The mother of one of the Columbine high school massacre killers has spoken for the first time about her sense of guilt for failing to spot any signs that might have prevented the atrocity.
Sue Klebold, whose son Dylan, 17, went on a shooting rampage with his friend Eric Harris, 18, at their high school in Colorado in 1999, says she still thinks about the victims every day.
But she also counts her son as one of the victims. “He was a human being. I feel that Dylan was a victim of some kind of malfunction going on in his brain,” she said.
Klebold said she still loves her son and does not believe he was a monster but cannot forgive herself for not realising something was wrong.
“You go back over every conversation, every gift, every moment, and what you feel is self-loathing,” she told the Guardian. “I let this happen; it was my role to keep him safe, and to keep others safe, too, and somehow this happened because of me, because I wasn’t able to stop it. The guilt one feels doesn’t fit in a room, it’s so huge.”
Klebold, 66, also admits that while she was shocked and devastated by her son’s role, she did not feel anger until six months after the killings, when investigators showed her the home video tapes Dylan and Harris had made. In them, the pair spew nihilistic hatred towards family members, as well as wider society.
The Columbine massacre still stands out as one of the worst mass shootings in US history, both in scale and character.
In April 1999, the two friends walked into the school on the outskirts of Denver and spent 49 minutes strutting around the premises as they killed 12 students and a teacher, and injured 21 others. They gunned down students who fled or cowered under tables, shot those who pleaded for mercy, laughing and spouting racist insults as they went. Then they killed themselves.
The pair were carrying explosives, which failed to detonate, and planted bombs in cars outside, one of which blew up hours later. It was subsequently revealed they had hoped to destroy the whole school and as many of its 2,000 students as possible.
Klebold still cannot believe she failed to add up the signs that Dylan was depressed to the point of being suicidal. He had admitted being unable to control his anger. “I was never for a moment thinking that he was a danger to himself or to anyone else,” she said.
“I could see his behaviours were changing. I attributed it to being an adolescent, and it is my deep regret that those behaviours might have indicated something else: depression, perhaps.”Klebold’s book, A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of the Columbine Tragedy, is to be published on 15 February, with all proceeds being donated to charitable foundations that focus on mental health issues.
In the book, she pieces together every memory she has of Dylan’s childhood, but still finds it almost impossible to match the child she called her “sunshine boy” with the merciless sad*st he became, with an expression of “sneering superiority” she had never seen before.
Klebold and Dylan’s father, Tom, endured not only opprobrium and death threats but also divorce and bankruptcy in the years after the massacre, as victims’ families sued.
None of the killers’ parents spoke out publicly for 10 years, then in 2009 Klebold wrote a first-person article for Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, O.
Now, another seven years on, she goes further, to talk and write in detail about coming to terms with Dylan’s willing participation in the planning of the murders. She clings to the scrap of comfort that her son killed fewer people.
Five years after the massacre, a report by the FBI concluded that Harris had been the primary mastermind and was a clinical psychopath. Dylan was a depressive, but each had played into the other’s damaged emotions, pushing each other into a spiral of violence.
They had been influenced by the 1995 Oklahoma bombing, an act of domestic terrorism, and the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers.
The Columbine atrocity went on to motivate similarly disaffected young men who perpetrated the Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook massacres, and other shootings that have become a blight on modern American life.
But despite her son’s appalling place in history, Klebold still cannot but love him. “I didn’t have any choice. You love your children,” she said.
- Read the full exclusive interview with Sue Klebold on theguardian.com from Sunday, and in Guardian Weekend magazine on Saturday.
- Get your copy of Weekend magazine, free this Saturday with the Guardian. Click here for £1 off the newspaper.
