Another Step Back

0.cached.png

By Newsweek Editors

See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.

This season should have been a time for healing and remembrance at Columbine High. The term was nearly over and Christmas was days away. The horrors of April 20, and all the sorrow since, might have been expected to recede a bit. The football team won its first state championship and a group of alumni organized a concert to honor the emergency workers who saved lives during the massacre. But on Wednesday night somebody sent a series of ominous e-mail messages and all the old demons came back to life. The instant messages, to sophomore Erin Walton, came from an America Online subscriber using the handle "Soup81." "Do me a favor, don't go to school tomorrow," Soup81 told Erin. "I need to finish what begun and if you go I don't want your blood on my hands." "Please don't do this," Erin replied. "You are really scaring me."

Despite the likelihood that the e-mail was a hoax, authorities shut down the school for Christmas break two days early while sheriff's deputies patrolled the empty campus. Tracing the e-mail through AOL, the FBI arrested Michael Ian Campbell, an 18-year-old from Cape Coral, Fla., and charged him with using interstate communications to make a threat, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Agents seized Campbell's computer and said he admitted using the handle Soup81. "He didn't mean to do anything," Campbell's mother said. "This was a stupid, stupid mistake and he knows it." "The Columbine tragedy has taught us all that we cannot afford to ignore any threat, no matter how farfetched it might at first appear," said Thomas Strickland, U.S. attorney in Denver.

Littleton was on edge even before the e-mail threats. That was because the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department allowed reporters to see the videotapes made by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold just before their April shooting spree. Time magazine published a story and newspapers followed suit. Hateful, suicidal and obscene, the published excerpts were a gruesome reminder of the tragedy to victims and their families. The parents of two slain students hired a lawyer to try to prevent the tapes from being televised and critics called for Sheriff John Stone's resignation. (Stone apologized.) "For every step the Columbine families take forward, they keep getting pulled two steps backward," said Bruce Merrill, a Denver psychiatrist. Concerned by the risk of stress and depression, county officials reopened a special hot line for Columbine survivors--sadly, it was just in time for the holidays.

Read More on News