"Cultural influences also appeared weak.  Only a quarter [of school shooters] were interested in violent movies, half that number in video games--probably below average for teen boys."

--Columbine,  Dave Cullen

I finished reading Columbine last night, the book by Denver journalist (and Salon contributor) Dave Cullen.  There was a waiting list for the book at the Loveland Public Library.  The book reminded me of how the shooting affected me.  Columbine opened almost the same year as Fairview High School, which I graduated from in Boulder, was about the same size, similar demographic and was (if I remember right) likely one of many large Denver area schools Fairview competed against in sports.  It serves as a reminder, those things can happen anywhere.

I especially liked the fact that Cullen went into the psychology of the killers as provided by FBI investigator and Columbine parent Dwayne Fuselier.  In spite of my lack of background in psychology, the motivations of mass murderers is an obsession of mine, starting well before my own father went "postal."  As a girl I was fascinated by a biography of Ivan the Terrible, who, like my father, was an orphan.  Maybe even then, I was seeing a potential for violence.

Neither Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold were orphans, nor was there much evidence in Cullen's book that their parents were absent or deficient.   However, Klebold's complaint about his fellow preschoolers in transcripts I'd read from the Basement Tapes was so similar to statements I'd heard from my own preschool-age son around the time that it influenced my decision to hold my son back a year before starting him in kindergarten.  Like Dylan, whose birthday was September 11, Evan had a late summer birthday, a fact that made him a full year younger than many of his classmates.  In spite of assurances from Evan's preschool teacher that he was academically ready for kindergarten, I feared the emotional age differential (which is much bigger for boys since they mature more slowly) would be a social obstacle for Evan all the way through school. 

Unlike Klebold, who was a classic depressive, Fuselier believed Eric Harris was a full-blown psychopath.  I don't know enough about the subject to comment, though I was fascinated to read that Eric had dreams about himself as the lone survivor of an apparent apocalypse.  I couldn't help wondering if the dreams might be a flashback to an early life experience in which Eric may have become separated from his parents.  Such early-life abandonment is believed to be a factor in mass murderers such as Unabomber Theodor Kaczynski and Saddam Hussein.

My brother and I had a childhood friend who died in an apparent suicide by sheriff.  Had the circumstances been different,  Danny could well have become a school shooter.  Or a church shooter:  Danny was the hyperactive second-grader who once ran around on the top of the desks when I was sent back from an assembly early because I felt ill;  the skinny, quiet, Joe-Cool guy who could always be found playing pool before my high school church group in downtown Boulder.  

 But what particularly brought back memories for me was the story about Cassie Bernall, a story that had a ripple effect throughout Colorado that reached my megachurch in Loveland.  Strangely, the story about the young girl who acknowledged her faith in God shortly before being killed by Harris didn't make much of an impression on me. Call me cynical, but I'd heard similar Christian urban legends over the years.  They often trouble me:  if the contemporary stories Christians tell prove to be falsehoods, as Bernall's story ultimately was, how can we expect anyone to believe the even more fantastic tales in the Bible?

For that reason, I had no interest in reading Misty Bernall's book.  In fact, it reminded me of a similar book about John and Patsy Ramsey I'd seen at my local Christian bookstore a few years before, likely one of those tear-jerker tomes that sell like hotcakes to Christians, because they use emotionalism as a means to inspire greater faith.  

I say likely, because I didn't even glance inside the covers of the Ramsey book, though I had every reason to be interested.  The Ramseys attended the same Episcopal church I attended as a girl in Boulder.  I have a mental image of JonBenet outside St. John's, not dressed in her tarty outfits, but in the knee-length Sunday school dresses I used to wear when I was the age she died, topped by my Sunday school hat adorned with navy blue ribbons blowing in the Boulder breeze.  The problem was my sister, a criminal prosecutor in the Denver area, knew the person who did the handwriting analysis for JonBenet's ransom note.  Ann told me Patsy's handwriting sample was the only one that was even close.

Why did Patsy Ramsey need her daughter to be a beauty queen?  Why did Misty Bernall need her daughter to be a martyr?  Was it not okay for their daughters to simply be themselves?  And why does it disturb Christians that Val Schnurr, the girl who was actually overheard in the library saying yes, survived the shooting after Klebold was evidently distracted?  Is this not a miracle?

Cassie Bernall impressed me as an angry girl, a girl who conspired with a pen pal about murdering her parents and hanging them up by their intestines, who even after her religious conversion had a hard time fitting in with her youth group at church.  And yet, after that conversion, she insisted on attending a secular high school (Columbine) where she felt she could make a difference, a move that wouldn't necessarily impress people in evangelical circles in Colorado, who believe the mark of faith is homeschooling your kids or sending them to private religious schools.   After reading Cullen's book, I understood why Cassie was angry.  Though I can't recall plotting to kill my parents, I was angry in high school for the same reason.  I just didn't fit in.

There were two ironies in the book for me.  The first was that Cassie's anger made her not that much different from her killer.  The other was that, because of our shared traits,  I ended up liking Cassie a lot.  I may even read the book about her.  Not because Cassie was a martyr who said yes, but because she was a maverick who said no to being another cookie-cutter Christian.  (Don't get me started on Sarah Palin, who is a maverick-wannabe.)  In the end, I like Cassie Bernall better as a real live girl than as the ghost of someone who never was.