Jefferson County District Atty. Dave Thomas, 50, still deals every day with the aftershocks of the April 20 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. The shootings, which left 14 students and one teacher dead, including the two teen killers who committed suicide, evoked painful memories of difficulties in Thomas’ own family. A few days after Columbine, Thomas began to speak out about the need to stop the epidemic of violence sweeping the nation’s schools. Thomas has used his own experiences as a touchstone in dealing with the Columbine victims and families and moving forward the debate about school violence. He also is helping to oversee the Littleton investigation, the largest criminal probe in Colorado history. Thomas spoke to the Tribune in Denver.
Q: The night of the Columbine shootings, you got an hour of sleep. What was going through your mind?
A: Complete and utter disbelief. I felt like I was in a bad dream. Even today, it is hard for me to comprehend that this occurred in my community at a high school where my two children went. The more I got to know about the two suspects, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the more disbelief I felt. I expected these would be two diabolical people, which they are because of what they did, but they didn’t fit the profile.
Q: The day after, you went to the library where most of the killings occurred. What did you see?
A: It was like walking into a church. Everything was frozen in time. It had a sense of unreality to it. There were these kids here, dead, completely motionless. It was like they were caught in a time warp. One kid I remember had a pencil in his hand, under a computer table. I noticed one of the female victims, how clean and shiny her hair was. And I thought to myself, you know she probably got up yesterday morning and took a shower and got ready for school and had no idea what was going to happen.
I did the same thing. I got up that Tuesday morning and went to a thing called the Good News breakfast. Six hundred people in Jefferson County–ministers, political leaders, citizens, teachers, kids–all celebrating good news in our community. The irony of it all: that celebration, and then all this devastation.
Q: If you had an opportunity to talk to Harris and Klebold, what would you ask them?
A: I guess my question would be: For one second, did you stop and think about what it was you were doing to so many people? Did that ever intervene in your thoughts? And if it did, how did you overcome that and do what you did?
I would also ask, How did you get here? What brought you to this moment? What was your purpose? To become famous? To get noticed? To seek revenge? And if you’re dead at the end of this, which they obviously intended, what did you really accomplish?
I’d like to help figure this out so that this doesn’t happen again. I mean, I wake up every day terrified that another act of school violence will occur somewhere else in this country.
Q: Part of the difficulty is figuring out which kids are in trouble, and who might act on violent impulses. What should communities do?
A: One of the things I’ve advocated is to take the communities where these school shootings have occurred and do a detailed analysis of who these kids are, what their lifestyles were, actually do a `life autopsy’ and see if we can find any common patterns.
I think many people in this country realize that some huge cultural changes have happened over the past 25 years. To our neighborhoods, to our communities, to our families. They have become, I think, broken. When I grew up here in Jefferson County, I knew all of my neighbors. To this day, I can name those neighbors up one street and down the other. I can’t do that where I live today. Most people can’t.
I think families relate differently. More mothers work, families have less time together. I think we need to sit back and reflect on the structure of our communities and how we raise our children. And maybe make some changes.
Q: Your own son bought a semi-automatic AK-47 for $300 when he was in college. How did you learn about it?
A: He told me he did. At first I didn’t realize you could buy a weapon like that at age 18. That surprised me. Then I was frightened about why a kid would want to do that. So I did talk to him. He just said, `I like them. I think they’re fun.’ And I said, `That’s it? That’s your only purpose?’ And he said `Yes.’ But I continued to worry, mainly because of (what I’ve seen in) my job, about him getting in trouble.
He lived a little bit on the edge. He had a lot of problems his first year in college. In fact, got kicked out for academic reasons. I was concerned about him going to the other side of the line, from being a law abiding person to not.
So, I made up a story. I told him that there had been some threats against me and I was wondering if I could borrow his weapon for a while. Which was really a dumb story, but he believed it.
Q: Do you think you knew what your son was feeling?
A: No, I don’t. I was a non-custodial father. He lived with his mother (after our divorce). I never had a communication level, particularly with my son, where I felt I had a real good understanding of how he felt. He’s very different from me, even though he looks just like me. I think, looking back to his growing up years, I think I should have had parenting lessons. And it’s not about how to change a diaper. It’s about how to communicate with kids as they grow up. Because I’ll tell you, I lost that ability.
