Newly Released Columbine Writings Reveal Killers' Mind-Set

GOLDEN, Colo., July 6 -- "I hate you people for leaving me out of so many things," high school senior Eric Harris wrote of his classmates. "You had my phone #, and I asked you and all, but no, no no don't let that weird looking Eric kid come along. . . . I HATE PEOPLE and they better [bleeping] fear me."

Barely two weeks after he scrawled that entry in a journal, Harris and his classmate Dylan Klebold carried out the threat, killing 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in suburban Denver. The pair then killed themselves, ending the nation's deadliest school shooting.

The Jefferson County sheriff on Thursday released about 900 pages of documents seized from the killers' homes just after the shootings on April 20, 1999. The cache includes school papers and report cards, as well as anguished love letters, poems, drawings, to-do lists, journals and chat-line ramblings from the two teenagers.

Since the attack, more than 20,000 documents and videos have been made public, and some of the details released Thursday had been previously disclosed.

The documents depict intense levels of nihilism, anger and contempt for the boys' schoolmates. They also show that the pair closely tracked the provisions of state and federal gun laws to determine how they could acquire weapons.

The newly released papers suggest that the two seniors dropped several clues about their plans in advance. But they were not enough to prompt intervention.

Two months before the killings, Klebold wrote a short story for an English class depicting a man who kills nine high school students with automatic pistols. "I saw emanating from him power, complacence, closure, and godliness," the story ended. "I understood his actions."

The teacher, whose name is not given, wrote, "You are an excellent writer and storyteller, but I have some problems with this one."

The killers, who chose Adolf Hitler's birthday for their rampage, were preoccupied with guns, bombs, murder and the Nazis, their personal journals show. This obsession is also reflected in classroom papers.

The same year as his short story about the mass murderer, Klebold submitted an outline for a research paper titled "The Minds and Motives of Charles Manson and Other Serial Killers."

Harris, who collected newsletters from anti-gun-control groups, wrote a class paper noting that federal gun laws had "loopholes" that meant "criminals who want guns have a pretty good chance of getting them." In another essay, he wrote, "It is just as easy to bring a loaded gun to school as it is to bring a calculator."

School authorities said after the shooting that they had no reason to fear violence from Harris and Klebold. After warnings from neighbors, the county sheriff's office considered seeking a search warrant to look for weapons at the youths' homes shortly before the shootings, but it never acted.