Columbine: Not a tear was shed for the victims (Part three)

The eight minute gap

Note: Just for reference as we move through the events of 4/20/1999, the first shots were fired at 11:19 a.m, and the boys committed suicide at 12:08. Or so they say.)

Typical of a staged event, in the movie we call the “Columbine Massacre,” we have a continuity problems. The official script has the boys placing duffel bags inside the cafeteria containing propane bombs set to explode at 11:17. This was part of the grand design. The bombs would do most of the killing. Kids running from the building would be mowed down. But the bombs failed to go off. According to FBI Special Agent Duane Fuselier in this (45:53 – again with the numbers!) National Geographic television show from 2007), the boys decided to simply shoot anyone they could. No particular student was targeted.

Placement of those duffel bags in the cafeteria is a critical event. But circumstances interfered. A custodian was replacing video tape in the school security camera at the very moment that would have recorded the placement of duffel bags. Therefore, we have no evidence that a key event of that day actually happened. Here is a recount by CNN. 

Each school day, a videotape records the activities in the school cafeteria. Four separate cameras, catching images from four different angles, are set up in corners of the cafeteria. Their primary purpose is to capture on tape any general mischief, food fights or other problems that can happen when 500 teenagers gather in one location.       Because of the cameras’ locations in the cafeteria, there are a few blind corners that the cameras cannot “see” or record on tape.

… The morning tape is replaced by a second around 10:30 or 11 a.m., shortly before the “A” lunch period begins at 11:15 a.m. and the activity in the cafeteria intensifies.

On Tuesday, April 20, the building custodian was behind schedule and was late changing the cafeteria videotape. At 11:14 a.m., he unlocked the door to the backroom where the recording VCR is set up. He hit the eject button, removed the morning videotape and inserted a new one.  But the videotape to record both of the day’s lunch periods and on into the afternoon was one that was being recycled. It had to be rewound. While waiting for the tape to rewind, the custodian left the room to make a quick call home. He hit “record” on tape #2 at 11:22.

In the time between 11:14 when the custodian stopped the first videotape and ejected it from the VCR, and 11:22 when the second tape began to record lunchtime activities in the cafeteria, two large duffel/gym bags appeared beside two separate tables in the lunch room.   In the eight minutes it took the custodian to eject the first videotape, rewind the second one and make a short phone call, the bags became visible.

If your antennae are not straight up on reading that, you simply need more exposure to fake events. There is always some explanation for key evidence being either absent in total or suspicious in some form. This evidence just happened to appear as cameras were disabled. (For the record, this is not an 18-minute gap, as with Watergate. It is only eight.)

The evacuation of the cafeteria

For anyone who has this kind of time, here is a 3 hour, 33 minute and 54 second video from the cafeteria that day. (From this point on I will simply highlight numerology clues In bold. Make of them what you will.) There is the jump at 11:14:54 to 11:22:38, at which time the kids are crawling under tables to hide. At 11:23:35 a man in dark pants and t-shirt (custodian perhaps – he does have telltale keys hanging off his belt) appears and exhorts the kids in some manner. Shortly thereafter Coach Dave Sanders (age 47) leads the charge, as seen below. By 11:24:14 it is pandemonium.

His head looks odd, as I see it, almost as if he is wearing a mask. He reminds me a little bit of John Belushi in Animal House, leading a charge with no followers. (I originally thought there were time stamp differences here, but was bleary-eyed. The footage matches as well as the forms of time stamp.)

Then comes the evacuation. It can be seen in the 27-second video below in the first four seconds.

The cameras, which captured Coach Dave’s heroic “Run away!” so vividly are now giving us blurred images.Here are a couple of screen grabs from this video:

Note in the top images that the boy with the white hat appears to have had his face deliberately blurred. No one is recognizable in this clip. What does this indicate?

• The cameras do not capture motion well, which means they are actually kind of useless, or
• We are looking at copies of copies, or
• The footage has been altered.
• The footage was filmed in advance or after the events, and they are hiding this fact.

All are possibilities, and I lean towards deliberate alteration with a strong possibility of staging. For whatever reason, due to blurriness, the evacuation scenes are useless in terms of identifying anyone.

