FROM LATE DECEMBER 2016 INTO January of the New Year, Denver media was bombarded with a sensationalist story the likes of which has become all too common in the last 20 years. The faces and names of two students were plastered over television screens across the metro area. The reason: their arrest over accusations in planning a school shooting. These two students, however, stood out compared to others making headlines in the years since Columbine, for two particular reasons.
First, the two students were arrested well before any deadly action was undertaken, thanks to Colorado’s “Safe2Tell” initiative and an anonymous tip sent through the service. Second, both students were young females—an exceedingly rare characteristic of student shooters.
Documents, including online activities, displayed during the proceedings indicated Sienna Johnson, a student of Mountain Vista High School in the Douglas County School District, befriended fellow Mountain Vista student Brooke Higgins online. This contact, District Attorney of the 18th Judicial District George Brauchler claims, was hardly innocuous; they had exchanged phrases like “wanting to get good with guns” and making “Columbine 2” and expressed attraction to the Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Other evidence shown during the proceedings included many of Johnson’s personal diary entries and writings. Her diary entries, published in Westword Magazine, had Johnson describe herself and certain personal details: being born in 1999 to an aimless family and spending her childhood transient from community to community and struggling to find a connection. Westword further describes Johnson as a bright and gifted student and very creative. She won a number of creative writing and artistry-related rewards in middle school.
Sienna Johnson’s diary entry on her own birth year is, in fact, one of the few publicly available concrete pieces of information reported actually confirming her age. When the story broke out, media outlets couldn’t agree on how old the two girls actually were (along with a third girl vaguely implicated in a related plot at a Douglas County middle school; the school and student’s identities were kept from the public due to the girl’s alleged age). Aside from Johnson’s diary entries and creative leanings, and the same set of photographs scrounged from social media, school and other sources disseminated through local media countlessly in news segments (including possibly at least one case when Johnson’s and Higgins’s names were mistakenly transposed), there seems to be little else available to the public in terms of who these girls actually were, or are. Sloppily laid and reported facts, abundant contradictions and a lack of care other than to spread the sensationalism of the story are all that are readily available.
Most media accounts seem only to want to paint these two students akin to would-be female versions of Harris and Klebold, with ample soundbytes of concerned parents being thankful of their incarceration. CBS4 News quotes parent Susan Gillis as saying, “I think five years is adequate” in regards to Johnson’s sentence in juvenile detention. The news outlet also quoted parent Brad Tejera as saying, “It scared the heck out of me. They are going to go to prison. They aren’t going to walk free. Am I happy the legal system worked? Yeah.” Almost nothing has come out to suggest any other side of the story—a position seemingly helped along by the prosecution.
A Culture of Systemic Bullying
In the years since Columbine the production of books, articles and news segments of what went wrong and continues to go wrong—video games, Hollywood liberals, the NRA—has nearly become a cottage industry in its own right. With school shootings on the rise, Columbine and Harris and Klebold have become the standard go-to’s for talking points and the bobbing heads they bring—and yet, if anything, the situation only continues to worsen. Going back to when that tragedy was fresh on everyone’s mind, interviews started pouring out about the exact nature of Columbine’s student body and academic culture—a culture that, by all available and accessed accounts, has changed extremely little in both Columbine’s Jefferson County (“JeffCo”) Public Schools and neighboring Douglas County (“DougCo”) Public Schools.
Bullying is deeply and inexorably tied in with the culture that produces school shootings—indeed, a part of the culture of school shootings itself—but it seems to be one that is pushed to the side of larger issues and even intentionally buried. Aside from Higgins and Johnson, one of the few female student shooters, confirmed or otherwise, is Elizabeth Bush, who in 2001 shot another female student in a Pennsylvania school over intense bullying. Bush, who was released in 2007, was under the influence of psychotropic drugs, and she has become a case study in the dangers of both such drugs and intense bullying.
Two survivors of the Stone Douglas shooting (better known as labeled by the national media as the “Parkland Shooting”), Isabelle Robinson and Emma Gonzales, have been caught up in controversy surrounding statements they’ve made that pro-gun groups such as Louder With Crowder and The American Spectacle have implied that bullying of the Parkland shooter as being the root cause and fault, as detailed by Snopes.com. The end result, certainly through no fault of Robinson and Gonzales but eagerly helped along by pro-gun groups and others desperate to mask the gun control discussion, has been to muddy the role of bullying and bully prevention to a degree never before seen in the history of modern American education.
