Columbine: Chapter 25 Summary & Analysis

Eric and Dylan presumably met in middle school, though they did not really connect there. Brooks Brown, Dylan’s childhood friend, met Eric during their freshman year at Columbine, and soon “all three” boys were close friends. They played video games together, attended football games together, and shared interests in classical philosophy and Renaissance literature.

In an “I Am” poem, a class assignment from his freshman year, Eric described “five times in eighteen lines how nice he was.” He described dreaming of himself as “the last person on earth,” and frequently shared similar fantasies in Internet chat rooms and journals. He wished for, and was obsessed by, the “extinction” of the human race.

Zack Heckler and Dylan shared one class their freshman year, but became fast friends. Zack, Dylan, and Eric all became a group soon enough, and would play video games together. On his own, Eric played the video game Doom obsessively and drew his own characters and worlds into his journal. He hacked the software to bring them to life, and believed he had “dominated and mastered Doom creativity.” In a freshman-year English paper called “Similarities Between Zeus and I,” Eric described himself as a tireless creator who, similar to Zeus, enjoyed “punish[ing] people in unusual ways.”