April 26, 1998: Columbine Gunmen Consider Hijacking Plane and Crashing It into New York

Eric Harris, one of the teenage gunmen who will be involved in the Columbine High School massacre, writes in his diary about a plot to hijack a plane and crash it into New York City. Harris and Dylan Klebold are two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, who on April 20, 1999, will kill 12 of their peers and then themselves in the school’s library. After the shooting, investigators will discover Harris’s journals. An entry written about a year before the massacre reads in part: “If by some wierd as s—t luck my and V survive and escape we will move to some island somewhere or maybe mexico, new zelend or some exotic place where americans cant get us. if there isnt such a place, then we will hijack a hell of a lot of bombs and crash a plane into NYC with us inside iring away as we go down.” [CNN, 12/6/2001] CNN will first report on the diary entry April 26, 1999, a week after the shootings, but will not quote from it until the December 6, 2001 report. [CNN, 4/26/1998]