Thanks for joining in Frank and Hugh. There's a lot to talk about.

Hugh, We definitely blew it on Columbine by trying to assign blame too quickly. In retrospect, it seems amazing that we (the media) thought we could have it all figured out--why it happened, who the killers were, what was driving them--in the first day or two. But we did, and we reported it, and it stuck. The data we needed to make those assessments didn't come for months and years. (It was about seven years before we finally got the killers' journals--the most important element of all.)

I'm putting a post together outlining the major myths of Columbine, which will address more of that shortly.

Frank, I am so glad to have your perspective here. I hope it adds to some understanding of what these tragedies can be like for the people going through them. Those anecdotes are all too familiar. People in/around the school began referring to the "Columbine Curse" for at least a few years afterward. The grief seemed to cascade, and under that umbrella of gloom it was hard to separate out random misfortune.

I was happy to see that eventually it passed, for the most of the people involved. It took a lot of time, and a lot of work, though. And I think it was generally a lot harder for people before they understood what they were going through. Frank DeAngelis, the principal, is emphatic about how badly he wishes he had learned about it earlier. If he could do it over, he would have gotten himself and his family counseling right away. The family is key, because they didn't understand it either, and they couldn't comprehend what he needed. I told the story in the book about how he would get home from a long day at the school, dealing with the repercussions from the tragedy, and the last thing he wanted to do was talk about his own feelings about it. His family desperately wanted to help, but what he needed was a respite. So he would flee to the basement, where only his dog would follow him, who asked no questions.

I do think about the perps a lot, because it took me years to understand them--and to get educated on psychopathy and teen depression. But over the last decade I have spent much more time thinking about the victims and survivors than the killers, and there was no way I would have done this book without their stories.

It was the morning after the massacre that I really got hooked on this story, and kept me hooked for the duration, and it was because of the survivors. Those distraught kids in Clement Park. I had to know what happened to them.

I was struck by this sentence in your post: "I believe [Dave] wishes he could have spent more time with those who took me into their homes as they sought to re-humanize a school and community that not only suffered, but was turned into a symbol of tragedy for the rest of America." You guessed right. I can never get too much of that.

Somebody asked me recently if I thought I could have done the book if I had not lived in Denver. I thought about it, and I decided I could have written a book, but not this book. I try to approach my work more as anthropologist than reporter. The word "interview" doesn't feel like the right verb to me most of the time. It's more about getting to know the people involved: talking to them, hanging out with them, going to church or school or the bar or the mall or the sandwich shop with them. Spending time in their houses and in their lives. I didn't want to report what they said about what happened, I wanted to absorb how they felt about it and then convey that on the page.