive for the horror they were planning. NBK was what the boys named their attack. NBK stood for natural born Killers which was a controversial 1994 American crime film starring Woody Harrelson and juliet Lewis. The film tells a story of two victims of traumatic childhoods who become lovers and mass murderers and are then irresponsibly glorified by the mass media. The film was notorious for its violent content and inspiring copycat crimes. In 2006, the film was named the 8th most controversial film in history. The boys used the NBK acronym whenever referencing their attack, whether in their journals or in their many homemade videos.
Kori: I wonder what inspired them to write journals. It doesn't seem like I know therapists tell you to write in journals, but they didn't really go to therapy. So do you think it's something they learned in class or something like that?
Amanda: Eric was in a creative writing class and he was a very good writer. And Dylan was very intelligent.
Kori: Like to channel their thoughts on paper?
Amanda: I think so, because his mom ended up going after all of this. She went on to write a book and is now a public speaker.
Kori: Okay.
Amanda: And so I wonder if maybe it.
Kori: Was just because I know when I was in high school we had a class that not required but suggested you write in a journal and stuff like that. And I could never get into that, but I'm sure other people did. So I was just wondering if maybe he had a class that did that.
Kori: And that's where they picked it up from.
Kori: Or they just thought journaling was a good idea. It is a good idea if you can do that.
Amanda: I don't know. And we'll learn later on that Eric's dad even kept a journal. So maybe it was just more prevalent in that time.
Kori: Maybe. I was just wondering. Eric faced some legal trouble before the van break in. In March 1997, the parents of Brooks Brown, a friend of Dylan since grade school, filed a complaint against Eric for threatening to kill Brooks on his website and claiming Eric broke Brooks's windshield after throwing snowballs at him. Brooks father, Randy, told police that Eric often spoke of making pipe bombs and using them to kill numerous people. Because computer specialists at the sheriff's department were unable to locate Eric's website, the complaint was filed as a suspicious incident rather than opening a criminal investigation. In April of 1997, Brooks mother, Judy, filed a second complaint after Brooks received an email warning him that the sender knew he was, quote, an enemy of Eric's, end quote, and that the sender knew where books lived and what he drove. Additional patrols were set up. Due to this, police did go to Eric's home and speak with Eric's parents. Since no crime was confirmed, no search of the premises was performed. Had the police gone to Eric's bedroom, the pipe bomb making materials would have been located.
Amanda: Also, if this would have actually been filed correctly, the boys would never have received diversion.
Kori: That's true. They would not have.
Amanda: They would not have.
Kori: Well, maybe Dylan might have because it seems like Eric was doing most of that.
Amanda: Yes, that's true.
Kori: So Eric's father, Wayne wrote about the boys fight in his journal where he documented Eric's increasingly problematic behavior. Wayne kept a 60 page journal simply titled Eric. It contained names, phone numbers and notes on Eric's activities on several occasions. In 1997, Wayne wrote, quote we feel victimized too. Wayne accused Brooks of being, quote, out to get Eric, end quote. Almost two years to the date of the attack Wayne wrote in his journal in support of his son. He wrote, quote we don't want to be accused every time something supposedly happens. Eric is not at fault, end quote. On the day of the shootings, Wayne Harris told police he had, quote no reason to believe, end quote, his son would be involved in such a situation. According to documents released in 2000, during the aftermath and trials in this case the Harris family routinely withheld information and hid behind their attorneys.
Amanda: Even before the death threats, eric was in trouble for breaking into student lockers at school and received a three day out of school suspension. This happened before Wayne started keeping a journal so there's not an entry that correlates with this encounter. But undated entries at the end of the journal he kept indicated Wayne imposed rules on his son. Wayne wrote that Eric was unwilling to control his sleep and study habits and was unmotivated to succeed in school. He wrote, quote we can deal with number one and number two. They chose to limit TV, phone and computer use and having lights out at 10:00 p.m.. Now Wayne wrote directly to his son you must deal with number three. Prove to us your desire to succeed by succeeding showing good judgment, giving extra effort pursuing interests, seeking help, advice. End quote. His parents knew that he was having troubles and had even taken away his weapons several months before the shooting. I don't know specifically what weapons were taken, but in Colorado, no one under the age of 18 is allowed to purchase or possess a firearm. Possession of bomaking materials is not necessarily illegal, but when it comes to a teenage boy, it's highly frowned upon. Or at least it should be. Dylan was known to be the hot headed, rage filled one. He was known to scream obscenities at teachers, constantly teetering on the edge of an eruption. He was suspended in 1997 for carving a homophobic slur into a freshman's locker. He can be seen on the boys homemade tape looking over to Eric for approval. On several occasions. He was less sure of himself than Eric was. Eric was level headed, the one who kept the boys out of most of the trouble. What Dylan lacked in social skills, he made up for in intelligence. While Eric made no plans to attend college, Dylan had been accepted into several. His mom had planned to send his deposit to the University of Arizona just days after the shooting. He had driven out to Arizona with his father and even picked out a dorm room. He attended prom the Saturday before. He had been asked to go with a friend named Robin Anderson. She was a smart, sweet, Christian girl. The two attended the dance, joking, talking, and discussing their futures. Dylan kept telling the group how excited for college he was if he had any plans for mass murder. They went completely under the radar.