Despite the larger conversation being decidedly steered apart in various directions for the sake of ulterior agendas, authors and experts have nonetheless described the role bullying played in Harris and Klebold’s decision to enact revenge in the most drastic, evil way imaginable—from the recovered and published memoirs of Columbine victim Cassie Bernall, “She Said Yes,” to teen-centric author Todd Strasser’s “Give a Boy a Gun,” effectively a fictionalized version of Columbine that’s nonetheless thoroughly researched and peppered with real facts and statistics (including an extended treatise on the role of bullying in ultimately shaping Harris and Klebold), to “The Spiral Notebook” by Stephen and Joyce Singular, the definitive account of Aurora Theater Shooter James Holmes that also includes an analysis of the roles bullying, culture and even “Big Pharma” had on both Holmes and Harris and Klebold. Indeed, Young Adult fiction concerning thinly-veiled Columbine retellings has nearly become a genre in its own right, including the much hyped 2016 novel “This is Where it Ends” by Marieke Nijkamp, 2014’s “Everything I Never Told You” by Celeste Ng and even as a subplot to the 2017 romance novel “Once and for All” by seminal Young Adult writer Sarah Dessen.
Interviews with parents, former students and other people associated with DougCo schools (note to me: some may choose to remain anonymous but check if you can get actual names) are sympathetic to or outright confirm what Johnson left in her diary: the very student body culture of Mountain Vista is exceedingly toxic to a degree most people think can only be encountered in teen comedy movies or second-rate young adult novels protagonising fashion-obsessed “mean girls.” hat this culture is hardly localized and contained within one school: that this is simply a way of life—the way of life—in the Highlands Ranch neighborhood (which both JeffCo and DougCo Schools feed in and out of), a community particularly described as staunchly conservative and, according to some, outright right-wing.
Many accounts and reports testify to the embedded culture of bullying in Highlands Ranch, including those trusted with students’ well-being and safety. Christopher N. Osher bylined a report in The Denver Post about how the principal of Rocky Heights Middle School, a part of the DougCo school system in Highlands Ranch, walked into a teacher (coincidentally, named Richard Johnson) sexually abusing a 13-year-old female student in 2011. The case was ultimately resolved with Richard Johnson being charged with rape and a multi-million dollar lawsuit levied against the district. Senator Rhonda Fields of Aurora, however, was quoted by Osher as saying that such prosecution of adults abusing their trust is exceptional. Tellingly, Osher goes on to describe the former head of security for DougCo schools, Dan Clemente, as having resigned over the district’s inability to resolve allegations of sexual assault and rape. The principal of Rocky Heights was also reported to no longer be with the district as of 2018. On August 27 in neighboring Denver Public Schools, a nine-year-old student committed suicide; according to cited sources, a contributing factor was bullying as a result of coming out as gay.
A Denver7 news report dated May 3, 2017 chronicles the struggles of Sabrina Inman, a student of ThunderRidge High School in Highlands Ranch (which like Mountain Vista is also part of DougCo Schools), who was inspired to start student-led anti-bullying efforts after frustration with the current student body and academic culture. “You would see kids crying in the bathroom and eating alone in the hallway. For half of the year last year, I was one of those people who sat alone,” Sabrina told Denver7 reporter Sally Mamdooh. “I was being called names like rat and w—e[sic] and I still get called them today.”
DougCo Schools responded with this official statement as told by Denver7: “Although [we] don’t discuss details surrounding this particular student, the incident is being thoroughly investigated … This is the process followed for every alleged incident in our schools, and it was fully implemented in this student’s case.” Sabrina Inman’s grassroots efforts suggest much is still left to be desired, with such activities as passing out shirts with “Do I Have Your Attention?” printed on them.
But perhaps the most telling witnesses of all to the systemic bullying culture of DougCo schools are those who felt they had no choice but to go to the most extreme ends imaginable to end their torment: the two girls arrested over the Mountain Vista planned incident, Brooke Higgins and Sienna Johnson.
FOX31 is quoted as running the following:
When a detective asked Johnson what a mass killing would accomplish, she responded, “It would be taking people down with me. People would know what I felt. People would know how much pain I was in. People would know how much I hated everyone. I would be making a name for myself.”
It’s the girls’ pain that is perhaps most haunting in their journals.
“I’m tired of being the only one suffering,” Higgins wrote. “I’m going to make everyone else suffer.”
Johnson confides the most important warning of all.
“If your child tells you they have a problem, help them or get them help,” she wrote.
