“Rebuilding Columbine” (April 18-24) claims that Columbine student Valerie Schnurr was murdered by “a member of a neo-Nazi group known as the trench coat mafia.”

“Neo-Nazi group”? Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were hardly a “group,” and the fact that Klebold complained about having to read the four questions at his family's Seder (they were Lutherans, but liberal Lutherans) doesn't make him a “neo-Nazi.”

Rather, the “trench coat mafia” were tragically hip. Klebold's parents, a counselor at Colorado Community College and an oil company executive, named him after Bob Dylan.

And what did they hate? As the May 10, 1999, issue of The Weekly Standard put it, “eight of the murdered students at Columbine High School were serious Christians, four Catholics and four evangelicals. The killers went after 17-year-old Rachel Scott and 18-year-old Valerie Schnurr for no other reason than that they had Bibles.”

That may be why the official take on Columbine is that Harris and Klebold were the victims (of bullying), not that hatred of Christians is a bad thing.

Don Schenk, Allentown, Pennsylvania

Editor's note: Our article quoted reports from five years ago, comparing them with what we know today. The reference to the trench coat mafia was from an article written shortly after the attack, before more was known about the killers.