The Web warning signs of last week's Colorado school massacre slipped beneath the radar of parents and school administrators, online services, police and outside watchdogs. But that radar is now working with a vengeance -- and some Net-savvy kids say they're feeling a backlash.
More than a year before students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went on their April 20 rampage at Littleton's Columbine High School, killing 12 students and a teacher as well as themselves, Harris posted detailed descriptions of the pipe bombs they were making on a Web site.
When a teen-age friend, Brooks Brown, saw those documents in March 1998, he thought the police should be notified.
"My parents talked to the bomb squad," Brown told NBC News.
The Jefferson County Sheriff's Department filed a report on what it considered a "suspicious incident," said spokesman Steve Davis. But nothing further was done.
Columbine student Jonathan Ladd, meanwhile, said he also raised early concerns about the school clique that Harris and Klebold joined, the "Trenchcoat Mafia."
Warning signs overlooked
Six months ago, when Ladd took over as the student administrator for the school's Web site, he came upon material that group members -- not including Harris and Kelbold -- posted while they were running the site.
Ladd found a "dark Web site" with disturbing art, weird song lyrics and "probably messages about different hate things" -- and said he reported it to the school's technology administrator. School officials told him to delete the data but didn't seem worried about the content, he said.
"I just did what I was told and got rid of it," he told NBC News' George Lewis.
School officials were not available Monday to comment.
A couple of months ago, two researchers at the Simon Wiesenthal Center also spotted the Trenchcoat Mafia's Web material. The Los Angeles-based center monitors more than 1,600 Web sites produced by hate groups.
"The fact that our researchers didn't choose to capture that Web site meant that there was nothing that explicitly or implicitly threatened anyone," said the center's associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper. "It was a page which they don't really remember very much about it all, which means just a couple of teen-agers playing around."
One of Harris' documents, posted on a Web site provided for America Online users, laid out homespun instructions for making pipe bombs. It even cautioned experimenters to handle gunpowder with care, since "mom and dad might ask some questions."
AOL's rules forbid posting bomb-making instructions, and although the service does not regularly monitor user home pages, action would have been taken if AOL were notified about such a site, spokeswoman Kim McCreary told MSNBC.
In the wake of the April 20 massacre, Harris' Web pages -- and other pages that may relate to the investigation -- have been removed and are being analyzed by the law enforcement agencies, McCreary said.
Time for soul searching
In the past week, the Littleton tragedy has sparked a new round of soul-searching over the "dark side" of the Internet -- along with the influence of neo-Nazi rock lyrics, violent video games, Gothic fashion and movies such as "The Basketball Diaries" and "The Matrix."
"The weaving of this material -- the hate material, the alternative music, the anarchy sites, the bomb-making, the terrorism -- that's all woven into a subculture that our kids know about," Cooper said.
In a Gallup poll, 82 percent of those surveyed said the Internet deserved at least some blame for the shootings, and 34 percent thought it deserved a great deal of the blame.
But on message boards and in chat rooms, some young Internet users complained that grown-ups were going after the wrong targets. Instead of addressing the alienation that high-school "geeks" often felt, parents and teachers were attacking Internet use and other aspects of their subculture, they said. Some said they were threatened with suspension, simply for sympathizing with the extreme anger and frustration that motivated Harris and Klebold.
On an AOL teen message board, one subscriber faulted a media depiction of the Trenchcoat Mafia:
"I have two friends who have worn black trench coats for 2 or 3 years. But the article said that me and all of my friends were practically just like the Littleton shooters," the subscriber said. "Why do things have to be an extreme now?"
Meanwhile, media critic Jon Katz posted further dark testimony from teens.
"I was called into the principal's office and he asked me if I was a member of any hate group, or any online group, or if I had ever played Doom or Quake. ... I thought I was going to be brave and defiant, but I just fell apart. I cried and cried," one correspondent wrote.
Teens get a voice online
On the flip side, the Littleton tragedy also has sparked new efforts to give alienated teens more of a voice online.
"It's important to understand that speech is not the problem, speech is the solution," said Charles Platt, who writes for Wired magazine and helped launch a new site titled High School Underground.
"Free speech doesn't cause massacres, nor does the availability of information," Platt said. "It's people feeling that they cannot speak -- or if they do speak, no one listens."
High School Underground presents essays written in response to the shootings, tips for creating online publications, a discussion list and links to other Web resources for "kids on the fringe."
Meanwhile, an Internet safety program known as Cyberangels established a new service, KIDSreportline, that allows classmates to report Web sites that threaten suicide or violence against fellow students.
The service would work with law enforcement, schools, the Web authors or the classmates to respond to troubling sites, said Parry Aftab, executive director of Cyberangels and a lawyer specializing in cyberspace issues. She said Harris' postings might have gotten more attention if such a service were in place.
"This is a terrible, horrible tragedy," she said. "It's something that for some reason I'm personally grieving over. But it's also an opportunity for parents to talk with their children about things like this ... about Nazism, about being cruel to other kids, about acting out, about responding to threats of violence."
NBC News correspondent George Lewis contributed to this report.