Kori: Plans not something you think of when you hear about gunfire erupting in a high school, not something you would assume two seemingly harmless high school boys would be doing in their free time. But that's just what the boys did. They planned and schemed. The boys spent over a year planning in BK. They even had Robin Anderson, who was 18, purchase the guns they would use in their attack on November 22, 198. They mapped out the hallway lighting, the best places to hide. They had handmade drawings of the school and had list after list of supplies needed to carry out their plan.
Amanda: The boys had actually planned for their attack to be more of a bombing, something similar to the Oklahoma City bombing that rocked the nation just four years prior. On the morning of April 19, 1995, timothy McVeigh lit fuses on a time sensitive bomb comprised of 13 barrels full of explosive chemicals, fertilizer, and diesel fuel. It is believed that these barrels in total weighed close to £6000. The bomb was placed in the back of a rider moving van and in front of the Alfred P. Mira Building, and the explosion killed 168 people, including 19 children. Over 500 people were injured. Eric and Dylan had planned their attack to go the same way this did, except neither boy had the same military training that Timothy McVeigh did, and they were just that boys. While the boys continued to plan, they carried on with life as usual. All right, guys. I want to introduce you guys to Lacey. Lacey, thank you so much for being here today.
Lacey: Thanks for having me.
Kori: Yes, thank you.
Amanda: Lacey, do you want to give us a little background on yourself?
Lacey: Sure. I was a freshman in high school when the Columbine incident occurred, and I went to Dakota Ridge, which was the nearest school to Columbine. It was actually 2.5 miles in either direction between those two schools from my house and my house. Like, the line for those schools was directly behind my house, so I could have gone to either school. And I'm here to discuss and answer some questions that you guys have.
Amanda: So why did your parents send you to Dakota Ridge versus Columbine?
Lacey: It wasn't a big decision. It just happened that I fell on that side of the street. So they were like, hey, do you want to go here? But literally, the people I went to elementary school with were split almost evenly through three different schools that would be Chatfield, Dakota Ridge and Columbine because we were all just directly centered in those property lines. So it wasn't a big thought process at the time. It was the newer school and when I went there it only had been open like maybe four or five years, so we went with it.
Amanda: Okay, can you describe kind of like what you knew of Columbine and maybe the rivalry between the schools or anything like that? Do you know what the vibe was there?
Lacey: Well, used to the impression that I had gotten in my freshman year was the three different schools all kind of had different vibes. Chap Field was kind of like just normal, everyday, average high school. Nobody really had any direction to follow one way or the other with what kind of school it was. Dakota Ridge was kind of known for being a little bit more of an art forward school. They had a really good theater program, a really good music program, stuff like that. And then we all knew Columbine to be the sports school. People would actually intentionally get their kids to go there due to their athletic programs and how competitive it was. But for the high schoolers themselves, we kind of got the impression that they were a more bully forward school. Whenever we play them in different sporting events and stuff, there would be a lot of incidents of vandalism to cars for the Dakota Ridge side. I don't know if that happened in other schools, if it was maybe just a couple of people that were rivaling with each other or what, but they kind of got that impression that they were the bully jock school at the time.
Kori: Did any of the students at either.
Kori: School, you know of like, have cell phones? Was that a thing? I was already an adult person.
Lacey: I was going to say that was an interesting time for technology when I started to think back about it because although cell phones were a thing, mostly just the more affluent people had them. Like at our school, there were a few here and there, but they were still at the time where text messages cost you per text. There wasn't really any internet on them. So they were basically just making calls at best. I mean, this was the time of the Razor flip phone and the Nokia block phones, which still choice piece of material. That thing lasted forever. But they didn't have all the bells and whistles, so they weren't really super prevalent, at least in my school. I don't know how Columbine was, but even if so, it wasn't like how we have them today. They didn't have that ability to just access things with the click of the button like they do now or film.
