The Washington Post 
      
      
     Dissecting Columbine's Cult of the Athlete 
   
   By Lorraine Adams and Dale Russakoff
   Washington Post Staff Writers
   Saturday, June 12, 1999; Page A1
   
   LITTLETON, Colo.The state wrestling champ was regularly permitted to
   park his $100,000 Hummer all day in a 15-minute space. A football
   player was allowed to tease a girl about her breasts in class without
   fear of retribution by his teacher, also the boy's coach. The sports
   trophies were showcased in the front hall -- the artwork, down a back
   corridor.
   
   Columbine High School is a culture where initiation rituals meant
   upperclass wrestlers twisted the nipples of freshman wrestlers until
   they turned purple and tennis players sent hard volleys to younger
   teammates' backsides. Sports pages in the yearbook were in color, a
   national debating team and other clubs in black and white. The
   homecoming king was a football player on probation for burglary.
   
   All of it angered and oppressed Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, leading
   to the April day when they staged their murderous rampage here,
   killing 13 and wounding 21.
   
   Columbine may be no different from thousands of high schools in
   glorifying athletes. But in the weeks since one of the worst school
   shootings in history, every aspect of what had seemed "normal" is now
   being reexamined. Increasingly, as parents and students replay images
   of life at Columbine, they are freeze-framing on injustices suffered
   at the hands of athletes, wondering aloud why almost no one -- not
   teachers, not administrators, not coaches, not most students, not
   parents -- took the problem seriously.
   
   No one thinks the high tolerance for athletic mischief explains away
   or excuses the two boys' horrific actions. But some parents and
   students believe a schoolwide indulgence of certain jocks -- their
   criminal convictions, physical abuse, sexual and racial bullying --
   intensified the killers' feelings of powerlessness and galvanized
   their fantasies of revenge.
   
   It was clear in the first hours after the shootings that vengeance
   against athletes was a preoccupation of the two killers. Harris and
   Klebold began firing with the words "All the jocks stand up." They
   barked that "anybody with a white hat or a shirt with a sports emblem
   on it is dead."
   
   But in the two months since that day, as pundits and politicians
   searched for an explanation of why, the national conversation moved
   away from those words, and even outside the walls of the school
   completely. It turned to the boys' families, where no clues have
   surfaced, to the mental illness of Harris -- he was on antidepressants
   -- to video games, to violent movies, to guns, which currently
   preoccupy Congress.
   
   While the rest of the country looks elsewhere for explanations, the
   community here has resisted easy answers. Through their mourning and
   anguish, many parents and students have made a more difficult turn
   inward, to the culture of Columbine and the aspects of it that may
   have provoked two angry boys to such aggression. In the past two
   weeks, a task force has been formed to examine that atmosphere, and
   several of its members say that discipline, harassment and special
   treatment for athletes must be dissected without defensiveness.
   
   "I don't think any one thing drove them to this," said member Joyce
   Hooker, a parent of two Columbine students. "But I think we need to
   say, 'Whoa. Why did they focus on athletes?' "
   
   Their perspective is adolescent and simplistic, but dozens of
   interviews and a review of court records suggest that Harris's and
   Klebold's rage began with the injustices of jocks. The pair knew of
   instances where athletes convicted of crimes went without suspension
   from games or expulsion from school. They witnessed instances of
   athletes tormenting others while school authorities looked the other
   way. They believed that high-profile athletes could finagle their way
   out of jail.
   
   In one episode, they saw state wrestling champion Rocky Wayne
   Hoffschneider shoving his girlfriend into a locker, in front of a
   teacher, who did nothing, according to a close friend. "We used to
   talk about Rocky a lot," said the friend, who asked not to be
   identified. "We'd say things like 'He should be in jail for the stuff
   he does.' " Another friend of Klebold's, Andrew Beard, remembers
   distinctly Klebold's rage at four football players' "getting off"
   after destroying a man's apartment last year.
   
   Hoffschneider, who graduated last year and works in the Denver area at
   a construction company, declined to answer detailed questions. But he
   said in a brief interview that he never knew the killers and that any
   suggestion he escaped punishment for his misdeeds was erroneous.
   
   Harris and Klebold were preoccupied with Hoffschneider, who became for
   many at Columbine a symbol of athletes' runaway sovereignty. On his
   Web site, Harris singled out Hoffschneider in the following passage:
   "LIARS!!!OH GAWWWWWWD I HATE LIARS. . . . Why must people lie so much!
   Especially about stupid things! Like . . . . my brand new hummer just
   broke down on the highway when I was going 250mph.' "
   
   Athletes' torment of Harris and Klebold personally also was a factor.
   This past year, they and friend Brooks Brown were outside school when
   a carload of athletes, wearing their trademark white caps, threw a
   bottle at them, which shattered at their feet. Brown recalled Klebold
   saying, "Don't worry, man, it happens all the time."
   
