Free Columbine by Dave Cullen Page B

shooting. They were--they didn't care who they shot at; they were just shooting and then they threw a grenade or they threw something that blew up."
    There seemed to be no end of "witnesses," though most had seen chaos but no one causing it. A senior described the first moments of awareness: "OK, I was sitting in math class, and all of a sudden we look out and there's people that are sprinting down the math hall and we open the door, we hear a shot, a loud bang, and then we hear some guy go 'holy crap, there's a guy with a gun!' So everybody starts freaking out, one of my friends goes up to the door and says there's a guy standing there. We evacuate to the corner of our classroom and my teacher just doesn't know what to do because she's so freaked."
    There appeared to be several shooters--all boys, all white, all Columbine students. Some were shooting in the parking lot, some in the cafeteria, some upstairs while roaming the halls. Somebody was positioned on the roof. Some of the assault team wore T-shirts; others advanced in long black trench coats. One pair included one of each. Some had hats, and one or two were hiding behind ski masks.
    Some of this mix-up was standard crime-scene confusion. Contrary to popular conception, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially when witnesses were under duress. Memories get jumbled and witnesses imagine missing details without realizing they're doing it. But much of this misunderstanding was due to specific factors. Eric discarded his trench coat at the top of the stairs almost as soon as he began shooting. Dylan kept his on until he got to the library. Each costume change created another shooter. The school's location on a hill, with nearby entrances on both floors, allowed Eric and Dylan to be seen upstairs and downstairs almost simultaneously. The long-range weapons scattered gunfire over a shooting radius hundreds of yards wide. Distant witnesses had no idea where the shooters were; they only knew they were under attack. Some witnesses listened carefully and correctly located the source of the turbulence----but the bomb blasts often led them astray, particularly when bombs landed on the roof. Several kids were sure something was coming from up there. They spotted a frightened air-conditioner repairman and instantly identified him as the rooftop gunman.
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    Word whipped through the Columbine community. Kids called home on their cell phones the minute they got to safety--or someplace they hoped would remain safe. About five hundred students were off campus, either for lunch or sick or cutting class. Their first sign of a problem came when they hit police barricades as they tried to return. Cops were everywhere. More cops than they had ever seen.
    Nate Dykeman was one of the kids heading back in. He was stunned by the stories he heard. Nate had gone home for lunch, same as he did every day. But on the way out, he had seen something peculiar: Eric walking into the building from the wrong parking lot at the wrong time. He should have been walking out. Eric and Dylan had both been missing that morning. They were up to something, obviously. Odd that they hadn't included him, or called, at least. Maybe not Eric, he wasn't the most thoughtful friend, but Dylan was. Dylan would have called.
    There had been some weird shit going on between those two lately. Pipe bombs and guns. When Nate heard about the shooting, he got nervous. When someone mentioned the trench coats, that sealed it.
    This isn't happening, Nate thought. This can't be happening.
    He ran into his girlfriend, who was stopped at an intersection. She was also a good friend of Eric's. She followed Nate home. Then Nate did the same thing nearly everyone was doing: he started dialing friends, checking in to make sure they were all safe. He wanted to call Dylan's house, but that was just way too scary. Soon. He would call soon. He checked on some other friends first.
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    While Deputy Gardner was firing at Eric,