Tad Boles’ mother bought him a black duster for Christmas in 1996 because they were on sale at Miller Stockman, a western wear outlet, for $99.
A week or so later, Tad’s closest friend, Chris Morris, had the same kind of coat.
“They were two little hipster sophomores going down the hallway — people started calling them the trench coat mafia,” recalled Mrs. Boles, who spoke on condition her first name not be printed. “I personally thought they looked kind of goofy, but they’re kids.”
Soon, it seemed like all of Tad’s buddies were wearing the coats. By last year, their girlfriends bought a business-card size ad in the Columbine High School yearbook, “Rebelations,” and devoted it to the “trench coat mafia,” running a photograph of the group.
In retrospect, the name sounds a little menacing, now that it is linked to the two young men behind one of the deadliest school massacres in American history, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
But it started out as just a tease, a name thrust upon the ragtag group of outcasts by the more popular kids at Columbine, who seized on the appearance of the dark, ominous-looking dusters as new fodder for their unending harassment of those on the fringes. In the yearbook, Harris and Klebold are not even in the picture (and those who do appear in it are not wearing trench coats).
In the first hours after the shooting and bombings that left a teacher and 14 students — including Harris and Klebold — dead at Columbine in this middle class suburb of 35,000 southwest of Denver, the group was described as devoted to Gothic music and culture, computer video games with ominous names like Doom, and all things German, including Hitler, whose birthday coincided with Tuesday’s destruction.
“We were just a group of friends that hung out like everybody else,” said Joseph Stair, Friday on NBC’s Today show.
Stair was in the Columbine Class of 1998 and is credited with “founding” the group.
“These kids that did this, they’re disturbed,” Mrs. Boles said of Klebold and Harris, whom she knew only slightly as Tad’s friends. “The things that they did had nothing to do with what the group was about.” She said the group “wasn’t about anything else but hanging out with friends.”
Mrs. Boles, a mother of five, insisted that the trench coat owners were just like any other teen-agers, interested in bamboo sword fights, Star Wars and computer games, but also “the teeny-boppers bopping at the prom” and that great American teen-age tradition, working on their cars.
“They’re just kids,” she said, pointing out that her son plays the cello, while his friend, Morris, plays the violin. “All of them are in shock. They’re all destroyed; I don’t know, they’re never going to be the same.”