The kids were told to hide under the tables, and then to run away. Anyone attending an American school knows about fire drills. We were not told to hide under desks – we only did that in case of a Soviet Union or Chinese or Cuban nuclear attack. We left the building in an orderly fashion. Pandemonium, which is understandable, has to be kept in check.

I suggest in the future that a leader running out of a room yelling “Run away!” during an emergency should be said to be “Pulling a Dave Sanders.” Also, it should be noted here too that the cafeteria of Columbine High School is directly next to the exits, so that the kids probably should have merely left the building. Instead, they hid in other rooms, which led to the frightful library massacre (to be covered is a later segment).

Propane bombs? Really?

I am going to insert the 27-second video again here so that you don’t have to jump up and down the page. Note that we are dealing with spliced footage to condense events down to a manageable time frame. If you have the patience, again, go to this 3:33:54 video to see the unedited director’s cut.

In the opening scene we see Harris* firing a rifle – he is said to be attempting to ignite the propane bomb that was planted when the camera were turned off between 11:14 and 11:22. He misses, apparently is not a good shot, or is only effective at very short-range. Had he succeeded, it would have been lights out, as that bomb, according to Wikipedia, would have killed or injured most of the 488 kids (!) in the room, and collapsed the ceiling, bring the library down on them.

[*Just a side note: We cannot say with any certainty that we are looking and Klebold and Harris, although they have the right body types and hair. Their faces are too blurry. These could be body doubles, quite common in Hollywood.]

Alas, no cigar, so Klebold is seen hurling an object across the room, to no effect. What was it? We are told the boys had Molotov cocktails in addition to the propane bombs, and that one of them eventually caused a partial propane explosion at 11:46.

The explosion at 18 seconds into the video (at 11:46 a.m. by the time stamp in the unedited footage), is said to be a partial explosion of the propane bombs, and is highly suspect. As anyone living next door to a meth lab knows, propane blasts are deadly. Here are a couple of examples:

A real propane bomb exploding is a kinetic energy event. Expanding gases send out a destructive shock wave that causes the damage as seen above. Fire is an after-effect.

Due to Hollywood, Americans are ignorant about bombs. We are told, for instance, that the fertilizer bomb at Oklahoma City (that happened four years and one day earlier) severed the columns holding up the building, causing a massive collapse. That is quite impossible, as will be explained down below*.

In the movies they show a flash of flame and augment it with sound effects. Often times people are able to outrun the shock wave by diving in slow motion towards a camera, which is unaffected by the explosion, of course.

So take a moment to review-second video, and at second 18 you will see the explosion. Note the table in front of it is undisturbed (shown to the left). The objects on that table do not move. That is not a propane blast. That is a mere gasoline fire, quickly extinguished by the sprinkler system.

For an example of the effects of a real propane bomb, here’s a video of a small tank suspended in air with a fire underneath it.

Shock waves resulting from explorations diminish in force exponentially as they move away from the initial event. If you are ten feet away you will feel one-one-hundredth of the shock wave as if one foot away, for example. For this reason, *the fertilizer bomb in OKC could not have severed any columns. That would have to have been done by explosives strapped to those columns.

The people setting off this bomb know to get away and down low, as it is the shrapnel that is most deadly. They are far enough away to miss the full force of the shock wave. The camera is undisturbed.

Here is how Wikipedia describes the bombs planted by the boys when the cameras were so conveniently turned off:

“The youths placed the duffel bags containing the bombs—set to explode at approximately 11:17 a.m.^[16]—inside the cafeteria before returning to their separate vehicles to await the explosion and shoot survivors fleeing the building. Had these bombs exploded with full power, they would have killed or severely wounded all 488 students in the cafeteria and possibly collapsed the ceiling, dropping part of the library into the cafeteria.^{[38]” (Emphasis added.)}

From this, and from the available footage, and from Wiki’s assertion that there was indeed a “partial” explosion of the propane bombs, I conclude that no bombs were planted, and that part of the story is constructed to make the event appear to be even more diabolical than it actually was.  There were no propane bombs.

End Part 3

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Intermission
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Conclusion