Elk Grove HS grad relates story of Columbine killers, survivors

For Dave Cullen, returning to his childhood hometown of Elk Grove Village for his 30th high school class reunion tonight should be a proud moment.

After all, he's a successful writer whose latest book, "Columbine," made The New York Times best-seller list.

Yet instead, the thought of revisiting his high school experience brought back some painful memories.

Cullen, 48, is openly gay now but was in the closet at the time he went to Elk Grove High School. He said he felt like a misfit then and contemplated killing himself.

It wasn't until Cullen began writing about the April 20, 1999, shootings at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colo., that he realized the sense of isolation and depression he felt in high school was common among suburban teenagers.

Cullen, a Denver-based freelance journalist and author, was assigned by Internet magazine Salon.com to report on the shootings, arriving at the school as police worked to take control of the building.

Cullen soon became obsessed with knowing what drove the killers to commit the mass murders, and how the survivors coped with the ordeal over the years.

He spent the following 10 years trying to explain why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold gunned down 12 students and a teacher while injuring 21 others in the school cafeteria that fateful Tuesday before turning their guns on themselves.

What Cullen didn't expect to find when he started delving into their lives and minds was similarities between theirs' and his own high school experience.

"The Columbine suburbia and the Northwest suburbs of Chicago are really similar in a lot of ways," Cullen said. "It definitely helped me writing the book having gone to a similar kind of high school."

At Elk Grove High School, which is roughly the same size as Columbine, there were 550 students in Cullen's 1979 graduating class.

Cullen said Jefferson County had a similar landscape to Elk Grove Village where most families are reasonably well off, live in modern houses in quiet neighborhoods with wide streets, and life is easy on the surface.

"But I think a lot of suburban kids feel a sort of emptiness out there," Cullen said. "Part of it was suburbia, and part of it was just adolescent angst."

Cullen said his two main goals with the book are to clear away the cloud of myths about Columbine and shine a light on teenage depression.

Cullen learned Harris, 18, and Klebold, 17, did not fit the profile of school shooters that the media and public initially imagined - information later confirmed by two separate FBI and Secret Service studies on serial shooters.

"One of the biggest impediments to us understanding why Columbine happened is the way we pose the question, 'why did they do it?'" Cullen said. "That 'they' is a huge problem because these are two different boys."

The killers' personalities and motives were dramatically different, he said. Neither of them was bullied, nor were they outcasts.

"Part way through the book, about eight years into the process, I realized I was making a big mistake," Cullen said. "I'm still looking down on these killers and being contemptuous. If I want readers to understand why these kids did this, I need to quit judging them."

Pouring over the roughly 1,000 pages of manic musings of Harris and Klebold, Cullen saw parallels between Klebold and himself as teenagers who felt like fishes out of water.

Lonely and depressive, Klebold saw the world through dark-colored glasses and viewed his life as miserable. He was mostly angry at himself and highly suicidal.

"When I was a kid, I had really low self esteem and had trouble fitting in," said Cullen. "In high school, for me, it felt like no matter what I did I was still going to be that total dork. Very much like Klebold, I mostly blamed myself."

Ultimately, Harris was the catalyst that led Klebold down the path to murder, Cullen said.

"Eric's cause is very easy to understand; it's hard to accept," Cullen said. "He really had two goals: self aggrandizement, (and) he was sadistic and planned to enjoy killing people brutally."

Cullen said he mostly could not relate to Harris, who was characterized by the FBI study as a clinical psychopath, but one passage from Harris' journal where he wrote, "life is just hell on Earth," hit home.

"That's exactly how I felt in high school and I thought I was never going to get through it," Cullen said. "It was so hard to see how is it ever going to really end."

Despite noting some parallels, Cullen said in writing the book he was careful not to project his own high school experiences onto either of the two boys.

The killings - permanently etched on the American psyche as the fourth deadliest school shooting in history - transformed suburban high schools forever.

"High schools have dramatically changed in response to Columbine, and some of those changes made sense and were based on what really happened, and some have missed the mark completely," Cullen said.

The biggest lesson Cullen hopes readers, and particularly parents, take away from his book is recognizing the patterns of teenage depression and treating it.

"The good news on teen depression is most angry teen depressives are not going to murder people in their high school," Cullen said. "By attacking the epidemic of teen depression we can dramatically reduce the number of mass murders in high school, but reap a much greater benefit of saving the depressed kids from themselves."