By COLLEEN SLEVIN, The Associated Press
GOLDEN, Colorado (AP) -- A videotape of the Columbine High School gunmen laughing and shooting at trees and bowling pins six weeks before they killed 12 classmates and a teacher was released to the public.
“Imagine that in someone’s (expletive) brain,” Eric Harris says.
The tape of Harris and Dylan Klebold, who committed suicide after the rampage on April 20, 1999, shows at least four weapons, including automatic rifles, shotguns and a pistol.
Clad in a trenchcoat, Klebold at one point holds a sawed-off shotgun and shoots from the hip at a bowling pin wedged between two tree limbs. He and Harris then look at a bullet-shredded tree trunk.
Harris also blows across the muzzle of a shotgun like a gunslinger.
The homemade tape was released Wednesday at the urging of the Jefferson County sheriff’s office and a task force established by the attorney general’s office, both of which want to make evidence in the case public.
The sheriff’s office earlier released surveillance video showing the teenagers as they entered the high school cafeteria during their rampage.
Randy Brown, a member of the task force, said he and his wife warned sheriff’s deputies more than a year before the shootings that Harris had threatened to kill one of their sons.
“The videotape is important,” Brown said. “What’s really important is did the sheriff see it, did the school see it, or did the parents see it? How many opportunities were missed to stop these two killers?”
Harris and Klebold were in a video class at Columbine, but Jefferson County schools spokesman Casey Mahon said he did not know whether the tape was made on school equipment or whether it was viewed in school before the shootings.
Mahon said the school district was investigating.
Sheriff’s investigators and the district attorney’s office said they learned of the video two weeks after the shootings from Mark Manes, one of the people on the tape.
Manes told investigators he got a copy of the tape from the gunmen. Manes’ lawyers turned the tape over to authorities.
No copies of the tape were ever recovered from the gunmen’s homes, sheriff’s spokeswoman Jacki Tallman said.
In addition to Manes and the gunmen, the tape shows Philip Duran and Manes’ girlfriend, Jessica Miklich. Duran recorded most of the footage, authorities said.
Duran and Manes, in their 20s at the time of the shootings, were charged with providing the teens with guns. Duran was sentenced in June 2000 to 4 1/2 years in prison; Manes was sentenced in 1999 to six years in prison.