'Somber day': Salazar opens book on probe

Former deputy says bosses lied after Columbine attack, report by AG discloses

Kevin Vaughan, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, February 27, 2004

Top Jefferson County sheriff's officials lied to the public after the Columbine tragedy about their knowledge of the killers, a former deputy told state investigators.

The former officer, John Hicks, grew so concerned about the accuracy of statements being made by department brass that he approached a superior, and Hicks refused to speak to the press about the school shootings because he "would not be allowed to tell the truth."

Hicks' account is but one element in a report issued Thursday by Colorado Attorney General Ken Salazar that showed sheriff's deputies well aware of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold - with 15 contacts in six incidents - many months before their horrific April 20, 1999, attack on the school.

The department's leaders have always denied some of those incidents and contacts.

In addition to the charges by Hicks, another former deputy told state investigators that one official, then-Lt. John Kiekbusch, effectively ended a March 1998 investigation of the soon-

to-be killers when he decided detectives didn't have enough evidence to search the Harris home.

The aborted search was a year before the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history.

Salazar, however, said he found no malfeasance in the decisions made by sheriff's officials before the Columbine shootings.

"My own view is that there was information that the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office had, but there was no nefarious plot, or deliberate plot, on the part of any member of law enforcement to stop any kind of intercession that would have prevented Columbine," he said.

But in a sometimes tense news conference, Salazar could not answer repeated questions about whether sheriff's officials, after the shootings in 1999, tried to cover up their actions in 1997 and 1998.

"The reality of that is I do not know today," Salazar said. "What I do know is today under this sheriff, Ted Mink, there is no such thing going on."

Public sees evidence for first time

Salazar's report came on a day of unprecedented access to evidence in the case - everything from a bloodied ballcap found in the school library to Harris' black duster. The evidence was opened to the public for the first time, and 975 people showed up to wander among the bullets, the explosives, the guns and knives, the brown paper sacks filled with the clothes of those who were wounded and killed.

"Today is a somber day," Salazar said.

Salazar also acknowledged that his investigators were still searching for missing documents, including a file belonging to a former sheriff's deputy that deals with the 1998 report.

And he would not disclose the substance of interviews done Tuesday with Kiekbusch, former Sheriff John Stone and former Undersheriff John Dunaway.

"It wouldn't be appropriate for me to discuss information in the context of an ongoing investigation," said Deputy Attorney General Mike Goodbee, who headed the probe.

Hicks, now a deputy sheriff in South Carolina, accused the three of deceiving the public about the department's handling of the 1998 report from Randy and Judy Brown that Harris had threatened to kill their son, Brooks, on his violent Web site and that Harris and Klebold were building pipe bombs.

After the shootings, Stone publicly questioned whether Brooks Brown was involved in the plot to attack the school. Kiekbusch challenged the account of Randy and Judy Brown that they'd had a face-to-face meeting with Hicks and, in explaining the response to the 1998 report, contended that investigators could not link Harris to any other unsolved pipe bomb cases in the county.

But Hicks told Salazar's investigators that he went to Sgt. Randy West and questioned the truthfulness of statements being issued by Stone, Dunaway and Kiekbusch. The meeting was interrupted, and it was never rescheduled. West told Salazar's investigators that he remembered Hicks raising the issue.

Hicks also said that after Columbine he was told by Dunaway to "talk to the press."

"Hicks knew he would not be allowed to tell the truth, so he refused," Salazar's report said.

Among the unanswered questions still lingering Thursday: Could criminal charges be filed if strong evidence of an organized cover-up was developed?

Kathy Sasak, assistant district attorney for Jefferson County, acknowledged that as she listened to Salazar's report, she wondered to herself whether a crime - possibly "official public misconduct" - had occurred. If it had, she said, the statute of limitations already would have run out.

Report sparks anger, dismay

For the families of some who died, the allegations against Kiekbusch, Stone and Dunaway and the missing files fueled their long-held belief that the public had been deceived.

"If that's not proof of a cover-up, I don't know what is," said Rich Petrone, whose stepson, Danny Rohrbough, was killed.

Stone, who took office only three months before Columbine and later described it as a "tar baby" he couldn't shake, said Thursday he was caught off guard by the charges Hicks leveled at him, Kiekbusch and Dunaway.

"That totally blindsides me that he would say that," said Stone, who left office a year ago. "I don't know what he's talking about.

"I don't know if he just doesn't like Kiekbusch and is taking cheap shots at him."

Kiekbusch and Dunaway, who both work for the Wackenhut Corp. in Washington, D.C., could not be reached Thursday.

A woman who answered the phone at Hicks' home said he would not comment.

Salazar's investigation, the third outside probe aimed at answering the questions surrounding the Columbine attack, was launched in October.

The new investigation began after sheriff's investigator John Healy discovered an Aug. 7, 1997, report about the late-night high jinks of Harris and Klebold stuffed into the pocket of a three-ring binder in his home office. The binder had been given to Healy by Hicks before he left the sheriff's office in June 2000 to return to South Carolina.

