The Jefferson County, Colorado, sheriff has released many of the documents relating to the Columbine massacre. It's a huge 900-page PDF file that you can download here.

I also read through it and pulled out a few excerpts.

First, there are two sections of journals that are simultaneously eerie and sad. You can get those here and here.

Then, there's also this one calendar page that has the date of the massacre written at the top. It's a tad ironic that the motivational word at the top of that page is "Optimism":

In the end, though, what strikes me the most about all of these notes is how similar certain parts of them are to my own high school experience.

I never fantasized about killing people, no. I didn't hate my fellow students, and I had no interest in guns and the military like these kids.

But, I used my notebooks as a path for my imagination. And as a teen boy, violence and sex were just adolescent impulses. It was fun to draw video game characters blowing each other up, cartoony violent scenes that would be horrifying in real life, but on the page were just silly.

Any frustrations I felt were also echoed in my school notebooks. And I saw a lot of the same frustrations and pre-adolescent behavior in Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

It just makes me wonder how much of the blame for this can be put on their parents. I wrote and drew all types of crazy shit that I never would have acted on, and I had two loving parents who were very supportive. I can't imagine what would have happened if they were unsupportive, uncaring, unloving, or poor examples of humanity themselves.

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