On April 20, 1999, Sue Klebold’s initial reaction to the mass shooting at Columbine was like so many other parents of children at the Colorado high school.
“My first thought was Dylan may be in danger,” she told Diane Sawyer on 20/20 on Friday night as part of her first television interview in the nearly 17 years since the shooting. “Who are these people that are hurting people?”
But then the news came. It was Dylan, her son, and his friend Eric Harris wielding the guns. She began hyperventilating, she said, trying to talk herself down.
“The police were there, and the helicopters were going over, and I remember thinking, ‘If this is true, if Dylan is really hurting people, somehow, he has to be stopped,’” she told Sawyer. “At that moment, I prayed that he would die. That God, stop this! Just make it stop—don’t let him hurt anybody.”
Her eyes welled up. She bit her lip on the last line, and stared ahead, silent, quivering. That admission, the most breath-taking of the hour, wasn't actually new. Sue Klebold had previously confessed that ghastly prayer to Andrew Solomon, in slightly different words, in an interview for his remarkable 2012 book, Far From the Tree. I recall my incredulity when I first read it then: Hard to believe a mom could even think that way. Did I believe her? Yes. So disarmingly candid—but it was a struggle. Hard as I tried, I couldn't picture her actually saying it. I could not picture Sue at all. I accepted it as an act of faith.
On Friday night, watching Klebold try to hold it together, grasping for the Kleenex box at moments, doubt never even nudged me. I saw a complete mom. All the peculiar fragments of Sue Klebold fit now. That’s the power of TV.
Despite covering the shootings for nearly 17 years on and off, and spending several hours on the phone with her last February when she interviewed me for her own book, I now had a solid image of her. Previously, I had only caught sight of her a few times in the media. A scared, ashen-faced shot of her in 2003, when all four Harris and Klebold parents met in a downtown Denver courthouse to be privately deposed in the case. (We will read their answers in 2027—a judge ordered them sealed until that date.) At the time, a prominent Denver journalist described the crush of paparazzi there to snatch photos of the parents—only to discover no one seemed to know what they looked like.
The blind fascination was understandable. They occupied a new, if tragically growing, rank in the American consciousness—School Shooter’s Parents. Sue Klebold and Kathy Harris were two of the earliest, and most notorious members. A prominent poll showed 83 percent of Americans placed blame partly on the women and their husbands for Columbine. Rev. Don Marxhausen, who performed Dylan‘s secret funeral, famously described Tom and Sue Klebold as “the loneliest people on the planet.”
Sue has actually come to us in startling glimpses in text three times before Friday night: a David Brooks column in the New York Times in 2004, her own O Magazine essay in 2009, and a chapter in Solomon's book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Awardfor Nonfiction. Finally now, she is telling her whole story, in her book A Mother's Reckoning, to be published by Crown on Tuesday, thus the 20/20 interview.
Sue Klebold had no big bombshells left to drop about who Dylan was, or what drove him. Most of what we’re likely to ever know has already been told. But in the Sawyer interview, she offered an onslaught of shocking details and stirring insights, and in the process provided one thing we have been waiting for all these years: a gripping portrait of what it was like to witness a slow, fitful descent to murder, and the parallel vision of what she thought she was witnessing at the time.
We saw the agony of a mom living with those two visions of her boy, struggling to reconcile them even now, too late to stop him. All the evidence points to the charming but sad*stic Eric Harris as the driving force behind the attack. Dylan was the shy follower, descending into debilitating depression. Both of them hid those qualities, from Sue and nearly every adult that mattered.
After the murders, Sue and Tom fled their home briefly, she said, and she thought about moving and changing her name. “I can’t run from this,” she decided, and several weeks after the tragedy she returned to work helping disabled community college students. “I would turn on a radio and people would be talking about me and calling me a disgusting person,” she said.
She confided to a journal that she worried she was losing her link to sanity. Later, she wrote, “All I want to do is die.” The biggest impact to her family, Sue delivered off-camera. Sawyer conveyed it halfway through the show. After nearly 30 years of marriage, Sue and Tom divorced: “driven in different directions, by grief,” Sawyer said. A marriage so private, we were unaware it no longer existed. That privacy likely changed for Sue Klebold last night. She could walk anonymously through Safeway or sit quietly undisturbed inside the Columbine Memorial, as she has so many times. Never again.
Sue also revealed that she was diagnosed with breast cancer a few years after the murders, and it was that fight that helped her put the despair behind her and regain the will to live. “I can’t, I can’t stay with this level of intensity,” she said. "I have to let some of it rest and say, ‘I didn’t kill these people! Dylan did—it wasn’t me!” It was a rare flash of anger. She clenched her fist as she spit out his name, and then wilted, dabbing a crumbled tissue under her nose.
It’s the same idea, essentially, that she tried to convey to David Brooks 12 years ago, that got her in so much trouble with some of the survivors. Brooks flew out to interview Tom and Sue in 2004, and summarized a wide range of responses in an 800-word column. It was clearly sympathetic, and Brooks told me privately at the time that he was impressed by couple. The column included this paragraph:
The most infuriating incident, Susan said, came when somebody said, “Iforgive you for what you've done.” Susan insists, “I haven't doneanything for which I need forgiveness.”
That quote rankled some of the families. It didn’t seem very humble. And it was still bothering a few when I checked in throughout the last week. Overall, their anxiety was high, but most were supportive, even gushingly so. Again, her assertion that she hadn’t killed anyone wasn’t necessarily a new idea, but on Friday, but she showed us how she got there. Completely different effect. And she showed us she got angry at Dylan too. That probably helped.
