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Columbine by Dave Cullen
5.0


What really happened April 20, 1999? Dave Cullen was one of the first reporters on the scene. He spent ten years on this book: widely recognized as the definitive account. With a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen, he draws on mountains of evidence, insight from the world's leading forensic psychologists, and the killers' own words and drawings, to paint a raw portrait of the two gunmen, whose actions that day came from opposing motives. There’s some repetition as the timeline skips around from the events of April 20th, to events that took place years before, and to the aftermath and healing years later. Utilizing countless pages and hours of testimony from survivors and others directly involved in the school shooting, including the journals and infamous "Basement Tapes" recorded by Harris and Klebold just days before their rampage, Cullen paints in vivid detail the story of how an idyllic suburb suddenly became a buzzword for everything that was bad about high school, parents, gun control, religion, etc. At the time Columbine was the worst school shooting in history. Sadly that’s no longer the case, but it was police actions, or inactions, that day that led to many of the active shooter protocols we have in place today; protocols that have been known to save countless lives when used appropriately. Audio book was read by Don Leslie, who does an excellent job presenting the facts of the case as written by Dave Cullen.