White Supremacists into Nostradamus and Doomsday
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 21, 1999; Page A1
The shooters who turned Columbine High School into an
unspeakable landscape of carnage yesterday were members of a
small clique of outcasts who always wore black trench coats and
spent their entire adolescence deep inside the morose subculture
of Gothic fantasy, their fellow students said.
Students at the Colorado school said the gunmen, whom police say
may have turned their weapons on themselves after killing as many
as 25 of their schoolmates and teachers, were a constant target
of derision for at least four years.
"They're basically outcasts, Gothic people," said Peter
Maher, a junior who had a confrontation last July 4 with the
shooters and several of their fellow members of the "Trench
Coat Mafia," the black-clad teenagers' name for their
clique. "They're into anarchy. They're white supremacists
and they're into Nostradamus stuff and Doomsday."
Several students said the shooters - whose names were withheld by
police but who are believed to have graduated from Columbine last
year - were deeply into death - talking, reading and dreaming
about it.
Black trench coats are a consistent theme in the Gothic
subculture that has attracted many teenagers to the poetry, music
and costumes of a scene that ranges from benign fantasy to
violent reality.
Inspired by fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons, Gothic
has become a fascination of many American high schoolers, some of
whom simply dress and paint their fingernails black while others
immerse themselves in a pseudo-medieval world of dark images.
On Web sites featuring poetry called "The Written Work of
the Trenchcoat" and in political tracts and other elements
of the conspiratorial imagination, trench coats serve as a symbol
for things from Hitler and the Nazis to mass murder to suicidal
fantasies. Yesterday was Hitler's birthday, an occasion for
demonstrations, mock funerals and other macabre commemorations
among both neo-Nazis and parts of the Gothic scene.
When the young men started shooting yesterday, tenth-grader Mindy
Pollock was in the school parking lot. She saw two shooters
firing their guns repeatedly, and she watched as her fellow
students dropped to the pavement.
She said she couldn't believe it was real, especially since she
had once before seen this same boy pull a gun on some of her
friends. "The one with the handgun today pulled a shotgun on
my friends once. He said he was sick of being made fun of,"
she said. "He said, 'I'll shoot you, I'll shoot you.'"
Pollock said her friends tried to calm the boy and then ran from
him.
Maher and two of his friends were at a fireworks stand in
Littleton July 4 when the Trench Coat Mafia boys approached them
and said they had a shotgun. Maher and his friends saw no gun,
but the trench coat boys did pull knives and tried to fight with
the others. Maher said he and his friends had had no previous
contact with the boys in black.
"We didn't want to fight, so we talked to them for a while
and then we just got out of there," Maher said.
Several students described the Trench Coat Mafia members in
similar terms: They wore their trench coats every day, no matter
the weather, even in class. Under the coats, they dressed in
black from head to toe - military berets, T-shirts, jeans, combat
boots. Red shoelaces and the occasional Confederate flag patch
were the only departure from the dark theme.
"They were kind of the freaks of the school," said
Kendra Curry, a senior.
Pollock and other students described the Trench Coat Mafia as a
group of perhaps six to ten students who were constantly being
ribbed by the school's athletes and other, more popular cliques.
"The athletes and stuff are really popular," Pollock
said. "They make fun of me all the time because I wear
bell-bottoms and I'm a little hippy girl. And they'd make fun of
the Trench Coat Mafia. They'd say, 'White trash,' and 'Why don't
you comb your hair?' and 'Are you Gothic, man?' and 'You need
some new clothes.' Just stupid teenage stuff."
Maher, too, said athletes at Columbine routinely teased the
trench-coated students, muttering "Goth" every time
they passed one another in the hallways.
Students said the Gothic look appeals only to a tiny minority of
young people in the Denver suburb. "They kind of stay by
themselves," said junior Evan Vitale. "They always have
the neo-Nazi look, so we were talking about them and Hitler's
birthday even before the shooting started. Everybody knew it was
Hitler's birthday."
On one such Web site, a skeleton dances over a raging inferno and
the words "The Trenchcoat." Below, a poem called
"Death of a Jester" includes these lines:
"There will be no performance today/There will be no curtain
call/He can no longer perform for you/So witness the grandest
spectacle of all/It's a one night engagement/So make your way to
the front row/It's the death of a jester/It's one dead man's
show.
"There are no mourners today/Only spectators at the
scene/Relishing in this bizarre event . . . /He died from no
acclaim/I heard his dying words/As his final breath he gave/He
wanted to be taken seriously/Now he's taken to the grave."
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