April 20, 2024

Dave Cullen on the Columbine High School Massacre, 25 Years Later

1 hour 43 minutes

There are no two ways around this fact: today’s conversation is tough. It’s really, really tough. Today, April 20, 2024, marks 25 years since the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado. I woke up this morning and read an article in People magazine about Frank DeAngelis, who was the principal at Columbine at the time of the shooting. In the article, DeAngelis said that every single morning, he wakes up and says the names of those killed in that day’s horrible events. He said he almost died twice that day, and, in his words, “For whatever reason God spared me that day. So I need to try to help others.” I will take a page from Principal DeAngelis and begin this episode by saying the names of the 12 students and one teacher killed that day: Cassie Bernall, Steven Curnow, Corey DePooter, Kelly Fleming, Matt Kechter, Daniel Mauser, Danny Rohrbough, Dave Sanders, Rachel Scott, Isaiah Shoels, John Tomlin, Lauren Townsend, and Kyle Velasquez. Thirteen people who woke up on this morning 25 years ago and headed into school for what they probably imagined would be a typical Tuesday—and they never came home.

Today on the show I have Dave Cullen, who wrote the definitive book on the Columbine massacre, simply titled Columbine, in 2009, 10 years after the attack happened. It took Dave a full decade to write this masterpiece, and he followed it up with a book about the Parkland school shooting, simply titled Parkland, in 2019. Dave’s Columbine book has a new edition and we talk about that in today’s episode. You can feel Dave’s passion for a topic he spent a full decade writing about oozing throughout this conversation.

I was 12 years old and in the sixth grade on April 20, 1999, when perpetrators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot and killed 12 fellow classmates and a teacher at the school. The massacre was also an attempted bombing that failed, and 10 of the 12 students killed were in the school library, the epicenter of the attack, where Harris and Klebold also killed themselves at the massacre’s end. When it happened, Columbine was the deadliest mass school shooting at a K-12 school in U.S. history; Harris and Klebold had been planning their attack for at least a year and planned for it to be primarily a bombing attack, and secondarily a shooting attack. When the bombs they’d built failed to detonate, they began shooting.

Their motive remains inconclusive, but Dave and I get into the “why” of it all in our conversation today. Its aftermath has unfortunately spawned dozens of copycat killings, called “the Columbine effect,” and the word “Columbine” itself has become a word symbolizing school shootings. The attack took place from 11:19 a.m. to 12:08 p.m., culminating in the suicides of Harris and Klebold. In 2007, the Columbine Memorial opened to the public, and two years later, in 2009, Dave’s book came out. Dave is considered the nation’s foremost authority on Columbine, and his book covers two major storylines: the killers’ evolution leading up to the attack, and the survivors’ struggles with its aftermath after it happened. Chapters alternate between those two stories, and the book spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and won numerous awards, drawing comparisons to Truman Capote’s classic In Cold Blood and Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me. This conversation is a difficult one, but necessary.

Columbine by Dave Cullen

The audiobook is also available

“Confronting: Columbine” podcast

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