Loners, Misfits, `Trench Coat Mafia' Talked Openly Of Blowing Up School

The "Trench Coat Mafia," as the suspects in yesterday's shooting rampage were called, stood out like sore thumbs.

They always wore ankle-length black trench coats, dark sunglasses and black berets. They numbered between five and 15, a collection of current and former students, hovering on the fringes of the campus. They talked openly about blowing up the school.

In many ways, they were just like students involved in the recent spate of high-school shootings throughout the nation. In other ways, they were starkly and chillingly different.

Late yesterday, police identified seniors Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris as the two students involved in the "suicide mission" at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. Police also held four of their friends for questioning.

Students at the Colorado school said the group has been a constant target of derision for at least four years.

"Kids get picked on," said senior Lucas Johnson. "They were harassed, not included. They were always on the outside looking in. There's always a group that gets picked on, but they seemed to like it that way."

Some described the group as dark disciples of the occult who worship everyone from shock-rocker Marilyn Manson to Adolf Hitler. Yesterday was the anniversary of the German dictator's birth.

"They're basically outcasts, Gothic people," said Peter Maher, a junior. "They're into anarchy. They're white supremacists and they're into Nostradamus stuff and Doomsday."

Inspired by fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons, Gothic has become a fascination of many American high schoolers, some of whom simply dress in black clothing and paint their fingernails black, while others immerse themselves in a pseudo-medieval world.

As outcasts and social misfits shunned by most of their classmates, they neatly fit the profiles of killers in shooting sprees from Paducah, Ky., to Jonesboro, Ark., to Pearl, Miss. They were disaffected boys, out to avenge social slights.

But the Colorado suspects were unique, too: More militant, more visibly angry, they may have been quiet outcasts, but they were noticeable ones. They may have been unpopular, but they were well-known to almost every schoolmate, because they were so violent, so mean, so armed, so "weird," as many put it.

Suspect once pulled a shotgun

Tenth-grader Mindy Pollock saw the two boys shooting her fellow students in the parking lot but couldn't believe it was real.

She had once before seen one of the boys 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.

This raises the question: Why didn't teachers, administrators and local police know of the group?

"School officials said they had no problems with the two suspects, there were no discipline problems," said Jefferson County sheriff's spokesman Steve Davis.

And district Superintendent Jane Hammond said: "We don't know whether it's a new group or we're just now experiencing them."

But students at Columbine knew the group, and for quite some time.

Sean Kelly, a 16-year-old junior, shared a computer lab with Harris.

"They just didn't seem to be all there. They liked things like Soldier of Fortune magazine," Kelly said. Harris made his own video production at school in which he bragged about some of his new guns.

A yearbook photo

In the 1998 yearbook, a photo of a half-dozen members of the group, showing them locking arms and smiling, was accompanied by the caption, "Who says we're different? Insanity's healthy. . . . Stay alive, stay different, stay crazy."

Student Alejandra Marsh, who said she knew one of the suspects, told a Denver TV station, "Their motive is, basically, because they hate the school and the administration. . . . They've always really talked about just coming and blowing up the school."

One group member reportedly had his own Internet site, listing the people he hated, glorifying violence. A parent of a Columbine student reported the Web site to local police, who, she said, did nothing.

And one of the suspects had a member profile on AOL listing his Personal Quote as, "Kill em AALLLL!!!!"

Steve Dreaden, 14, took gym class last year with a member of the Trench Coat Mafia, a boy who never removed his sunglasses.

"He'd more or less hunt kids down playing dodge ball, then hit them as hard as he could," Dreaden recalled. "He'd slide behind you and hit you with the ball, really hard. . . . The guy is weird, but we didn't think he'd do anything like this."

"There were only about four or five members of the Trench Coat Mafia," said Joe Dreaden, 16, Steve's brother. "Most of them supposedly graduated with seniors last year. These are just the stragglers or something."

Targeting jocks, minorities

Rumors swirled throughout the day that the suspects targeted minorities and athletes. In fact, tension between athletes and gangs has been all too common at Columbine, and in the county at large.

However, officials said today that only one of the victims was black.

Last fall, county commissioners heard testimony from sheriff's officers about rising tension between athletes and gangs.

Many students acknowledged that Columbine is sharply divided, with teens squaring off into rigid cliques: the jocks, the skateboarders, the "Goths," the rich kids, the brains - and the Trench Coat Mafia.

But Columbine also was an open, attractive, sprawling campus in the middle of a relatively safe suburban enclave. From the outside, it seemed an unlikely scene for deputies standing guard, much less a tragedy of yesterday's magnitude, no matter how segregated the students.

And this, too, sets the Colorado shooting apart from others: The Columbine community is neither rural nor poor, not a place where male students would be expected to harbor such feelings of total isolation from the outside world.

But students said the Trench Coat Mafia seemed to feel like a world unto themselves.

Joe Dreaden said a friend of a friend was in the library when the shooting began. The friend said the shooter talked about "this being revenge about something."

Revenge for what, Dreaden didn't know.

This report is compiled from accounts by the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press and The (Colorado Springs) Gazette.