Kori: Anything because a lot of them have cameras or anything like that on.
Lacey: We barely got grainy pictures out of them. Yeah, best at that time.
Kori: Yeah, I'd been out of high school for almost five years, so there wasn't a whole lot of cell phoneage. You're right, you did have to pay per message before nine.
Lacey: I didn't have my first cell phone until I was maybe 18 or 19, so it wasn't hyper common like it is now?
Kori: No.
Amanda: Do you remember where you were when the shooting started and did you guys hear about it at school?
Lacey: I don't necessarily remember where I was when the shooting started. I do remember when first hearing the rumbles about it, it was towards my last block of the day because we had a block schedule, so it was three classes a day and lunch, basically. So I was headed to my last class, which was an English class, if I remember correctly, and while walking through the halls, people were talking that something was going on towards the Columbine area at Columbine School, but we didn't exactly know what had happened. People were just saying that their parents had called or something had happened and they were trying to figure out what was going on basically at that time. And then when I got to that class, we were lucky enough that I had a pretty decent, cool teacher. And she had just been hearing the rumblings about it, because, like we said with the phones, the same thing was with the Internet, where it wasn't a time, although it existed, where people were even connected on their computers. 24/7 we still relied on the TV news to get that information. So she turned on the TV that we had in the classroom for announcements and such and allowed us to witness what was going on as the news was reporting it. And so at that time, there was still a lot of questions of what exactly was happening, if anybody had been injured, how many students were involved. It was really up in the air and so we ended up staying in that classroom. And I could be wrong on the timeline this because it's been a bit, but I want to say they had us locked down to close to five in the evening because we were so close in proximity, and so we were locked down for quite some time before they even attempted to let us go home.
Kori: Were any of your friends involved in the shooting? Like, did you lose anyone? Did you have friends that went to that high school?
Lacey: I didn't lose anyone directly. I had known talked to a couple of the people that were injured, but nobody that I was very close to. However, I did have quite a few friends that were there during the time, so there was a lot more of the mental recovery that I had to deal with versus the actual physical recovery after the fact or dealing with the deaths.
Amanda: Can you describe like, a normal school day for us before Columbine?
Lacey: In a lot of ways. It was the quintessential high school experience that they would show in 90s movies. I mean, really? You hung out with all your friends. We used to get there super early and hang out all together before we go to our first classes and just basically breeze through the day. Like I said, we had a block schedule, so we had three classes for, I think it was like an hour and 45 minutes every day instead of the shortened periods. And then we were out of class at around like 150 in the afternoon ish. So it was pretty normal just chilling with your friends. I was lucky enough that if there was a lot of bullying and angst at my school, I was not directly involved in it because I kind of just had friends in every group and I wasn't very close to one specific group, so I didn't really ever experience that kind of stuff. But it really was it was just simple life. You just chilled with your friends, you went to classes, you went home, and nobody really thought any different at that time.
Kori: How did it feel like after columbine happened? Because you were a freshman, so you still had quite a ways to go. So how did it feel afterwards?
Lacey: It was very much what I would consider to be a mass loss of innocence, basically. Especially with the parenting in general, because people that grew up prior to this incident, especially, we grew up with a lot more freedom to walk to school, play outside in the streets, and our parents didn't know where we were, and it wasn't really a big deal. We weren't constantly helicoptered over. Then this happened and suddenly this fear parenting tactic kind of took over, which I fully understand, but I think because this isn't the first shooting, it wasn't the first mass shooting, but it was the first widely known middle America, primarily I hate to say it, but primarily white, student oriented. And then people started to pay attention, which is really sad because it's been a problem for years, but it suddenly hit in our backyard kind of a thing, and then it became an actual problem. And it really changed how school was, because you went from just going about your day every day to having to watch everything you said. Because I don't know about you guys, but saying the phrase like, oh, I'm going to kill you to your friend wasn't like a weird phrase.
Kori: No.
Lacey: Then it developed zero tolerance policies. You can't do any kind of bullying, you can't threaten anybody. And everybody was like, Whoa, wait, we're not threatening anyone. But you had to kind of learn a whole new language immediately because now everyone's so frightened and they don't know what to do with that. And that led into even more stuff where certain schools were getting metal detectors and stuff like that. And it was a very interesting time. In general, my high. School experience because it was really book ended with tragedy. We had Columbine in my freshman year, then we had 911 in my senior year.
