Heed Columbine's Lessons: Make Information Available, and Speak Out

Every day, every hour, more people come forward who knew that something was deeply wrong with Cho Seung Hui. Teachers, roommates, classmates from college, high school, middle school -- people knew.

And people acted. Not all of them, and not all in loud and useful ways, but some who were disturbed by Cho's actions and words did what we would want them to do: They told somebody.

And still, here we are.

Why?

Dawn Anna, who has supreme cause to ask that question, thought we would be beyond this point by now. "I had this Pollyannish vision that when Lauren was murdered, that the reaction from the nation and the world was so intense and so heartfelt that we would all get around the table and say: 'As a parent, I saw this piece of behavior' and 'As a teacher, I saw this' and 'Let's put it all together and see what we can do to protect our children.'

"But it didn't happen."

Tomorrow marks eight years since the murders at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. Eight years since Dawn Anna's daughter, Lauren Townsend, and 12 others were killed by two teenagers whose murderous intentions had been plain to see for years. The killers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, wrote school papers about their plan. They put up a Web site about it. Harris even wrote in court documents that he was homicidal and suicidal.

People knew. Still, Columbine happened.

Even afterward, Anna and other parents couldn't get people to speak openly about what they had known. The parents eventually sued to force the flow of information that hadn't happened before the murders.

They won, and they lost. Harris's and Klebold's parents were deposed and required to tell how their children became killers. And the authorities were forced to reveal the existence of numerous complaints about the two boys that were never investigated.

But a federal judge in Denver, Lewis Babcock, ruled this month that the depositions, the thousands of other records and the basement videos in which Harris and Klebold spelled out their sick plan must remain sealed for 20 years.

"There is a legitimate public interest in these materials so that similar tragedies may hopefully be prevented in the future," Babcock said. But he ordered all the material sealed for fear that its release might engender copycat killings.