Bullying in the school district is not limited to the student body, either. On June 8, 2016, The Denver Post reported on a lawsuit filed by two teachers, each afflicted with an illness, against DougCo Schools, alleging that they had been unfairly and illegally dismissed as a result of their illnesses.
Prosecution Oddities
Many oddities abound in terms of how District Attorney of the 18th Judicial District (and State General Attorney candidate) George Brauchler chose to prosecute the case, not the least of which is how he chose to prosecute the case as what he describes as a “one-of-a-kind” deal, as a “hybrid adult-juvenile” case. Certain elements were prosecuted under the juvenile court system, while others through the adult process. The end result is that the identities and intimate details of two female 16-year-old (or younger, depending on citation) students were made freely available to the media—a rarity, even given the severity of the allegations, and against common practice when prosecuting minors.
A 12-year-old female suspect was involved in a school shooting in January 2018, in what was initially believed to be a case of an accidental discharge; it was first thought that the student brought the gun in response to bullying. A 13-year-old female student was also charged in direct connection with the alleged plans by Higgins and Johnson. In neither case was the identity of the student released to the public.
Kevin Vaughan, a reporter for 9News, also raised questions about the oddities of Brauchler’s handling. Despite the strong wording of online interaction regarding wanting to “get good with guns” and staging “Columbine 2,” as well as alleged accounts of Johnson designing “aerosol bombs” similar to designs used by Harris during the Columbine shooting as put forward by FOX31, Vaughan was unable to conclude that the two girls had any definitive, serious plans for a shooting or had access to weapons.
Vaughan cited another case involving Mitchell Meehan, a male student of Endeavor Academy, who had access to weapons and, in Vaughan’s conclusion, a more serious threat than Higgins and Johnson. Meehan’s case is still pending, but according to Vaughan, he faces a maximum sentence of 18 months in county jail. Higgins faces over three years in juvenile detention and prison, and Johnson faces a total of five years with heavy probationary restrictions upon release. Meehan, who FOX31 reports was 18 at the time of arrest, has his case remaining relatively obscure in local media reporting; both Higgins and Johnson have had their identities and details widely spread across local television media outlets despite being underaged at the time of arrest. Dan Recht, a Denver-area defense attorney, was quoted by Vaughan as saying that Meehan’s case represents a more credible threat than the case of Higgins and Johnson, and that both cases may represent an over-reach, most certainly in the case of Higgins and Johnson.
The Meehan case, like the Higgins and Johnson case, was handled by District Attorney of the 18th Judicial District George Brauchler.
When questioned by Vaughan, Brauchler staunchly defended his decisions by saying the appropriate actions were filed. Defense Attorney Recht disagrees, saying that “felony menacing” may better fit the Higgins and Johnson’s case.
According to the 9News Wants to Know piece by Vaughan, there were almost 500 cases of felony-level threats made in Colorado—and 80 percent of them were made by juveniles. Yet little remains to be done to address this concern other than after-the-fact arrests and prosecution, which does little but crowd juvenile detention centers even more, deny students access to basic education rights and ensure that the issue remains perpetuating, putting Colorado children in danger of becoming both victim and perpetrator.
Media Culpability
Various reports by Westword Magazine, CB4 News Denver, The Denver Channel 7, etc. have been in a hurry to classify Higgins and Johnson in the same vein as actual school shooters—Harris and Klebold, the Parkland shooter and all other school shooters and perpetrators of drastic school violence (a seemingly disproportionate amount of which occurs within Colorado, with shootings or other nationally visible incidents at Arapahoe High School, Platte Canyon High School [both in the Denver Metro Area] and Doherty High School in Colorado Springs, in addition to Columbine, Mountain Vista and still others). In this vein, Higgins and Johnson have been painted with the same brush as Harris and Klebold—deeply troubled, disturbed loners with almost certain psychological problems, if not outright sociopaths, who should be removed from society for the greater good and who are almost incapable of contributing to society save for their complete absence from it or risk severely destructive consequences.
Not so fast, a litany of psychological and psychiatric as well as journalism and “true crime” experts will attest. The issues with the classic public image of Harris and Klebold—and of Higgins and Johnson being painted into the same picture—are multi-fold and of such troubling inaccuracy that they can justify their own complete library of books on the subject—and indeed, they have.
The very public image of Harris and Klebold—and the very fact that they even have a public image comes as a result of the Columbine massacre—is only the first sin the media committed, a sin that has perhaps helped pave the way for Higgins, Johnson and even the aforementioned Elizabeth Bush to end up in incarceration with very real consequences for their teenaged and adult development rather than to receive the actually productive help they require.