   Recalling many conversations with Harris and Klebold over the three
   years he knew them, Brown now feels the shooting "had to do with the
   injustice in our society and in the school."
   
   "We all hated it -- hated the fact we were outcasts just simply
   because we weren't in sports," Brown said. "It's insane when you think
   about it, but it's real."
   
   To some athletes and parents, this is guilt-induced revisionism. They
   point out that athletes moved in and out of a variety of cliques. Some
   were scholars, the majority well-behaved. These parents and students
   experienced a Columbine where camaraderie was strong, discipline
   evenhanded and harassment minimal. To say otherwise, they say, is to
   validate the mind-set of murdering madmen.
   
   "They had no school spirit and they wanted to be different," Randy
   Thurmon, parent of a wrestler and football player, said of the
   killers. "Anyone who shows any kind of school spirit, any pride in the
   school, they're accepted."
   
   The new introspection also has been resisted by Columbine school
   officials, who ignored the task force's invitation to their first
   meeting, members said. Coaches, teachers and principal Frank DeAngelis
   denied requests for interviews, according to Jefferson County schools
   spokesman Rick Kaufman. Kaufman said he would answer written
   questions, but then did not. He broke an appointment for a scheduled
   interview Thursday. Messages left for coaches, teachers and
   administrators at home went unanswered.
   
   But one school official who serves on the board overseeing all
   Jefferson County schools believes that these issues cannot be
   dismissed so quickly.
   
   "I do believe that in all of our schools athletes can appear to have a
   different status. I think it's okay if kids are working hard and
   they're good role models," said Jefferson County School Board member
   David DiGiacomo. "But to give them special privileges, I think we have
   to be careful."
   
   With the first media bulletins of the shootings, Stephen Greene was on
   his car phone, calling a school hotline about his son's safety. He got
   voice mail and screamed out a message: "I knew something like this in
   this school could happen."
   
   Greene's sense of foreboding dates to 1996, the year Hoffschneider
   transferred to Columbine after being expelled from a private school
   for fighting. He had other blemishes on his record -- a 1992 arrest
   for criminal mischief and a 1995 arrest relating to a "missing
   person." As juvenile cases, their outcomes were sealed.
   
   The summer before Hoffschneider entered Columbine, his girlfriend's
   parents alleged in court papers that Hoffschneider's mother and sister
   kicked in their door one morning. Edmund Lemieux, the girl's father,
   said the Hoffschneider family "was abusive and physical towards us."
   
   "It was a serious situation at the school," he said. Lemieux said he
   and his wife kept three of their children from attending Columbine
   when they learned that Hoffschneider -- a 215-pound football player
   who would go on to become a two-time state champion in wrestling --
   had transferred to their children's school. Calls to the Hoffschneider
   family were not returned.
   
   Within a month of school opening in the fall of 1996, Hoffschneider
   and another football player were teasing Stephen Greene's son
   Jonathan, who is Jewish. Their favorite gambit was singing about
   Hitler when he made a basket in gym class, Greene recalls. The gym
   teacher, Craig Place, who was also Hoffschneider's wrestling coach,
   did nothing, Greene said.
   
   "They pinned him on the ground and did 'body twisters,' " Greene said.
   "He got bruises all over his body. Then the threats began -- about
   setting him on fire and burning him."
   
   Greene went to Place, DeAngelis and his son's guidance counselor.
   "They said, 'This stuff can happen.' They looked at me like I was a
   problem," he said. Greene called the school board, which notified the
   police. Hoffschneider and the other athlete were charged with
   harassment, kicking and striking, court records show, and sentenced to
   probation. But Hoffschneider was allowed to continue his football and
   wrestling.
   
   He also attracted a following. "He created a tough little group of
   guys -- probably seven or eight boys that were involved in sports,
   mostly football, wrestling, who began to take control of the school,"
   said parent Cecelia Buckner. "They all wore white hats."
   
   One of the group was Anthony A. Pyne, a 230-pound football player with
   a tribal band tattoo on his left arm. (Pyne's mother said her son
   would not comment, on the advice of his attorney.) After Christmas,
   Pyne began to tease Aundrea Harwick in English class about her
   breasts. Harwick went to the teacher, Tom Tonelli, who was also a
   Columbine football and wrestling coach. He suggested she move to a
   different seat.
   