Kori: Oh, yeah.
Lacey: And so we literally got to watch the fear just amp up throughout the years. And now we're to places where we have clear bags because you can't have a bag people can't see in it changed our dress code because no one could have trench coats or baggy clothes. This was the years of the Jinko jeans where you could have probably smuggled just about anything you wanted in those and everything was changed within that instant. Where now? What does this mean? And for us freshmen at least, we were just getting to the point where we were finally like, okay, we're getting school. We understand where we're at in life. And it kind of wiped the whole slate clean. And we had to start over again along with everyone else because now we're living in a completely different vantage point than we had prior. And now people are scared to have their kids walking to the mall and stuff like that. And now everybody's scared of the goth kids and the metal kids. And it was really unfortunate because I have always been a big fan of the so called weirdos. So I got to watch them have to start fighting for their own identity because individuals that were singular have now been brought into the forefront as this negative.
Kori: Negative group culture.
Lacey: Yeah, and then unfortunately, I get why, but it became so much of a political event that people were using it to validate their arguments and kind of forgot what the whole thing was about initially because it was used for their own benefit at that point. And I think very few politicians and such really took the time to actually care about what happened. It was all about how they could use it. And that's on both sides of the spectrum, to be honest.
Kori: It is. To be honest, in my opinion, I think they're still using school shootings and mass shootings for their own leg up. Nobody's really thinking about what's happening to the kids or the victims or anything like that. Everyone's just using it to promote their own agenda and no one's thinking about the victims. I have to say that I graduated in 95, so I'm old, but I feel, in my opinion and I've talked about this with some of my friends that are older and we didn't have in the early 90s, high school was totally different than it is now. Like, when my kid went to high school, it was a totally different ballgame. People had cell phones, you had Facebook, you had computers, people had Internet. We didn't have Internet until I graduated high school. And even then it came on a CD that you had to insert into your computer and hook your computer up to a phone line. I think the bullying culture now has really amped up since the late 90s.
Lacey: You can be internet face with stranger.
Kori: At this point and you could go home. I was talking to my wife because we're the similar age well, we're the same age and we were talking about how you were mean to a kid at school but you went home and you didn't have the internet to bully them online too. You couldn't send them mean messages, you couldn't call their house, you got their mom and not them. So you really couldn't be me into a kid at school. You go home, you forget about it the next day. You and that kid were friends and.
Lacey: The kids too, right? They take that break and not let it grind on them.
Kori: Right. It's just constant bullying and constant meanness and it's coming from everywhere like adults are bullies too. Oh, for sure, we're the worst ones.
Lacey: And when you look at it, you've got all these kids that are just trying to get along but they're sometimes feeling bullied while being the bullies and the internet has just made that so much easier and I think it's hard to get away from it now. And we did all of these things to help with all the school shootings and made all these policies and it hasn't stopped a darn thing. No, I mean if anything, columbine was just the first major thing that got the ball rolling, right? And from that point on, we've used it so much as the political gain that we've not actually developed any mental health counseling and alert systems to people that might be in danger of falling into these patterns. And it's not an easy answer. And everybody wants to make it ban guns, or everyone has guns, but it's got to be a multi stepped system. And nobody wants to take the time to bridge the government officials opinions to just figure out what's actually best for our kids and try to make it so it's not so tough. I mean, look at the fact that when we had COVID happen drastically down on school shootings, shockingly enough, right?
Kori: Right.
Lacey: But we didn't ever take the time to evaluate why kids weren't going to other places and shooting it up during COVID Right. They were out of school building so they were at home for the most part.
Kori: Right.
Lacey: They have the time to do it.
Kori: Right.
Lacey: Why wasn't it happening? Right. And again, that's a very simplistic overview of that concept but we're not taking the time to actually care about what we could do to help. It's just about using it for our own advantages at this point. And after the actual shooting, littleton was inundated with people on their own specialty horses trying to get their points across. We had people coming to do interviews and people that are giving heartfelt speeches and everything but they never ever took the time to get to know anybody. They didn't take the time to really feel out the system. It was just that this is the flash in the pan moment, right? This is what's going to get us the attention. And I can only imagine in this day and age, if it happened, it would be all the influencers, everybody showing videos and things like that. And I'm thankful to the families or for the families that that wasn't in place at the time because it was hard enough with all the news footage and such. I can't imagine what it would be like getting all of the streaming and videos that would come in after the fact. So I really feel for these kids and these parents these days when it comes to that.
