Month: February 2016

“I know it is terribly hard for me to even talk about my love for Dylan, for them to even hear me say that. But he was my son and knowing him did enrich my life and I loved him and he brought joy to me when he was alive. And since his death I have found meaning in life in trying to find answers to understand why this happened and how this terrible thing came about.”

The pain and sadness of a Columbine killer’s mother

The Columbine High School attack was 17 years ago, but remains etched into the consciousness both in the US and around the world. After years of silence, the mother of one of the two killers has been speaking to BBC Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark.

“The hardest thing to understand was kids killing kids.”

That quote from a student at Columbine High School is one of several set into the beautiful wall hewn from Jefferson County red sandstone which circles the Columbine memorial like an embrace.

The memorial which sits in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains pays tribute to each of the 12 students who were killed, and the teacher who was murdered as he tried to protect them.

“What I do is I sit there and in my head I talk to the kids and to the teacher who is there, without the rest of the world, without parents, without lawyers, community,” says Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold who, along with Eric Harris, set out to blow up the whole school on 20 April 1999.

“I just want them to know that I am thinking about them. And I will always think about them.”

Sue Klebold’s composure left her as she spoke to me about the students that her son had killed.

For the last 17 years, she has had to live with the trauma of that day – of knowing the son she loved committed such an atrocity.

But she also had to struggle with her son’s own suicide, and the firestorm that engulfed the Klebold family in the aftermath of Columbine.

It’s only now that Sue Klebold is speaking publicly about what happened. Her book, A Mother’s Reckoning, is a harrowing read. All the profits she makes from it will go to mental health charities.

Sue and her then husband Tom only discovered six months after the killing that Dylan had been suicidal for two years, and since then Sue has devoted increasing time to helping other families whose children take their own lives, though few have done so in such extreme circumstances.

Columbine will forever be the shorthand for high school shootings in the US.

The Columbine attack

  • 20 April 1999
  • Columbine High School in Colorado
  • Carried out by students Eric Harris (18) and Dylan Klebold (17)
  • Both took their own lives in the library of the school after the attack
  • 12 students and one teacher were killed
  • 21 others were injured
  • Subject of a documentary by Michael Moore in 2002, Bowling for Columbine

Sue doesn’t shy away from hard questions. She takes me through the day of the massacre, and her initial reaction. For the first months she was in in a really extreme state of denial.

“I didn’t know that he was a killer. What I believed, at first, was that he was involved in something that had gone terribly wrong and people were hurt and killed. But in my mind, I could not accept him as a killer… until six months later when I actually saw the police report and they were able to say yes, this really occurred.”

Sue’s deep-set dark brown eyes betray her profound sadness. I asked her how she could cope with knowing that her son and Eric Harris had planned to kill everyone in Columbine High school, where the roll call was almost 2,000 pupils, and to that end they had amassed an arsenal of more than 90 bombs, guns and grenades.

“When I thought of that, and thought of the magnitude… I really didn’t think I was going to live through it.”

In her book Sue writes that it would have been better for the world had Dylan not been born – but not for her.

“When I think about what he did to other people, the lives he took, the trauma that he caused – for even the people who lived through this event and will have trauma for the rest of their lives – or who lost siblings or friends in this incident, there is no measuring that or quantifying it.”

“I know it is terribly hard for me to even talk about my love for Dylan, for them to even hear me say that. But he was my son and knowing him did enrich my life and I loved him and he brought joy to me when he was alive. And since his death I have found meaning in life in trying to find answers to understand why this happened and how this terrible thing came about.”

Sue described how on the morning of the massacre when it was still dark, and the house was black, her son, usually a reluctant early riser, thundered down the stairs, past her bedroom, right to the front door.

“I couldn’t see him but all I heard him say was ‘bye’, and then he slammed the door and left.”

In her book she writes that she was startled by the harshness in his voice. She and her husband Tom decided he would talk to her son that evening to find out if something was wrong. Of course, they never saw him again.

I asked her what she wished she had done that morning.

“I wish I had just tackled him and just said: ‘Sit down. You’re not going anywhere. We’re gonna talk.’”

[BBC News – 2.12.2016]

—–
Check these out. 🙂 

Kirsty Wark’s interview with Sue Klebold will be broadcast on on BBC Newsnight on Monday 15 February at 22:30 GMT on BBC Two

A longer version Columbine: A Killer in the Family is next weekend on Our World on the BBC News Channel and BBC World News (click for transmission times)

rainflesh:

everlasting-contrast:

schoolshooterss:

New picture of Dylan! ( these new pics are killing me I’m not ok)
Taken from: @/rebdominee on Instagram

Short and curly, lanky fingers, and I spy with my own little eye..the black beaded cloth necklace existing back in Jr. High days. Happy boy in the beautiful past. 🙂 

New t-shirt for @rainflesh to make. 😉  Trying to make out the phrase.. 

Yess!

It says Unionbay!

But of course!  At first glance it looked like it read Unfanboy. lol   Thankss for that. 🙂

“Sunshine Boy”

Baby Dyl and momma Sue

Alas, no, I didn’t have any intent of stumbling upon spoiler photos today, like, at all.  However, I was a fool and scrolled my dash, and well?  Here we are.. 
You just can’t stop the internet, can ya?

And…my heart skipped a beat in my moment of recognition.  

Oh. The. Feels. In just this ONE photo.   So beautiful, so full of promise and love.  The eye contact connection between a mommy and her baby boy. The joy in one another’s eyes.  But, oh, so sad in knowing what he becomes half way through his “Book of Existences”.  Oh, what Sue must’ve gone through, just to go through all the family albums to carefully select photos for her book.  And the ache in her heart at the memory of these moments shared between her and Dylan.  The good feeling is still frozen in that brief moment captured in an image on photo paper but the pain and sadness hangs over it like a dark, rain cloud.  The bitter eclipsing the sweet.  :-/   So, my heart is both happy and aching in seeing this one precious photo, the first of the new.

