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Inside the Columbine investigation:
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Fantasies of mass murder led to casual surveillance but officers never talked to parents of Harris, Klebold
By Kevin Vaughan, Lynn Bartels
and Ann Carnahan Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writers
Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone on Friday night defended his department's handling of a 1998 complaint that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold might be building pipe bombs and fantasizing about mass murder.
"There was not significant information in those initial charges for an arrest," said Stone, who was not the sheriff when the complaints were made.
Officials said Friday that Neil Gardner, the sheriff's deputy assigned to Columbine High School, kept tabs on Harris and Klebold after the March 1998 report. He even engaged in "light conversation" with the boys at the school, officials said.
"So this guy (Gardner) was eyeballing him," Stone said. "He was aware of those things."
But officials acknowledged that officers never talked to the two students about the allegations nor interviewed their parents.
Asked why, Stone said, "These pipe bomb calls are very common."
The casual surveillance failed to detect the boys' meticulous planning for the homicidal assault they unleashed on Columbine April 20. Twelve students and one teacher died and 23 were wounded in the attack, which ended when Harris and Klebold committed suicide.
Stone said his agency's investigation of the assault has been lauded by Attorney General Janet Reno and police in Los Angeles and Denver. He said no outside review of his department's handling of the incident is needed.
"We still don't have all the facts on this thing," Stone said. "We need to really make sure this is reconstructed, to analyze it ... to look at how you combat stuff like this.
"If a kid comes in and wants to kill a half dozen kids in school, he can do it. What can you do with people like that?"
The acknowledgment that Gardner monitored the boys' activities came after the Denver Rocky Mountain News reported Friday that he had been told of a police report detailing their potential for violence.
Sheriff's Lt. John Kiekbusch said that Gardner discussed the complaints about Harris and Klebold with a dean at Columbine.
Kiekbusch would not identify the dean. Neither of Columbine's two deans could be reached for comment. Christine Mikesell did not return a message left by the News. And a woman who answered the door at the home of Peter Horvath said he would have no comment.
Gardner also could not be reached for comment.
Jefferson County school officials said they had "no information" about which Columbine official knew of the report filed by the Browns.
"It appears that the parents of these young people didn't know what was going on," school board member David DiGiacomo said. "If the people who lived with them in their household hour after hour had no clue, why is it so hard to see that they could have kept it from school officials?"
The information about Harris and Klebold that was supplied to Gardner came from a sheriff's department "suspicious incident" report.
The report was based on a complaint by Columbine parents Randy and Judy Brown after they saw Internet postings in which Harris threatened to kill their son Brooks.
Kiekbusch acknowledged that officers never talked to Harris or Klebold about the Browns' allegations and never interviewed the parents of either teen.
Neither step was taken, Kiekbusch said, because the Browns told deputies they wanted to remain anonymous.
"That is beyond ludicrous," Randy Brown said Friday evening. "We took the complaint to them with the kids' names. We wanted them to be arrested.
"We asked them if they could keep our name out of it, act like they found it on their own, so we didn't have to worry about Eric killing Brooks."
Investigators said they concluded that they could not prove a crime had been committed, based on the Browns' information.
"In light of the information available at the time, reasonable action was taken with all the reports received from the Brown family," sheriff's deputy Steve Davis said.
Several other developments surfaced Friday:
Much of the investigation Friday focused on the handling of complaints from the Browns, who told Jefferson County authorities on March 18, 1998, that Harris had threatened on the Internet to kill their son.
Randy Brown's complaint included Klebold's name, writings from Harris' Web site and allegations that the teens were building pipe bombs.
Kiekbusch said sheriff's officials did everything they could, given what they knew at the time.
He said the Browns' complaints were taken seriously.
Investigators did a computer check to see if Harris had been arrested for other crimes. It apparently did not turn up a January 1998 car break-in involving Harris and Klebold.
Kiekbusch said that investigators could not find Harris' Web site.
"You've got to be kidding," Randy Brown said. "The address is on four of the 12 pages we gave them. They never contacted us and said we can't get it. Our kids could have gotten it for them in three minutes.
Kiekbusch said sheriff's department officials made other efforts to look into the complaint.
They investigated pipe bomb reports to see if any could be linked to Harris and Klebold.
Ultimately, investigators decided that even if Harris writings about bombs and killing were authentic, they were probably protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.
"You can put an awful lot of information on the Web and it doesn't constitute a crime," Kiekbusch said.
Asked to respond to the Browns' complaint that eight to 10 follow-up phone calls to the sheriff's department were not returned, he replied, simply, "No."
Kiekbusch and District Attorney Dave Thomas acknowledged that they're studying ways to better assess complaints like the one filed by the Browns.
"We all learned a lesson on the 20th of April," Kiekbusch said. "And I think part of that is that we need to take these things in a more serious fashion."
"I think it's very difficult and painful to look back and ask a lot of what-if questions about what could have prevented this, because I don't think anybody knows one way or the other," Thomas said.
Despite Brown's frustration with how the complaint was handled, he said he does not hold officials responsible for what happened April 20.
"There is an inter-office communication problem in the sheriff's office that needs to be addressed," he said. "But the blame for this tragedy doesn't fall on the detectives -- or the teachers, parents or the DA.
"It falls on Eric Harris and, I hate to say it, Dylan Klebold."
Staff writers Karen Abbott, Tillie Fong and Bill Scanlon contributed to this report.
May 1, 1999
