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Professor Neurotoxicity | page 1, 2, 3
The media blitz after the shootings painted Littleton as a bucolic, charmed community. "It was once a small prairie town of gold rushers and traders, where the biggest scare was getting hit by a prairie dog," a Time magazine reporter wrote after the tragedy. "Now it's a stretched finger of the big city, with aspiring families who don't lock their doors, enclaves with names like Coventry and Raccoon Creek and Bel Flower, scrubland turned into golf courses." The newsweekly failed to mention that a few miles from Columbine High School lies a U.S. Air Force
base identified as a national toxic waste site, under EPA orders to undergo a massive cleanup. Just surrounding the base is
a 4,700-acre tract of land owned by Lockheed Martin, within biking
distance of the high school campus. An April 1999 EPA fact sheet reports
that hazardous cleaning solvents, rocket fuels, PCBs and metals used to
develop Department of Defense missiles and spacecraft leaked into the
groundwater and soils. Chromium-filled sludge was dumped on the ground, then leached into nearby Brush Creek, which flows directly from an Air Force plant to a popular swimming reservoir. Because Brush Creek flowed directly through Kassler Water Treatment Plant's infiltration gallery, the waterway was also polluting the area's drinking water, which had been contaminated as early as 1957. By the mid-1980s, Kassler
Water Treatment Plant was distributing dirty water to more than a million
customers in Denver's southwest suburbs. Records show that the EPA had been warned more than 10 years earlier that Brush Creek could contaminate the Kassler Plant, but it took decades and the activism of some worried parents to make the pollution public knowledge. The Denver water board closed the plant in 1985. At the time, Dylan Klebold and his classmates at nearby elementary schools in unincorporated Jefferson County, an area which had been receiving water from the Kassler plant, were about 5 years old. But the story didn't end then. The month of the Littleton
shootings, Lockheed Martin tried to limit the federal health assessment of
the Air Force site. Given the strength of the defense industry lobby, it doesn't look like the there will be a full-scale investigation into the industry's environmental impact on the neighborhood anytime soon. But even if there were an investigation, would we really have a clearer
understanding of what happened at Columbine? Perhaps Dylan Klebold splashed around open-mouthed in a polluted swimming hole and guzzled poisoned drinking water during the formative years of his childhood. Exposure to the contaminated water may have given other children brain damage -- as mothers of a local community contended in the early 1980s, when they claimed that the Kassler drinking water was causing rampant birth defects and cancer among their children. But there are no statistics on violence among the Kassler kids, since no agency has carried out a study on the behavioral effects of Kassler contamination. Masters argues that neurotoxicology is such an embryonic field, it's all about opening questions in hopes that other researchers will follow. As for Harris, who didn't grow up on Kassler water but followed his father's military assignments from state to state, Masters says that while he can't diagnose him from a newspaper article,
he does hazard a speculation. "The kinds of things Eric was writing in his
diary indicate that there were deficits in the way his brain was
functioning," he says. He adds that another clue to Harris's brain chemistry
is his medication, Luvox, a drug usually prescribed for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Masters' claim that Harris' destructive urges might be evidence of prefrontal cortex
deficits is highly questionable: If that were the case, every third
teenage boy in America would at some point be diagnosed with brain
dysfunction. But Masters' approach isn't so different from the way most researchers begin to approach a problem: Take a carefully explored subject, see what's missing in the
analysis, flag it, look for other clues, do some more research and present
a previously unexamined hypothesis. Even with the case of Eric Harris, what
initially seems nutty may not, in the end, be so outlandish. Throughout Harris' life, his father worked on Air Force bases. Before moving to Michigan, New York and finally Colorado, the Harrises lived in Beaver Creek, Ohio, when Eric was 2 years old.
According to the CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry
(ATSDR), lead and chromium, area soil contaminants, are two of 67 chemicals
released in Beaver Creek from the Wright Patterson Air Force Base and
Lammars Barrel Factory. (In comparison, the ATSDR lists 203 toxic discharges
in Littleton's county.) According to Adrienne Anderson, an environmental studies instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, "The Harris family has a history of living on or near Air Force facilities that are national toxic contamination sites." None of this proves that Harris was exposed to toxins -- or that, even
if he was, that it had any effect on his brain. Eric
Harris' brother, Kevin, a former high school football
player who now attends the University of Colorado at Boulder, appears perfectly normal. Masters suggests the difference may be tied to other factors, such as metal intake during pregnancy, which can cause severe fetal brain damage and differences in personality. Moreover, he points out that changes in the brain occur throughout life and may not emerge until later.
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