But he was, at one time, her Sunshine Boy before he became the God of Sadness…

Friday 12 February 2016 17.00 ESTLast modified on Friday 12 February 201617.01 EST  

Emma Brockes and Joanna Walters

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 sadist he became, with an expression of “sneering superiority” she had never seen before.

Analysis Waco, Columbine, Aurora and Newtown: 20 years of mass shootings that changed (and didn’t change) America

Mass shootings remain an almost exclusively American phenomenon among advanced countries. These nine rocked the country and galvanized many in favor of gun control – so why has so little action followed? Read more

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 Kleboldwrote a first-person article for Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, O.

Now, another 17 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.

[Source]

I really want something where she can just talk about good things about Dylan but nobody wants to hear that because the public doesn’t want to humanize him, so she has to go into interviews talking about warning signs for parents and feeling like she blames herself.

@rebs-storm on Susan Klebold’s interview
(via dahmersbeer)

You took the words right out of my mouth!  This is a potential fear of mine.  From the snippets we’ve seen thus far, the interview might be sanitized so as to not go into depth about Dylan as her son with good and decent aspects to his personality as well as the fact that he’d been mentally deteriorating and suffering with depression.  They may be sticking with what her reaction was to what her son did and how badly she feels as well as some signs she noticed in retrospect without examining anything more personal about him or her relationship with him so as to not offend the general public that is already skeptically that she is doing this for attention and sympathy for herself as well as her son, who in their eyes was ultimately, at the end of the day, a murderer, no more no less.

 It may not be a very bold, forthright interview. Diana Sawyer is a reporter and asks the pat questions.  I just tend to think that Oprah would’ve done it far better justice in terms of discussing the more personal, psychological human aspects about this tragedy. She’d be that inquiring mind, having the courage to explore with Sue more in depth aspects of Dylan as an individual, to touch upon the interpersonal relationship dynamics between Sue and Dylan and the entire family unit to try and deduce what might’ve gone wrong.  Oprah tends to not be afraid to ask the burning questions she feels her audience would be curious to know like: “what was the fondest memory you had with your son in the last few months of his life?” and “what was the worst fight you two had together?”  Not sure Sawyer is capable of digging deeper so we get the full picture of Dylan and can then sort of connect it with the question of ‘why did he do this’. 

Someone with a mysteriously non-descript sounding blog title sent this to me, so posting it here as an fyi:

Love the title too;
 “We Need to Talk About Columbine: My Son, The Mass Murderer”

ETA: theguardian is password protected    emmabrockes


Btw, by the size of Sue’s cheekbones you’d think she had some native American Indian in her lineage somewhere.  That facial feature seems to have skipped Dylan and Byron completely!

In that video you posted of the interview, was that DYLAN’S casket that was shown?

No, that is not Dylan’s casket. I did see that someone took a snap from the clip of a green and gold casket trim and ran with making the assumption that it belonged to Dylan That was a casket of one of the victims most likely though I’m not sure whose it belonged to. Dylan was cremated, not buried. He was laid out in a temporary cardboard casket for his very small and private funeral service and then cremated.

***PLEASE ANSWER*** Can a person watch 20/20 the sue klebold interview on a labtop while its bei ng aired on tv?

If you’re in the US, I believe that depends on what sort of tv service provider you have. For example, if you have Universe or XFinity, you can download the app for your device or log on your your computer/ laptop and watch tv real time. There might be other ways of watching it on your laptop. Someone else is free to add to this if they have ideas.

blood-of-innocents:

The card sent to Anne Marie Hochhalter from Tom and Sue Klebold

Dear Anne Marie,

   Our prayers have been with you each day as we read about the terrible ordeal you and your family have experienced. We read that you had been transferred to Craig Hospital, and we were so thankful that you had progressed to the point where you could enter a rehabilitation facility.
   Though we have never met, our lives are forever linked through this tragedy that has brought unspeakable heartbreak to our families and our community. With deepest humility we apologize for the role our son, Dylan, had in causing the suffering you and your family have endured.
   Your recovery process will be a long and difficult road, and we hope that the support of people all over the world will help you find strength and courage as you meet the many challenges you have yet to face. When we read reports of your progress, we marvel at your resolve.
    It is still terribly difficult for us to believe that the son we knew could play a role in causing harm to you and others. The reality that he shared in the responsibility for this senseless tragedy is beyond our comprehension.
   We offer our love, support and service as you and your family work to gain control over your lives.
   May God watch over you during your recovery process and beyond. May each day bring you successes, however small, that bring you hope and encouragement.

                                                                                               Sincerely,

                                                                                    Tom and Sue Klebold

❤️🤘🏻✌🏻

Sue Klebold: ‘I Had All Those Illusions That Everything Was OK’ Video – ABC News

lovernotfighter1982:

wine-and-vodka:

lovernotfighter1982:

I’m not sure you’ll cope with this guys, but here goes….

Ohgod not… Her crying. 

I just want to hold her, and tell her it’s okay.

Me too @wine-and-vodka 😭😭😭😭

😔😢 It’s like she’s enduring a therapy session in front of millions of people who could judge her any which way they feel like. Such a courageous woman to be open with her heart and let people know the truth of how she suffered herself. ❤️ Your emotional vulnerability is your strength Sue Klebold!

Sue Klebold: ‘I Had All Those Illusions That Everything Was OK’ Video – ABC News