Kori: I can't even imagine.
Amanda: Speaking of policies, though, do you remember learning about the Brady Bill?
Lacey: Not really. I think most of that was later on for me, learning about it.
Amanda: Okay. That was like something that during our research we really stumbled on. A lot of the papers that Eric was writing was about the Brady Bill. So I just didn't know if that was something that you guys were studying in school or if this was just kind of one of those left field things that he might have.
Lacey: Yeah, they might have to some degree, but I don't really recall any major studying of that bill off the top of my head because school, for the most part, unless you were in some AP classes, was pretty much a skim the surface of most things.
Kori: The Brady Bill was kind of a weird bill. It was passed because of the man who was injured in the 1981 attempted assassination of President Reagan.
Amanda: Right.
Kori: But it was not even represented. It wasn't even introduced until 1991 by Chuck Schumer, but it faced opposition and it passed in 1991 but failed to reach a compromise in the Senate. And it was signed into law in November 30 of 1993. But it didn't even take effect until 1998. So even if it was talked about, it probably wasn't talked about enough for anybody to because I honestly didn't know about it until to be honest, until I worked at the jail.
Lacey: Yeah, and I didn't either. Maybe college we kind of went over in a couple of classes, but it wasn't a big topic that I can remember.
Amanda: Is there anything else that you would like listeners to know about Columbine?
Lacey: Just that because of this, it really opened a lot of new and interesting issues that I guess people didn't either anticipate happening or didn't know there were going to be a problem later on. There's some fascinating case study when you come to the Cora Act, which is the Colorado Open Records Act, and it is a main thing about how police release records to the public, basically. And because of Columbine, they had a whole big situation where people wanted the photographs, they wanted all the reports, and the general public was trying to get these. And they had to add a part to the Colorado Open Records Act to say that a judge or a records department could deem something against public interest and not release it. Because although we have open records, sometimes it may not be within the public interest for the school people to see their family members, their friends. These memories just splashed all over the Internet, splashed in the newspapers and such. So they had to develop some new rules based on that. And then you look at the officers that were involved in the actual situation in general, their policies and procedures all had to change, too. So they got hit really hard about why they did certain steps, but they didn't ever have a plan for this. And then you go back to the schools after that. We started doing the active shooter drills. To some degree, we had to have a plan, which, by the way, our plan was not great because if you went to school there, you know exactly where to go to take out a really good number of people. It wasn't really the most well thought out thing, but it was really going back to, well, flashing back to when they used to do the bomb drills in school. It was just a different kind of terror to inflict upon your kids that, okay, when this happens, what are you going to do? And it became as commonplace as a fire drill to know what you needed to do. And now it's just even more so becoming a problem. So we're just getting all these new ideas that we haven't yet thought of. But as we do that, the people who are committing these crimes are getting smarter as well. They're having to develop other tactics to get in to do what they want to do. And it's like a never ending problem. It's the snake eating its own tail. Because as soon as you come up with the policy, someone comes up with a way to get around it. And we get so busy over policying that we just don't get anywhere, in my opinion. So it's just waiting for the next shoe to drop on a lot of these situations.
Kori: I want to talk about the active shooter thing because that was a thing that started not too far after that. And I know that Lacey, your bonus kid, is 22 now, and mine is almost 25. Did yours have to go through, like, an active shooter? And Amanda, too. Your kids are little. Did they have to go through active shooter in their schools? I know mine did, and it was kind of scary for them. I don't think that as adults, we feel like we're doing the best that we can as parents or as adults. And when you put your child through that kind of trauma, that's not real trauma at the time. I don't know if that's worse or better.
Lacey: I could see it being a split thing because it either makes it too real Gary, to go to school or it makes it like something that might never happen. We're basically acting this out, right. I can see kids taking it in either direction. I don't know if he actually had any active shooter drills here. I'm sure he probably did, or at least they had a plan of some sort, but he never really talked about it. But I know that most students, especially the younger ones, in the last several years, a lot of classrooms have developed that. A lot of schools have developed that to make sure that the kids know where to get, especially since these school shootings are happening at younger and younger schools. They're now in elementary schools.
Kori: I know that mine had to go through it, and it was traumatizing for her friends and her and then we were talking about how, like she said a couple of times, it's just teaching people where to go. And that's the other problem. Are we doing active shooter drills for whole schools and teaching kids like, okay, well, these kids are going to this room, so you know what I mean? I don't know.
