Stuart Biegel

University of California, Los Angeles

· From Egan, "The Trouble with Looking for Signs of Trouble," N.Y. Times, April 25, 1999

Another trait of child shooters points to a particular Western or rural form of rootlessness. Suicide is highest in Western states and rural areas, which experts attribute to transient populations. By this reasoning, entire regions are doomed to confusion about the kinds of children they are raising. A more accurate way to profile potential shooters is to look for what experts describe as three legs of a stool. One is fascination with violent media. Another is easy access to weapons. A third is flawed character. By itself, no element will turn a brooding student into a killing machine. But taken together, all three elements spell trouble.

· From The Trial of Leopold & Loeb, www2.idsonline.com

May 21, 1924 - A day that stands alone in infamy as the day two...[wealthy and highly educated]... Chicago youths -- Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb -- kidnapped Loeb's distant cousin Bobby Franks from his Harvard preparatory school and beat him to death. They then dumped the body in a culvert near the Pennsylvania railroad and covered it with hydrochloric acid...Although Clarence Darrow vehemently attempted to defend the two murderers, both Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life imprisonment.

· From "Classmates Describe Shooters As Obsessed with Goth World," S.F. Chronicle, April 21, 1999

Black trench coats are a consistent theme in the Gothic subculture that has attracted many teenagers to the poetry, music and costumes of a scene that ranges from benign fantasy to violent reality.

Many American high schoolers have become fascinated by all things Gothic. Some simply dress and paint their fingernails black while others immerse themselves in a pseudo-medieval world of dark images.

On Web sites featuring poetry called "The Written Work of the Trenchcoat" and in political tracts and other elements of the conspiratorial imagination, trench coats have served as a symbol for everything from Hitler and the Nazis to mass murder to suicidal fantasies.

Yesterday was Hitler's birthday, an occasion for demonstrations, mock funerals and other macabre commemorations among both neo-Nazis and some subsets of the Gothic scene. Sheriff's spokesman Steve Davis said investigators were intrigued by the possibility that the carnage was timed "in conjunction with" Hitler's birthday.

Dave Williams, a police expert who has been studying the Goths for six years, told The Chronicle that by and large, they are nonviolent.

But occasionally some who claim to be Goth have harmed people, such as individual acts of violence in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Still, until yesterday there had been nothing like mass murder in the Goth experience.

"I was always afraid something like this might happen," said Williams, a sergeant in the Dayton, Ohio, Police Department.

Sergeant Williams says some Goths act out a bizarre and elaborate role-playing game, "Vampire, the masquerade." He said one particularly dark aspect of the Gothic is when role playing is carried to extreme.

"The game -- Vampire, the masquerade -- I call it Dungeons and Dragons on steroids," he said, adding that players assume the persona of vampires and act out attacks.

"There are people who I have seen who lose touch, who think the gaming system and mythos are real. They have gone off and done some very strange things. Basing things on my experience, is there a propensity for this? It's possible."

Trench coats, like those worn by the Colorado gunmen, are the modern equivalent of vampire capes in the symbology of the game, Williams said.

As part of the game, Williams said, participants join one of seven "clans" associated with vampirism.

"The seven clans compete for power in the vampire world -- the idea of the game is to essentially to control the world," he said.

One clan, known as the "Brujah," is the most violent among the game's participants. Another group, which is outside the clan system, is known as "Sabbat" and makes random simulated violent attacks on opponents in the game.

Typically, the game is played by everyone from kids to business executives, and clashes in the game are resolved with the old-fashioned method of the child's game known as "scissors, paper, rock," he said.

But, Williams said, the game requires players to totally immerse themselves in the study of the occult.

"Any belief system taken to the extreme is dangerous," he said. "In this one, ultimately, the fanaticism causes the problem," Williams said. "You are steeped in the occult, you are reading about the occult. You are sucking so much of this in, it's a huge indoctrination. That has a tendency of messing with the mind."

· From Biegel, Post to CyberProf Mailing List, April 25, 1999

It seems that the Columbine HS events have touched a very raw nerve in this country, and in the process have generated discussion regarding a range of interrelated issues that may affect us in the CyberProf community. From a legal and policy perspective, these discussions could result in significant new efforts to (among other things) restrict K-12 student free speech rights, limit online hate generally, regulate anonymous remailers, and expand the duty to warn under tort law.

· From CNN, "Harris Hinted at Violence to Come," April 21, 1999

Harris' and Klebold's interest in Hitler and World War II was well-known around school, students said. They played war games and bragged about their guns.

The two sometimes spoke German in the hallways and made references to "4-20," Hitler's birthday, said Aaron Cohn, a neighbor.

The massacre took place on the anniversary of Hitler's birthday.

· From Merida, "Not Telling Anymore: Fearful Kids Keep a Code of Silence," Washington Post, April 27, 1999

There were clues that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold might be disturbed youngsters capable of masterminding the mayhem at Columbine High School. Confrontations with kids they disdained. A fascination with Nazism and automatic weapons. A video made for a class project months ago in which the real-life shooters play trench-coated triggermen who mow down athletes in a school hallway.

· From Brooke, "One of the Killers Envisioned a Far Bigger Slaughter," N.Y. Times, April 27, 1999

Officials Monday also briefly addressed complaints that the authorities had been made aware of threats by Harris, but did nothing.

The parents of Brooks Brown, a classmate of the suspects, have disclosed that they notified the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department eight times last year with complaints that Harris, a neighbor, had threatened their son. The couple, Randy and Judy Brown, said that after Harris chipped the windshield of their son's car, he created a computer game that revolved around destroying the Brown house and created a web site that featured a death threat against their son and accounts of manufacturing and exploding pipe bombs.

Although Harris and Klebold were on probation at the time, Jefferson County detectives never followed up on the complaints, the Browns have said.