Q: What lessons did you take from this experience?
A: You can’t just isolate a particular factor and say that’s the problem with kids. Violent video games, violence on TV, guns, they are they are all contributing factors. But I think it depends on the individual. My son obviously had something going on inside, but he never committed a crime with this gun.
Q: The murder of your sister-in-law three years ago by her husband was also a profound experience for you. How did that change you?
A: I had never had a violent act in any close proximity to me personally. I lost both of my parents when I was relatively young, so I had been through tragedy. But I had never been through violent tragedy, the kind that haunts you for a long time after. I guess one of the things I learned from that is it is can be an extremely destructive experience or a very constructive experience for families, depending on how the family responds.
The reason I’m continuing to chair the Healing Fund (for Columbine victims and families) is because I want it to be a good experience. I think I know what these families are going through. So I plead with them: Let’s be different from some of the other communities where shootings occurred, and where they have torn each other apart over this.
Q: You adopted your sister-in-law’s daughter, Maggie, who is 8, and who witnessed her father mutilate her mother after killing her. Is it clear what burden she will carry forward in life?
A: It’s not. And I think that’s one of the very terrible things about being touched by violence–that we don’t know for sure the long-term effects on people. We do know, from a lot of research that’s been done, that it can pop up at varying times throughout your life. That’s why she’s been in therapy. We don’t know whether she will have a propensity toward violence because she’s been exposed to it. We certainly hope not. But our way of dealing with that is just to give her as much love as we can, which is the only thing we know how to do.
My (second) wife and I don’t have any children. She has never had any children. And we have sometimes thought, Maggie may have been a gift from fate.
Q: What about your brother-in-law?
A: He had been mentally ill for years, and went off his medications. He became psychotic. He hunted down my sister-in-law, like an animal. I don’t think about him. I figure that is the worst punishment of all, to forget him completely, not pay any attention.
Q: You’ve said something has to come out of these shootings at Columbine. What is it you hope for?
A: What I hope is that it touches enough people that we can have a huge cultural change. I’ve seen one very large change in my lifetime, surrounding peoples’ drinking habits. When I was a young prosecutor, when we’d get off work at 5 p.m., we’d go to the neighborhood bar, and we generally were there many hours. If you went to a Chamber of Commerce meeting at 11:30, they’d roll out the hospitality cart and everybody would have a couple of drinks before lunch. That just doesn’t happen anymore.
I think the same kind of cultural change has to happen around violence. And I’m not just talking physical violence. I’m talking about verbal and emotional violence, the way we talk to our kids, the way we discipline kids, the way we intimidate spouses.
I’m hoping that if we take violence as our focal point, that we can make it unacceptable. It’s like a drunk person walking into the room. We used to laugh at him. We don’t do that any more. It’s not funny. It’s actually very sad. We know that now.
If we could change our attitudes toward violence, our fear of each other, hopefully it might change the way that I relate to my neighbors. Maybe we’ll spend more time going to the people who live next door and say, Hey, can I do something to help you?–and we won’t be so isolated.
Q: Congress has been debating this subject. What’s your message for lawmakers?
A: We need to put a lot of resources at the front end of our systems. We put massive resources at the back end. I use them. I mean, I put a ton of people into prison every year. Probably as much as any jurisdiction in Colorado. But I think an equal amount of effort and resource needs to be put in upfront, when children are very young and their characters are being formed.
Q: Is there any public misconception of what happened here that you would like to correct?
A: I was born and raised in Jefferson County. I love where I live and I think it’s a wonderful place with wonderful people. I want other people to accept the fact that what happened here could happen anywhere and not to blame us. Frankly, I’m not willing to accept the blame. I don’t think we did anything wrong.
The fault lies, frankly, with two people who chose not to obey the law, who chose to hurt other people, to do some really terrible things. If there is a broader kind of cultural fault here, and I do think there is, it is something we all need to accept as a society.
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An edited transcript
