"Crosses in Clement Park"
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, arrived at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado at 11:30am, a time when they knew a large number of their classmates would be in the cafeteria.
Dressed in black coats and armed with sawed–off shotguns and semiautomatic weapons, they began firing in the parking lot and continued shooting as they proceeded to the school cafeteria and then the library.
Before they took their own lives, the two students had killed twelve of their peers and one teacher.
The SWAT team that was given the task of securing the building
found over thirty booby traps and bombs in the school, which the two killers
had apparently built over an extended period of time in preparation for their
attack.
Police found a diary at the home of Eric Harris that traced the deep sense of alienation that he felt, his interest in Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and the massacre's extended planning process.
“If you recall your history,” Harris wrote in the diary, “the Nazis came up with a ’final solution’ to the Jewish problem: kill them all. Well in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I say ’Kill mankind.’ No one should survive.”
The diary is a window on hatred that fluctuated between targeting individual groups and striking out at humanity as a whole. A reporter for Salon.com labeled Harris “an equal-opportunity hater,” someone who would have wrecked havoc on all of humankind if he had had the opportunity.
Clement Park is situated across from Columbine High School, and after the shooting, the park became the site of an expansive spontaneous memorial.
A carpenter from the Chicago area visited the park and constructed fifteen large crosses. The two for Harris and Klebolt were removed several days later by the parent of one of their victim’s.
The placement of the crosses in the park sparked a controversy over who should be remembered in the spontaneous memorial and who should be omitted.
Harris’s and Klebold’s parents lost their children, but unlike the other twelve students and the teacher, their children were killers.
Should the loss that those parents experienced have been acknowledged and included or excluded by virtue of their children's being perpetrators?
Already in this earliest response, in the spontaneous memorial that blossomed out of the rampage of killing, remembrance became a battleground, and highly charged questions emerged over who was to be honored, remembered, and/or acknowledged in their loss and who was to be excluded.