   A similar event happened at a Columbine wrestling match at Arvada High
   School. Pyne, "in front of everyone," said Harwick, broadcast to all
   within earshot: " 'Her breasts are getting bigger.' They're laughing
   -- the jocks were." She told Coach Place; he told her to sit on the
   other side of the gym.
   
   She then went to a woman at a concession stand, who called the Arvada
   police. The officer issued Pyne a ticket. Because he was a juvenile,
   court records are not available, but Harwick said he pleaded guilty
   and paid a $50 fine.
   
   The next day at school, administrator Rich Long, trying to persuade
   the girl to drop the charges, told Harwick and her mother that "by her
   going and getting the police, she's ruining his possibilities of
   playing on the football team," Elissa Harwick recalled. Pyne played
   football anyway.
   
   Views of the Greene and Harwick stories differ. Football player
   Christopher Meier, who was a sophomore at the time, said, "I'm not
   defending him" but that administrators treated Hoffschneider fairly.
   Friends of Harris and Klebold noticed something else. "He always got
   things that we never could get," said Tad Boles -- "respect."
   
   In Harris and Klebold's junior year, an unlikely challenge arose to
   the jocks' unchecked power -- from Columbine's social underclass. "All
   of us outcasts got jealous," recalled junior Pauline Colby.
   
   Just as jocks wore an unofficial uniform to school -- white baseball
   caps -- the outcasts donned black, most noticeably trench coats. When
   jocks branded them "the Trenchcoat Mafia," they embraced the name.
   
   In line at registration for new classes that year, football players
   pushed a 4-foot-9 freshman and called her dirty because she dressed
   like a hippie. On another occasion a boy called "Little Joey Stair,"
   one of the wraithlike Trenchcoaters who was friends with Harris and
   Klebold, looked up in a hallway to see three football players shoving
   him into a locker, saying, "Fag, what are you looking at?" remembered
   classmate Mikala Scrodin.
   
   "Last year there was a group of seniors who picked on everyone, not
   just the lowest people. Pretty much everyone was scared to take them
   on; if anyone said anything, they'd come after you, too. I don't think
   teachers realized it was serious, they just saw it as kids joking
   around," said Kevin Hofstra, a Yale-bound soccer team captain.
   
   Hoffschneider's circle -- known as "the steroid poster boys" -- had
   their cafeteria table. On the other side of the room, shy skinny boys
   -- among them Harris and Klebold -- claimed a table, too. The athletes
   threw Skittles candy at them, said senior John Savage. Once, athletes
   threw a bagel close to the table, and the cafeteria emptied for fear
   of a fight. In the boys' bathrooms, a graffiti war broke out -- "Jocks
   rule!" Came the rejoinder: "Jocks suck!"
   
   In the halls, body slams were common. Trenchcoat students got pushed
   more than most. "A football player reached out and stepped on the cord
   of one of these girls' Walkmen and it ripped out and fell and broke,"
   remembered Melissa Snow, who graduated in 1998. "She just didn't say
   anything. For those kinds of kids it's really hard to stand up to a
   bunch of football players, who are all standing around thinking it's
   really funny what this guy did to you."
   
   Harris and Klebold absorbed it all. As the year went by, they drifted
   closer to the Trenchcoaters, but unlike most students, they seemed to
   take the taunting to heart. "They just let the jocks get to them,"
   Colby said. "I think they were taunted to their limits."
   
   That January, during one of their nocturnal pranks, Harris and Klebold
   were arrested on juvenile charges of felony burglary for stealing from
   a van. They got the lightest sentence available: a diversion program,
   with the charges expunged after 10 months of counseling and community
   service. In fact, their own light sentence has provoked questions
   among some parents that school officials were lax not only toward
   athletes, but toward all sorts of student misbehavior.
   
   Days later, on April 6, Hoffschneider and four other star athletes
   were arrested for ransacking the Denver apartment of a 22-year-old
   man, according to court records. The arrests made the papers. Within
   days, the athletes were back at school. Nine months later they pleaded
   guilty and got probation.
   
   Something had changed by Harris and Klebold's senior year. What began
   as rage -- held inside -- turned into a vicious plan of revenge. But
   if it started with athletes, as it evolved, it morphed into a plot to
   destroy the entire school.
   
   On April 20, some of the jocks who had tormented Klebold and Harris
   had already graduated. Hoffschneider had, though his brother was in
   the cafeteria that day. Among those who died, six were athletes, but
   none of them was considered among Klebold's or Harris's chief
   taunters, or among Hoffschneider's crowd. Whether the killers even
   recognized them as athletes is difficult to know.
   
   Researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.
   
                 Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company