Friend of Columbine Killers Still Seeking Answers

13-years after the killings at Columbine high school rocked the nation and the sleepy mountain town of Littleton, Colorado, many questions still remain unanswered as one man tries to put the past behind him.

On April 20, 1999, the nation fixed its sights on Columbine high school, as two boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on a 50-minute killing spree that left 12 students and one teacher dead before ultimately turning the guns on themselves.

Brooks Brown, now 31 years-old, was a senior at Columbine during what was considered to be the worst school shooting in U.S. history. He was also very close friends with the killers. Brown can recall the final encounter he had with one of them the morning of the massacre.

After one of his classes, Brown went outside to smoke a cigarette, a habit he said he routinely followed throughout the year. When he noticed Harris pull into the school parking lot, he immediately walked over to scold him for missing a test that morning. The conversation he said, still haunts him to this day.

“I don't know why he didn’t shoot me right there,” Brown said.

One year prior to the massacre at Columbine Brown and Harris had a falling-out when Harris threw a block of ice at Brown's car, chipping his windshield. Shortly after, Brown discovered that Harris had also posted a death threat against him online.

Harris wrote out a fantasy where he planned to plant explosives throughout the town of Littleton and begin shooting people as they ran through the streets in panic. He also described a shoot-out with police.

“I don’t care if I live or die,” Harris wrote, “All I want to do is kill and injure as many of you as I can. Especially Brooks Brown.”

Brown showed his parents the writings that also featured descriptions of pipe bombs Harris and Klebold claimed to be making in one of the boy's basements. The Browns filed a police report with the sheriff’s department and according to Brook’s father, Randy Brown, the department said they had enough evidence to begin drafting an affidavit for a search warrant on Harris’ home but the warrant was never issued.

“I have theories about why he didn’t want to kill me that morning,” Brown said, “Psychologically he was trying to 'kill the school,' and not any specific person. I was a specific person so he couldn't think about killing me.”

Instead, Brown said Harris told him, “Brooks, I like you now. Get out of here. Go home.”

Brown quickly left the school unaware of his classmate's real intentions. Feeling puzzled by Harris’ words, he walked away from the parking lot then a few moments later the first sounds of gunfire rang out behind him. Fearing that his classmate Klebold was also involved, Brown ran to a neighbor’s house to call police.

In his book, 'no easy answers: the truth behind death at Columbine,' Brown writes he was later accused of being involved in the massacre by Jefferson County Sheriff John Stone. Brown’s parents believed Stone used their son as a scapegoat while he planned to silence them from shedding light on the report they filed against Harris just one year prior to the shooting.

Brown began receiving death threats from people on a regular basis often framed as an outsider, he felt shunned from his community and was even asked by police to undergoing a lie-detector test which he later passed.

From day one, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s department had been scrutinized for its overlapping shortcomings the day of the Columbine shooting. Parents of victims blame the department for not responding quickly enough the day of the attack, misinforming the media and the public on the number casualties and not immediately contacting parents of students who had been killed.

Brian Rohrbough did not find out his son Daniel was dead until the morning after the shooting when a local newspaper published a frontpage picture of his son's lifeless body.

In Nov. 2000, the Jefferson County sheriff’s Department was ordered to release evidence about the investigation of the Columbine High School shooting. In response to the court order, they released an 11,000-page document packed with evidence previously withheld from the public. Among the evidence were hand-written journals from both Harris and Klebold.

However, the evidence failed to provide a sense of closure to some victim’s families, including the Browns who eagerly awaited the release of the police report they had filed against Harris and the search warrant police supposedly drafted just one-year prior to the school shooting but again, that day never came.

In 2001, a judge ordered the release of the drafted affidavit search warrant on Harris’ home, but the Jefferson County Sherriff’s department allegedly could not locate the document claiming it had simply “disappeared.” To this day, the whereabouts of the document that could have potentially saved a dozen lives and prevented the deadliest school shooting in America are unknown.

Since that horrific day at Columbine in 1999, in the affluent suburb of Littleton, Colorado, Brown has tried to make sense of the final conversation he had with Harris just moments before the shooting began. Brown has endured the pain of being called a murderer just for being acquaintances with both shooters. He has even been accused of being involved simply because he was told to leave the school by one of the gunmen prior to the shooting. Despite all of that, Brown has managed to put that terrible day at Columbine and the personal hell that followed, behind him.

“Time,” he said, “Time and caring and wonderful friends who helped me grow past it.”

Although, he admits there isn’t a day that goes by when he isn’t reminded of the final conversation with Harris and those haunting last words in the final moments before the deadliest school shooting in American history.

“Brooks, I like you now. Get out of here. Go home.”