Columbine: Chapter 37 Summary & Analysis

In the wake of Eric’s arrest for theft, his parents realize he needs professional help. Wayne Harris searches for a therapist, and makes Eric an appointment for mid-February. He also plans to apply for Eric to complete a juvenile diversion program, which mandates a year of counseling, community services, fines, and fees in an exchange for having the crime removed from Eric’s permanent record. Eric tells his new psychiatrist that he has “anger issues” and thoughts of suicide, and is placed on an antidepressant. Eric and Dylan are forbidden from contacting one another. Eric’s computer access is revoked, and he continues to work on his pipe bombs. On February 15th, just before Eric’s first therapy appointment, Jeffco bomb squad investigators respond to a call reporting a pipe bomb found in Eric’s neighborhood. The investigator summoned “defused the bomb and filed a report.”

Eric and Dylan do not tell their friends about their arrest or their punishments. Eventually, though, word gets out, and Eric and Dylan are both humiliated. Eric is “raging mad,” while Dylan retreats into fantasies of finding love with Harriet, and writes of blowing himself up with a pipe bomb if “by love’s choice” she doesn’t love Dylan back.

Wayne Harris works diligently to get Eric into a diversion program. Meanwhile, Eric is detonating his first pipe bombs in his spare time, and laments not yet having found a “target” for them. Eric’s dreams of human extinction begin to change—on his website, he longs to be an “enforcer” of annihilation, and “rig explosives all over a town.” He wants to “kill and injure as many as [he] can.”

Dylan, alarmed by Eric’s rants, gives Brooks Brown Eric’s web address and tells him to look at it, but not to tell Eric that Dylan pointed him there. Brooks checks the website, sees that he himself is threatened personally several times, and tells his mother. His parents call the cops, who follow up and file reports, but do not alert the DA’s office—as a result, Eric and Dylan still get into the diversion program.

Both Tom and Sue Klebold attend Dylan’s diversion program intake meeting. Dylan and his parents independently fill out an intake form, and then a mediator discusses each set of results with all three Klebolds. Dylan’s parents are shocked by Dylan’s confessions about drinking, but admit that they know their son is “angry, sullen, disrespectful and intolerant.”

Wayne and Kathy attend Eric’s intake session, too, and are surprised that on a checklist of thirty “potential problem areas,” they only mark three, while Eric himself marks fourteen—“virtually everything related to distrust or aggression,” including homicidal thoughts. His parents worry that though they can try to control his behavior, they cannot control his moods. Eric, on his website, will write that he only made a “partial” confession in the intake meeting, and continues to describe his desire for humanity to bend to his will, as well as fantasies of “blowing up and shooting up everything he could.”

The boys’ intake supervisor, Andrea Sanchez, worries about both boys’ ability to accept responsibility for their actions, but recommends them for enrollment. A Jeffco judge doesn’t believe that this offense is the boys’ first—though both they and their parents claim it is—but is impressed by their “deferential” behavior at their hearing and he approves them for diversion. Fourteen months later, Cullen writes, the judge will “lament how convincing the boys had been, [and] how decepti[ve].”

Judy and Randy Brown, Brooks’ parents, continue to hound the cops. Investigator Guerra drafts an affidavit for a search warrant of Eric’s house, and even mentions within it the pipe bomb recently discovered near Eric’s house. The affidavit is filed, but is not followed up on “in any way” and no explanation for the inaction is ever provided. None of the “damning” evidence was ever brought before the judge who approved the boys for diversion. Eric, having gotten wind of the Browns’ continued pursuit of him, takes his website down and begins writing the journal, in which he would “record his progress toward the attack and thoroughly explain his motives.”