Lacey: Yeah, because when they initially did it for us and I don't know, it's been 20 years, the plan has changed.
Kori: Different.
Lacey: Our school was literally out in the middle of nowhere. It was an area that had not been built out yet at the time, so there wasn't anything super near. So they would have everybody in the school go out to the soccer field and all stand there. Well, all you would have to do is get on the roof.
Kori: Right.
Lacey: And you could be that person picking people off. We did talk about it at the time. Even at that age, this seems like we're just showing people how to make it easy.
Kori: Right. It just seems like we're corralling us all in one spot.
Lacey: Yeah. And would it not be more beneficial to scramble to some degree, but now they've built out a lot more out there, so I think probably things have hoped changed in 20 years.
Kori: They're not running out to the soccer field.
Lacey: Right. But yeah, they really are. And that's a double edged sword because you want to teach everyone where to go, but you're also potentially teaching the people that are going to be doing this. And how do you prevent that? You can't. At least not in a way that I can easily figure out.
Kori: Manda have your kids had to do anything like that, or no?
Amanda: Yeah, I don't believe they have. They do, like fire drills and tornado drills and things like that, but they go through such a small school.
Kori: Nashville was a small school.
Kori: Yeah.
Amanda: It's very politically one way.
Kori: Oh, yeah, that makes sense.
Amanda: I don't know that they've done that.
Kori: I was just wondering because my kids school was sort of similar to the whole Chatfield North or Dakota Ridge, Columbine. That's how the schools where we used to live kind of work. The school that she went to was more artsy than jock culturey, I don't know.
Lacey: Well, and going back now, thinking about it, too, there were always rumors for the students in my school, and of course, they were, as far as I know, just rumors that the Columbine students were on steroids. Now, that's obviously like, something people would say because they're good at sports or whatever, but these kids were literally like a foot to two taller than everyone else, the average student. They were so muscly. They were looking like adult men as freshmen. And even later on, when my nephew was playing sports and we'd go to games and stuff, it was still the same thing. They had these really muscled up six foot plus, just grown men mustaches tattoos on the other team. And then we have a bunch of, like, 13 to 15 year olds on their JV who look like regular kids that have not even looked like they've hit puberty. So watching them, it was literally like watching kids versus adults. And whether that was just through these are already big kids that they've recruited to come to Columbine or not, it did create the picture of the typical steroid jock.
Kori: Right.
Lacey: And that also probably contributed to the concept that they were mean bullies. I don't know. But thinking back, even then, it was very much two different species of people when you were looking at them.
Kori: That's crazy.
Amanda: I think nowadays, especially being back in the high school, they're just, like, built differently now.
Lacey: No offroads anymore.
Amanda: Yeah, it's crazy to me.
Lacey: Yeah. You can't tell teen girls from adult girls sometimes. You can't tell teen boys from adult boys. It's very confusing because it's definitely not like how we grew up.
Amanda: Right.
Lacey: But like I said, there was that even then with that school. So maybe they were just the prime species that were being built towards what we have now. I don't know. But they were definitely not built like that at my high school.
Amanda: Right?
Lacey: At least not at that age.
Amanda: Corey, do you have any more questions?
Kori: I do not have any more questions.
Amanda: I don't think I do either. So unless you have any final words, we can let you get on to your dinner.
Lacey: No, thank you for having me. And I hope I gave you a little bit of insight. I know I wasn't directly there, but the ripple effect was very real down there, and we're still feeling it today.
Kori: We are.
Kori: You are correct.
Amanda: Well, thank you for joining.
Lacey: I appreciate you. Thank you.
Amanda: And we just want to say thank you again so much to Lacey for joining us this week.
Kori: Yes, it was great.
Amanda: And that is where we are going to end, part one. So next week, we will be back with part two of the Columbine Massacre. Thank you so much for joining us today. Make sure to send in your questions for us. If you haven't already, please subscribe so you can be notified every time we upload. If you enjoy listening to us every week, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We love doing listener shoutouts, so make sure to leave a comment or review for us. New episodes are released every Friday at 10:30, a.m. Mountain Standard Time. Please follow us on Instagram at Colorado Crime Pod or on Facebook at Colorado Crime Podcast for information on next week's episode, as well as other true crime happenings. We hope that you have a beautiful day wherever you are, and as always, stay safe.
Kori: I want to throw in a little note we're also on YouTube until next time podcastians have the weekend you deserve.
