Tiffany Typher and Eric Harris together for Homecoming '95.
Eighteen-year-old Tiffany Typher dated Harris briefly four years ago, when the two were freshmen at Columbine, and he took her to homecoming. But he left her with one bizarre and lingering impression after she broke up with him.
A mutual friend [Brooks Brown] asked her to stop by the Harris house, where Typher remembers stepping into the backyard and seeing Harris sprawled on the ground by a large rock with blood splattered everywhere - as if he had bashed his head on the rock in a lovesick suicide.
"I knew it wasn't real, I could tell it was fake blood,'' she said. "I yelled, "You guys are stupid!' and started running to a friend's house and crying, because it shook me up. He was doing that so maybe I'd come back to him and say I'm sorry.''
They became friends again last year, but Typher says she already had seen a change in Harris. He'd started dressing differently, in all black. Harris seemed increasingly agitated by the abuse and disrespect from the school's athletes toward the Trench Coat Mafia.
"They hassled him, definitely,'' Typher said. "Everywhere they went, they were taunted and teased about how they dressed, about being gay. You could tell he'd get upset by it. Most of the people in that group, when people teased them, they walked off and didn't say anything. But he seemed really fired up when he talked about the jocks. I had no idea his hate would drive him this far.''
Typher said most of her contact with Harris was in German class from their freshman through junior years. Harris developed a preoccupation with a techno-rock group called Rammstein, whose lyrics he studied devoutly, and immersed himself in all things German.
"He said he felt he learned more from Rammstein than he did from the teacher,'' Typher said.
- The Denver Post (Published on April 23, 1999)