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Apr-18-02, 12:33 PM (EST)
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"Mention of Miller and Lewis"
 
  
Secret Agents
Jeffco is a public-records embarrassment.
BY PATRICIA CALHOUN

Jefferson County just doesn't get the
message.

When confronted with bad news, Jeffco
inevitably decides to kill the messenger rather
than contemplate the message. Which,
almost as inevitably, is this: Someone
screwed up. Again.

The most recent screwup involves more
leaked documents coming out of the
Columbine investigation (the grand-champion
screwup), including some grisly photographs
of the crime scene. The mere thought that
these photos somehow eluded Jeffco's crack
security is enough to frighten families of the
victims, who desperately hope that they
won't log on to the Internet one day and find
a photograph of their dead son or daughter.
(The parents of Daniel Rohrbough didn't
learn for certain that he'd been killed until
they saw their boy, lying motionless on a
sidewalk outside the school, in the April 21,
1999, Rocky Mountain News.) And the
very mention that these photos now exist
outside of the evidence room has been
enough to panic Jeffco officials, who are
desperately trying to track the leak to its
source.

If they can charge that source and a few
tributaries along the way with a crime, so
much the better.

Since word of this latest leak seeped out
earlier this month, the Jefferson County
Sheriff's Department has been calling around
town, trying to determine who has access to
the photographs -- and how they got that
access. Westword's turn came Monday,
when Captain Dave Walcher -- Jeffco's
incident commander at Columbine that
bloody Tuesday three years ago and rarely
heard in public since -- called a reporter and
asked how he'd obtained certain documents, including two photographs
published in our March 7 issue: one a photo of a timing device (carefully
cropped), the other a Dylan Klebold-inscribed pipe bomb.

The real question, of course, is why these pictures are still deemed too
sensitive to be released to the public; since Jeffco has officially closed its
Columbine investigation, there's no reason not to release just about everything
in the files -- except, perhaps, for medical records and the more graphic
photos of bodies. (Those are making the rounds, too; I recently witnessed the
casual exchange of a handful of photos showing Dylan Klebold dead in the
library -- photos that have yet to surface anywhere in print.) And if Jeffco
doesn't recognize that now's the time to come clean, then Attorney General
Ken Salazar's new Columbine Open Records Task Force should do the job
("The Paper Chase," March 21).

But Walcher did not want to discuss the particulars of the Colorado Open
Records Act. He wanted to know the source of the photos we'd published,
whether we'd paid for the photos, whether we'd take money for the photos.
And while we weren't about to give up our source -- not only are there
journalistic principles involved, but hell, at this point, Jeffco is so full of leaks
that the better query might be who isn't sneaking out public documents -- we
made no secret of the fact that we would not be selling the photos. If, of
course, we actually have any photos.

That doesn't mean that someone else won't sell them, though. The sheriff's
department isn't the only group calling around. In recent weeks I've heard
from family members, lawyers and private investigators, all trying to determine
whether there are pictures for sale. The family members are asking because
they don't want to see them in print; the lawyers and investigators, on the
other hand, could well be looking to broker just such a deal. The National
Enquirer has been sniffing around, and the calls are likely to become more
insistent -- and the offers more lucrative -- as Columbine's third anniversary
rapidly approaches.

And if, at some point, money does change hands, Jeffco stands ready to cuff
them.

Not for the heinous crimes committed that day at Columbine. And not for the
crimes of omission that the Jeffco sheriff's department may have committed in
the year leading up to the shootings, when it failed to follow through on a
search-warrant affidavit that could have led deputies to Eric Harris's diaries --
and details of deeds still months in the offing. (Rather than ask who leaked
Harris's diary entries, which first appeared on Westword's Web site in early
December, Jeffco authorities pointed a finger at the Harris family, which had
little reason to release Eric's rantings.) Not for the apparent crimes of
commission in the years after Columbine, either: when Sheriff John Stone
refused to talk to parents at the same time he was showing Klebold and
Harris's basement tapes to Time magazine; when the Littleton Fire
Department (our butt-ball buddies) started showing a Columbine tape around
the country; when Jeffco's official report displayed obvious mistakes.

No, the big crime would be the selling of information. And unlike the horrors
of


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