Hicks was the same investigator who was given the March 1998 report from the Browns.

Six days after the discovery of the 1997 document, Sheriff Ted Mink made it public and asked Salazar to investigate.

Contacts with killers

On Thursday, both Salazar and Goodbee said the investigation wasn't completed. But they outlined a number of allegations that both shed new light on the handling of reports before the Columbine tragedy and raised new questions about the response of various officials:

• Kiekbusch, who headed the Columbine investigation and fielded questions about the handling of the Browns' 1998 report, looked at a draft affidavit for a search warrant for Harris' home in 1998 and concluded that there was not enough evidence to go ahead with it.

• Just after the Columbine shootings were reported - at a time when law officers were rushing to the school from all over the metro area - Kiekbusch ordered Hicks not to respond to the scene.

• An investigative file compiled by Detective Mike Guerra, who wrote the draft affidavit, apparently disappeared for several days after the Columbine attack. It and other documents could not be located by Salazar's investigators.

• Guerra "ran the affidavit by an unknown" prosecutor - contradicting earlier reports that no one in the district attorney's office was aware of it in 1998.

Kiekbusch, who left the sheriff's department in the fall of 2002, had contended after Columbine that investigators did all they could with the 1998 report. He said that detectives were unable to determine any evidence of a crime.

But he also never publicly disclosed the existence of the search warrant affidavit, written in early April 1998.

It came to light after CBS News and the families of several victims went to court, forcing its release in 2001.

Guerra wrote the report, and former sheriff's detective Glenn Grove told Salazar's investigators that Kiekbusch looked at it and concluded that "he didn't have enough for a search warrant and that he needed to keep working on it."

Specifically, according to Grove, Kiekbusch questioned the lack of an "eyewitness" to tie Harris to an unsolved pipe bomb case.

Hicks told investigators that when the Columbine shootings were reported just before 11:30 a.m. on April 20, 1999, he "was not allowed to respond, but ordered to stay at the office by Lt. Kiekbusch."

A day or two after Columbine, Hicks told investigators, he realized that Harris was the same person he and the other detectives had looked at a year earlier.

Hicks also told investigators that several days after the shootings, Guerra told him that his file on Harris had been removed from his desk, then returned.

Guerra, however, did not recall the episode when he was questioned by Salazar's investigators.

That file, and Guerra's daily reports for much of 1998, have not been located by Salazar's investigators.

"We're still in the process of searching for those documents," Salazar said.

At the same time, Guerra told investigators that he had "run the affidavit by an unknown DA, who told him he didn't have probable cause."

Guerra could not remember the name of that prosecutor.

Investigation into memory

District Attorney Dave Thomas had always maintained that nobody from his office had been aware of the draft affidavit until after the Columbine shootings.

On Thursday, he stood by his earlier statements, contending that Guerra apparently had called someone in his office for advice but hadn't shown that person the draft affidavit.

"There's nothing inconsistent at all about what I've said in the past," Thomas said.

The investigation also showed that sheriff's officers had 15 different "contacts" with Harris and Klebold between February 1997 and July 1998. They revolved around six separate incidents - five of them the result of police reports made by the Browns as well as a 1998 van break-in.

Salazar, Mink, Goodbee and Thomas faced openly hostile questions from reporters about how truthful sheriff's officials had been in the past.

Still, they skirted questions about whether sheriff's officials had covered up their handling of the reports made to them before Columbine.

"Forensic evidence of gunshots and bullets are easier, or certainly more clear, types of evidence in determining what occurred," Goodbee said. "The vast majority of evidence that we gathered in this investigation related to people's memory of what occurred - what occurred six and seven years ago."

But he also said he was still asking questions.

"We are still in the process of looking at some things with respect to the outstanding matters, including Lieutenant Kiekbusch, and there may be some additional information there," Salazar said. "But I don't think I'm going to comment beyond that."

He also said that in retrospect, the search warrant should have been pursued in 1998, but "those are answers that I can say, 'Yes,' today."

'The truth is out there'

It was all difficult to take for the parents of some of those who died.

Tom Mauser, whose son, Daniel, was killed in the school library, said he wants more answers about the Browns' 1998 report.

"The big question is, where did it stop? The 'it' is the report," Mauser said.

And Dawn Anna said she won't quit pushing for answers.

Long after the news conference ended, she stood to one side of the room, a button on her lapel featuring a smiling picture of her daughter, Lauren Townsend, and the words, "The truth is out there."

Lauren, a 4.0 student, was shot to death in the school library.

"They fumbled before April 20 of '99," Anna said. "They fumbled on April 20 of '99.

"And they've covered their tracks since then."

Early on, one official after another promised her they'd get her the answers she craves. That gave way to the sentiment that the families should let go and move on.

She's not ready to.

"I want people to remember the way they felt that day," Anna said. "I want people to live up to those promises."

Staff writers Lynn Bartels, Jeff Kass and Peggy Lowe contributed to this report. vaughank@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5019