no easy answers: the truth behind death at columbine
no easy answers - the truth behind death at columbine
by Brooks Brown and Rob Merritt
In April 1999, two teenage pupils burst into Columbine High School in Colorado, USA and began what was the worst school shooting in US history. Twelve students and a teacher were killed and many more injured. One student who escaped the massacre was Brooks Brown, friend of the shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Now, with the aid of young journalist Rob Merritt, Brown has written his own account of events at Columbine.
When I first began reading "no easy answers: the truth behind death at columbine" (sic), the words, "bandwagon" and "jumping on" were never far from my mind. Brown was a friend of both protagonists, although he had experienced a major falling-out with Harris and the pair had only recently begun to mend fences and talk again. As Harris walked into the school, armed with pipe bombs and a shotgun, he encountered Brooks outside and told him to go home, thus sparing him from the ensuing carnage. Initially, Brown and Merritt's book seemed like a rather cheap effort to cash in on second-hand notoriety and I disliked it intensely.
However, as I read on, I quickly realised that "no easy answers" was making a more valid contribution to the ongoing discussions on the phenomenon of school shootings than I had first realised.
As a friend of the perpetrators, Brown came in for a lot of suspicion regarding his degree of involvement in the shootings, the flames fanned by an inept police department who appeared to alter the facts of the case at will to suit their own ends. While authorities struggle to understand what could possibly have driven two young men from supposedly stable and loving families to commit such atrocities, Brown points out that clear warning signs before the event were ignored. He describes an atmosphere of bullying and exclusion that was rife in the school, something which he believes may have contributed to the anger and rage that finally pushed Klebold and Harris over the edge into insanity.
Brown points out the mismanagement of the case by authorities, particularly by the police who allowed a teacher to bleed to death over a period of several hours without making any attempt to rescue him and who appear to have accidentally shot one of the student victims themselves.
At the end of the day, two teenagers committed the school shootings at Columbine and the views of a contemporary, who had shared many of their life experiences, seem valid. Sadly there will undoubtedly be other similar incidents in the future and any understanding that can be gained must be worthwhile.
"no easy answers" is not a deep book and, as is suggested by the title, the authors do not claim to have answers to what happened at Columbine. What they do have, though, is insight and a desire to expose the truth of the matter as they see it. It makes for thought-provoking reading.
Publisher: Lantern Books
ISBN: 1 59056 031 0
Price: £11.19 / $17.95 p/b
Date Reviewed: January 2003
My Rating: 3/5
