On Monday in Boulder, Del Elliott prepared congressional testimony about stopping violence among teenagers.
On Monday in Salt Lake City, an 18-year-old hid a shotgun and a pistol under his trench coat and randomly killed five people and seriously wounded four at a shopping mall.
Are you paying attention, Judge Babcock? Lewis Babcock is the federal jurist who will soon decide whether to seal the civil depositions of the parents of Columbine High School killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold for 25 years.
Babcock or anyone else who thinks that nothing bad can come from blocking access to those documents for a quarter-century is deaf and blind.
The Utah shootings didn’t occur in a school. But the trench-coated teenage perp who went on a seemingly casual killing spree reeks of Columbine.
“Columbine represented teenage violence different from the norm,” said Elliott, director of the University of Colorado’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence. “Most teenage violence is gang-related or a fight over a girl. It’s the randomness (of Columbine) that is different. The target is everybody. It’s a kind of violent event we don’t understand very well.”
Elliott would like to. He’s undertaken what is probably the most comprehensive study of the causes of Columbine. Colorado Attorney General John Suthers asked Babcock to let Elliott look at the Harris/Klebold civil depositions.
In an affidavit filed with Suthers’ request, Elliott tried to explain to the judge why such a study is critical.
It is not to heap more shame and guilt on the parents of Klebold and Harris. It is not because Elliott thinks the depositions should be pruriently exploited.
Elliott favors limited access to the depositions for scholarly purposes. To see them, you’d have to defend your need to know what was happening in the Harris and Klebold households leading up to the 1999 school attack that – if consummated as planned – would have killed hundreds of innocent students and staffers, not just the 12 students and one teacher Harris and Klebold did murder before turning their weapons on themselves.
I think parents and other members of the public also deserve the chance to study that subject in a controlled environment, though without copying privileges that could lead to an Internet circus.
The real issue here is some kind of access because, as Elliott pointed out, “25 years from now, (the depositions) are not going to be useful.”
“The whole purpose is to learn how to prevent things like this,” he said. “We’re hoping to provide ID markers that parents and schools can recognize.”
And intervene.
“We know there have been copycat events going on,” Elliott added, “attempts to outdo Columbine. Fortunately, most of them have been thwarted. But there are a lot of kids who obsess about what happened at Columbine. The potential for copycats is real.”
As real as a teenager randomly slaughtering mall shoppers in Utah the very week you’re supposed to tell Congress how to stop such killings.
Nobody knows enough yet about the Utah shooter to draw a direct correlation to Harris and Klebold. There may be no link between their backgrounds. Sulejman Talovic, the 18-year-old that Salt Lake City police have identified as the mall killer, is a Bosnian refugee. His motives remain a mystery. All police have said is that Talovic lived with his mother.
Still, enough similarities exist between Talovic’s actions and those of Harris and Klebold to demand comparison. The Columbine killers were upper middle-class children from seemingly loving two-parent homes who donned trench coats, hid weapons and went on a still-inexplicable killing spree.
“They looked like they were on a normal life-course trajectory,” Elliott said. “Then, something went terribly wrong.”
Maybe an expert like Elliott won’t ever be able to figure out what – even if he gets to look at the Harris/Klebold depositions. Uncertainty is no excuse to give up. Especially while teenagers continue to murder indiscriminately.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
