As the older of the two Columbine shooters, 18-year-old Eric David Harris carried himself with the confidence of someone who believed he was always the smartest person in the room. He presented as charming when it suited him—well-spoken, quick with a joke, capable of smiling through a lie. But beneath the surface was a seething disdain for the world around him. He did not merely want to kill; he wanted to punish, to assert control in the most absolute terms. He saw others as weak and stupid, and in his journals, he raged about “natural selection,” fantasizing about cleansing the Earth of what he considered inferior humans.
Eric was born in Wichita, Kansas, the son of a retired Air Force pilot, and grew up in a disciplined household. But structure only gave him cover. He was a skilled manipulator, lying easily to his parents, school officials, and court counselors after a 1998 arrest for theft. His juvenile diversion officials saw improvement. He wrote polite apologies, attended counseling, completed required programs. All the while, he was writing hate-filled diatribes online, building bombs in his basement bedroom, and plotting a massacre with clinical precision.
He was the one who built the website where he detailed their contempt. He was the one who documented their cache of weapons, who designed their plan as a DIY military operation. His worldview had calcified into a cold, nihilistic logic: if the world could not be fixed, it should be destroyed and he was happy to die in the flames. On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris didn’t just want to shoot people—he wanted to make them suffer. The basement tapes, long hidden from public view, reportedly show him reveling in the fantasy of domination along with a massive arsenal of guns and bombs. In those final days, he wasn’t hiding anymore. He believed he was becoming something more than human—something untouchable, something… Godlike.
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