As Dave Cullen reports in his seminal book about the massacre, “Columbine,” the media has and continues to misreport the role of bullying in Harris’s and Klebold’s motivations—and in the process, implies that it’s perfectly acceptable for targets of extreme bullying to respond with even more extreme acts of violence. As Cullen details in his book, totalling over 400 pages, bullying and an intensely toxic culture was and indeed still is present at Columbine, and across the entireties of JeffCo Schools as a whole, but Eric Harris in particular may have been a contributor to, not a victim of, that toxicity (although Dylan Klebold may indeed be such a victim—as a direct recipient from Harris).
Furthermore, the continuous painting of Harris and Klebold as bullying victims creates a deep thread within the fabric of American society implicitly stating that extreme violence is an acceptable means for bully targets to find escape. Indeed, this seems to be the main, deciding factor in the apparent admiration and even attraction Higgins and Johnson had to the two Columbine killers. As suggested in their online interactions, neither girl saw either Columbine shooter as a sociopathic killer merely enjoying bloodsport the likes of which have been popularized in such movie franchises as “The Purge,” but rather saw them as victims who were forced to respond in the only way the oppressive, toxic culture of JeffCo Schools and the greater Littleton area would allow them to.
This is an image they bought into thanks to continuous perpetuation by the media-at-large.
All the while, at the same time, this merely masks the true issue of the toxicity of JeffCo and DougCo schools—those responsible for the proliferation of bullying and toxicity are seen as victims, straight-edged students who managed to escape the deadly, misguided wrath of the Harrises and Klebolds, of the Higginses and Johnsons of the world, individuals who simply could not and would not play along with the system and are best treated as animals needing to be put down for the greater good.
This may seem like a contradiction—and indeed, it is. A contradiction perpetuated by the media on the basis of whichever way popular sentiment seems to be following during a given incident.
Dave Cullen is hardly alone in his assessment of the media’s sins in (mis)reporting the Columbine massacre and the very real, very deadly consequences it carries. Jennifer Johnston, Ph. D. and Andrew Joy, both of Western New Mexico University, have written extensively about how media reports and sensationalism greatly contribute to the rise of mass-shootings. Whether intentional or not, this sensationalism has effectively lionized Harris and Klebold—instead of inspiring Higgins and Johnson to find more peaceful, productive ways to speak out about the toxicity of DougCo schools, it instead inspired them to follow in the Columbine killers’ footsteps. Madelyn Gould, Patrick Jamieson, and Dan Romer of the University of Pennsylvania submitted an article to the “American Behavioral Scientist” echoing Johnston’s and Joy’s concerns about media reporting and sensationalism with school shootings. Dr. Paul Mullen, an Australian psychiatrist, outright claims that media sensationalism is the root cause of a massacre occuring in Port Arthur, Tasmania in 1996.
The claims of Cullen—an extremely venerated journalist himself who was at the forefront of the Columbine massacre reporting—along with at least no less than six academic experts, are extremely damning to how the media conventionally covers mass shootings, school-based or otherwise. The truth of these claims can be borne out of how the media has chosen to depict Higgins and Johnson throughout their own ordeal—by dragging them through a proverbial Game of Thrones-like walk of shame where intimate details are not only put on full display, but bizarrely contradicted. They use whatever “facts” help sell whatever idea seems convenient at the time—that these two girls are simply “distaff counterparts” of Harris and Klebold; that these two teenaged girls help put a sexy, seductive spin on school shootings that up to this point was sorely missed and needed; that these girls bought into the false myths and the wrong lessons learned from Columbine that help perpetuate mass-shootings, not diminish them, by bringing to light how bullying and toxicity in school environments should be corrected.
The idea of these two girls being sold by the media as deadly, dark seductresses ripe for guilt-free exploitation is reinforced by public reaction. Within days of being involuntarily spread across local mainstream media, an unauthorized Facebook “fan” page for Sienna Johnson popped up, trying to pass her off as a sex symbol for “alternative-thinking,” “anti-culture miscreants” everywhere. The page was quickly removed by Facebook administration. Comments still pepper Twitter to this day openly sexualizing Higgins and Johnson and objectifying them as overt sexual objects, apparently in a “guilt-free” frenzy given their status as would-be mass killers. Several tweets turn the “missing white woman syndrome” phenomenon on its head, implicitly suggesting that Higgins and Johnson should be recipients of horrific sexual crimes as just punishment, while another extremely bizarre tweet openly expresses desires to “adopt” Brooke Higgins in particular.
