The Life and Times of Catherine Hicks essays

The Life and Times of Catherine Hicks essays Once upon a time, the most that kids had to worry about at school was a looming test or a deadline for a paper. No more. After the carnage that left 15 dead and 23 wounded at Columbine High in the affluent Denver suburb of Littleton, there can be few youngsters anywhere who feel totally confident that they won't one day encounter a fellow student with a gun in his hand and madness in his eyes. Although the tragedies of West Paducah, Kentucky; Peal, Mississippi; Jonesboro, Arkansas; and Springfield Oregon (to name the most well-known school shootings earlier in the 1990s) were shocking enough, those tolls fell short of the clockwork slaughter among the 1,900 students at Columbine. There, for more than three hours, two misfits spread terror before killing themselves even as hundreds of local, state and federal law-enforcement officers lay siege outside. The two-Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17-savored Goth music like Marilyn Manson and violent computer games such as Doom as well as Nazi mythology and paraphernalia. They hated the jocks in the rah-rah school who made them feel like outcats. Klebold, who wore a T-shirt that read SERIAL KILLER the morning of the massacre, is remember by fellow seniors as a follower in search of a leader. He found one in Harris, who created a Web site on which he had posted bomb-making instructions and virulent warnings to classmates. The parents of Brooks Brown, a senior whom Harris had threated the previous yeaer, complained to both school and police numerous times, but nothing was ever done. If Harris and Klebold weren't well-adjusted teens, they still gave few hints of the depths of their lethal alienation. After getting caught stealing in early 1998, they sailed successfully through a juvenile rehabilitation program, and their police records were expunged. Both came from prosperous families, with parents who believed they knew their children well-though Littleton's sheriff ...