| Did the Columbine Killers Program a CHS Level of Doom?
There's been discussion over whether or not accused Columbine attackers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold programmed a level of the video game, Doom, to resemble the high school they attended and that, on April 20, 1999, they were implicated in having shot to pieces.
According to an article by Barbara Mikkelson of Snopes, an "urban legend" web site, a claim had surfaced on the internet in 1999 that
"One of the boys who murdered his classmates at Columbine High School prepared by designing new computer game levels that resembled his school and peopling them with representations of his classmates."
The article in which she covers this is titled, "The Harris Levels", and in it, she labels the claim,
"False."
In case you're unfamiliar with my work, I recently completed a video called "The Columbine Cause" (http://www.xmail.net/evanlong/tcc/) in which I examine the 4/20 attack on Columbine High School with an emphasis on witness statements as presented in the more than 30,000 pages of government documents released to the public domain.
Most of the documents are now on the internet and hyperlinked from a page I created called "Columbine Attack Government Document Library" (http://www.xmail.net/evanlong/tcc/Columbine_Attack_Government_Document_Library.html).
In reference to Mikkelson's statement, on page 7,043 (JC-001-007043) of the release called 11,000 Pages of Investigative Files, then-CHS student David Proctor, who had played Doom with Harris and Klebold via modem, was reported to have told "investigators"
"that earlier this year [1999] Harris had told him he designed a level of Doom that was Columbine High School."
The Mikkelson article, last updated in 2005, would therefore be incorrect on a major point of fact.
What's really interesting about it, though, is that to make the kind of statement she made, Mikkelson undertook the logical impossibility of proving the negative in an incompletely known system.
In other words, even if we didn't have access to the record of Proctor's alleged statement, we could still say that Harris and Klebold might have programmed a level of Doom that resembled CHS and unless someone could present a record of every computer file ever produced, it's logically impossible to state with one hundred percent certainty that they didn't, except to say that there is no specific indication that they did.
This kind of flawed analysis is a weak limb for a high-profile debunking web site to have gone out on, so perhaps there was an ulterior motive for the production of the piece.
If there was, perhaps it's to be found in statements within it such as
"[T]here's not much to it, really",
"There's no need to look for any more horror"
and
"There is no fathoming the heart of the Devil".
If we were to follow the implications of these statements, we'd perhaps never read the government documents to find that eyewitnesses were alleged to have reported up to a dozen attackers in addition to Harris and Klebold including an adult in his 30's along with current and former CHS students, some of whom some of the witnesses were able to name by name.
We'd also perhaps never discover that the police and FBI "investigation" of the attack seems to have consisted mainly of subjecting these witnesses to repeated reinterviews during which they were actively pressured to change their testimony.
Let's reject inaccurate and potentially misleading articles like "The Harris Levels" and find out more about the real events of and surrounding the April 20, 1999 attack on Columbine High School. | |