Particularly being lost in all the conversation regarding Higgins and Johnson is Cassie Bernall – one of the thirteen victims of the Columbine shooting, immortalized by her proclamation of her religious beliefs and being gunned down for it. But as published in her posthumous memoir, She Said Yes, Bernall more closely resembles Higgins and Johnson than the saintly image proliferated by the media. Originally lumped into the same crowd as Harris and Klebold – her very killers – Bernall nonetheless rose above that reputation to become a model student surrounded by love and kindness. By all indications, Higgins and Johnson are very much capable of this same transformation – along with hundreds of thousands of students across the country.
A Most Peculiar Case
After the tragedy of Parkland, and after years of amounting tragedies that include the Las Vegas Shooting, the Orlando Pulse Nightclub Shooting, several shootings in Colorado including at Arapahoe High School and stretching back to Columbine and even before, the issue of mass violence perpetrated by our youth marches towards a seemingly inevitable epidemic. Yet, despite students being galvanized into marching, little seems to be done by the powers-that-be aside from highly publicized shoulder shrugging and the flinging of Second Amendment Rights rhetoric.
In the case of Brooke Higgins and Sienna Johnson of Mountain Vista High School, their own forced deaths at the hands of police or themselves and potentially scores of others has been seemingly prevented, allowing for local politicians to pat themselves on the back. But the truth of what exactly has been prevented and what remains permissive and evasive in a community with a rocky reputation as far as teens are concerned remains obscured.
The only truths known for certain are the most basic of facts: two teenage girls are in juvenile detention until they reach adulthood involving highly unusual plea deals and an unorthodox prosecution lead by an attorney with unabashed political aspirations in a state that, despite constant campaigning by grassroots groups, remains near the top when it comes to student-committed mass shootings. Little has been done to substantively change the culture to prevent such acts of violence and make all students feel welcome and inclusive.
Patty Jenkins, a film and television director who received acclaim for “Wonder Woman” and “Monster,” a film about child prostitute-turned-serial killer Aileen Wuornos, was asked to speak about the latter in the introduction for Love is Love, a special collection of comics in memorial and support for the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting.
Jenkins described the chronic, prolonged physical and emotional abuse, rape and sexual trafficking Wuornos suffered that eventually helped shape her from childhood into a murderer of over half a dozen men: “To me, all of this painted quite a different portrait than ‘man-hating lesbian who killed for thrills,’ but no amount of clarification seemed to bring the world around to considering her as anything more.”
“Thirteen years later,” Jenkins continues in Love is Love, “I wanted to make a film (“Monster”) about her—not because I wanted to apologize for what she had done or dismiss its gravity, but because I could not accept the lack of compassion and understanding that was being applied to this incredibly tragic case of damage and destruction. Aileen had clearly crossed a line and finally turned into exactly the same kind of victimizer that had created her … But if only she had found more compassion in the world, if only our world could have looked a little more deeply at her story a little sooner, maybe this could have been avoided.”
Those who have studied what molded Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold into mass killers—from those who have studied Cassie Bernall’s last words to the fictional yet all too real world Todd Strasser and other authors have penned—would be inclined to argue that the same could have been applied to the Columbine killers themselves. Those that knew them personally—including actual Columbine survivors interviewed anonymously—would be inclined to disagree; there was something inherent in both boys that made them “off.”
Isabelle Robinson and Emma Gonzales would also argue that there was something demonstrably “off” with the Parkland shooter—but they also agree that something needed to be done, that intervention was necessary but not present. The truth of Brooke Higgins and Sienna Johnson—whether there was something “off” about them that predisposed them to be mass killers, or if they were simply two teenage girls caught up in an intensely harsh and caustic academic and student environment that, as Higgins herself described, created a “fucking nightmare school,”—is hard to determine with what the public currently knows. But what is clear is that there is immediate and imminent failure in the system itself—if not the justice system, then certainly the school system. This system has failed, and continues to fail, every individual even remotely involved in it—everyone in the community, the students and perhaps most of all, Brooke Higgins and Sienna Johnson themselves.
“Unfortunately for all the victims and victors in both of these stories,” Jenkins continues in the introduction to Love is Love, “no one was able to escape the damage that a world without compassion and acceptance creates.”
Without diminishing the issues of gun control, it is vitally important to remember that the solution to stopping school shootings once and for all can be applied to stop forever a multitude of society’s woes: once we are compassionate to everyone, everyone will embrace each other. Only then will society be as free and as open as it needs to be by necessity, where people can truly celebrate the diversity of themselves without fear or persecution.
