The headlines in major newspapers the day after the Columbine massacre were shocking — and they were wrong:
“Up to 25 Die in Colorado School Shooting” (The Washington Post)
“Gunmen Stalk School, Killing Up to 25 and Wounding 20” (Los Angeles Times)
“High School Massacre: Columbine bloodbath leaves up to 25 dead” (Denver Post)
In fact, the death toll was lower — 12 students and one teacher were killed on April 20, 1999, by shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who then took their own lives. Even so, Columbine remained the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history until the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018 that left 17 dead.
Today will mark 20 years since the Columbine massacre. And while correcting the death toll took only a day, other aspects of early reports that turned out to be unfounded have lingered in the nation’s subconscious.
“It’s frustrating because we’ve known so much for so long, but initial impressions are hard to change,” said Peter Langman, a psychologist who has studied school shootings so extensively that Sue Klebold contacted him for insight about her son Dylan while she was writing a memoir.
1. Harris and Klebold were not in the Trench Coat Mafia.
Even as the massacre was unfolding, students told journalists that Harris and Klebold were members of a group known as the Trench Coat Mafia.
The Washington Post put it this way: “The shooters who turned Columbine High School into an unspeakable landscape of carnage yesterday were members of a small clique of outcasts who always wore black trench coats and spent their entire adolescence deep inside the morose subculture of Gothic fantasy, their fellow students said.”
The Denver Post reported: “By several accounts, the group [was] also interested in the occult, mutilation, shock-rocker Marilyn Manson and Adolf Hitler.”
And The New York Times: “[I]nvestigators now believe that among the dozen or so students in the group were the people responsible for yesterday’s mass shooting at the high school.”
Students and investigators did say this to reporters. But Columbine was a large school with 2,000 students. Many “did not know [Harris and Klebold], or knew them only as kids who sometimes wore trench coats,” Langman wrote in a 2008 report.
“As a result, people assumed that [Harris and Klebold] were part of the Trench Coat Mafia; this assumption is wrong.”
The year before the shooting, when Harris and Klebold were juniors, there was a group of mostly senior students who sometimes referred to themselves as the Trench Coat Mafia.
Harris and Klebold knew a few of these students, but they were not considered core to the friend group, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office later determined, and did not appear in a photo of Trench Coat Mafia members in the 1998 yearbook. Most of those students had graduated the year before the shooting.
2. Harris and Klebold were not isolated outcasts or loners.
In the conflation of Harris and Klebold with the Trench Coat Mafia, they became synonymous with the word “outcast,” which appeared in every major newspaper report. The Post said people described them as an “isolated pair”; the Denver Post used “loners.”
But a thorough look at the shooters’ lives, one not based on panicked students’ reports, refutes this, Langman said.
“They both had a lot of friends. They both engaged in school activities, out-of-school activities, they worked part-time jobs with some of their buddies at a pizza shop,” Langman said.
Both were in a bowling league. Harris had played on the school soccer team as a freshman and sophomore, and continued to play soccer and volleyball after school, according to the sheriff’s office report. Klebold was in a fantasy baseball league and had gone to prom with a female friend a few days before the massacre.
3. The attack was not revenge for being bullied.
The first articles also indicated that Harris and Klebold sought revenge against classmates who had bullied them. The New York Times said Harris and Klebold appeared to target “peers who had poked fun at the group in the past.”
But a look at police records and Harris’s and Klebold’s own writings paint a much more complex portrait, Langman said. Yes, Harris and Klebold were sometimes teased, but they were nowhere near the most bullied in the school.
