One of the Australian twin sisters who shot themselves in a suicide pact at a Colorado shooting range wrote several letters to a survivor of the Columbine school shooting in the months after the tragedy, a Denver television station reported on Saturday.
Kristin Hermeler, who died in the shooting last Monday, wrote two letters to Brooks Brown, according to KCNC-TV.
Brown was a student at Columbine High School who was once targeted by Eric Harris, one of the gunmen in the April 20, 1999, shootings. Brown and Harris became friends before the Columbine shooting.
“As someone who has been rejected, victimized and ostracized in their life, I would like to thank you for giving him [Eric] that chance,” Hermeler wrote in a June 1999 letter to Brown.
She also thanked Brown for not judging Harris and second gunman Dylan Klebold, who Hermeler said were “rejected and victimized by so many others.”
The letters further suggest the sisters had a fascination with the Columbine massacre, in which Harris and Klebold killed 13 people and themselves.
A photocopy of the Time magazine cover on the Columbine shooting — headlined “The Monsters Next Door/What Made Them Do It?” — was found among the belongings of Kristin and Candice Hermeler after they shot themselves last Monday.
The high school where the massacre took place is about 32km from the shooting range.
Why the sisters, both 29, had the Time cover and why the sisters made the plan to kill themselves is unknown. No suicide note was found.
Candice Hermeler survived and was hospitalized in serious condition with a head wound. She has told authorities about the suicide plan.
Arapahoe County sheriff’s captain Louie Perea said on Friday that Candice told investigators during an emotional interview that she didn’t care about the Columbine attack and that it had happened a long time ago.
The sisters, who are from Australia’s Victoria state, had been in the Denver area for about five weeks.
They didn’t attempt to contact Brown or his family during that time.
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