Helping others through loss: Mother of Columbine gunman speaks out

acinnamon-girl:

Sue Klebold continues to be an inspiration by virtue of her strength and her commitment to helping others. On Saturday, November 18 – the day after the Columbine episode of Active Shooter: America Under Fire aired and after a particularly difficult two weeks that saw two more mass shootings take place in the US – she spoke at a Survivor Day event in Colorado Springs, hosted by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

“His death was a terrible, terrible event and a terrible tragedy, but in my own heart, he is still my own child and I can not let that define him for me.”

❤

Helping others through loss: Mother of Columbine gunman speaks out

When memory bears witness to
                          the innocents consumed
                                                                       in dying rage..

              The way lies through our love..

There can be no other
                                          means to the end..

Or the keys to my heart
                                               you will never find.

Thank you for being the reason I started my blog. When I got interested in Columbine I first came to the TCC looking for a good resource. Thanks to your blog I still haven’t lost interest and I have learned so many more things that otherwise would be difficult for me to find. In short: I thank you for what you do here.

I’m so glad to have been an inspiration to you in starting your own blog and also that you’ve learned a lot via E-C. Thanks for sharing this. 🙂  I’m sure I sound repetitive when I say this but it certainly does mean a lot to me to realize how influential E-C has been to people. I had no idea just how much, tbh. ❤

What is your favorite facial feature of Dylan’s

image

How about The Everything facial feature?  😉   If you asked me a day ago, I might say his prominent broad lion’s nose, if you asked me a week ago, I might say his very strong, defined chin and jawline or the crescent shaped curve of his smiling eyes with those hooded eyelids.  Though, right at this particular moment, that lil’ dimple on the right side of his mouth speaks to me. 😉 

You’re basically the last of the good TCC, back when it was actually kind of cool here. When you leave an era has ended

Ah, yes, I remember back in the day.  Good times! …even though it wasn’t all that long ago. Haha   Still, even though the Imagines blogs have overrun the tag these days, there are a few cool quality blogs that are doing a fine job of it with their research posts. And that’s a really good thing to see. 🙂 I’m flattered that you associate E-C with a kind of nostalgia for the sort of ‘golden age of Columbine of the TCC’ lol but as with everything on Tumblr, there will always be new eras to be made after I’ve completed my mission here so to speak. 😉 

I think your site is lovely. A great resource and a place we can mourn and remember a lost soul so to speak that made a VERY bad decision and learn from his mistakes. I will be around if you change the way you manage the blog but I hope you don’t leave. I’m in SoCal and would love to meet someone who I can talk about Columbine like this with someone, who mourns all 15 and looks at it critically. So your blog is a great place for ,me.

I like your perspective as to how you see E-C.  That is most definitely part of my intent in creating this blog. 🙂   Thanks for the kind words. ❤  Well hopefully in posting this someone down in SoCal can meet up with you for some quality Columbine connections. Btw, are you getting as much rain as we are here this November up in NorCal?  

why are some people asking if you’re leaving? am i missing something? :( you’re the reason why i’m still here and interested <3

I’m not really sure why people think this, tbh.  Perhaps they just picked up on some of my recent..unrest. lol  I’ve not officially stated I’m leaving. Should I ever decide to do so in the future, I would let you all know but of course..

I’m flattered that E-C is the reason you’re remaining ‘here’. Thank you ❤

Whatever your decision is with your blog, I’d just like to say it is the most unique culmination of info on Dylan /Columbine I’ve seen and is truly wonderful. There’s such a personable quality that really brings things to life and makes for such an enjoyable experience when reading your posts. Much luck and love to you!

Aw, really? I’m so touched by your unique description of my blog. Truly.
Thank you so much. ❤ to you too!

“My takeaway is that Harris was very Type A, in your face, very plan-oriented, very structured. Klebold was more
Type B. ‘Just tell me where to go; I’ll show up, I’m good.’ So, to me, their personalities were just very, very different. Was Harris more of the man with the plan? Yeah, but I don’t think Klebold just followed along like a little puppy dog.
He was in. He was all in.“

– Kate Battan, Active Shooter: America Under Fire

Randy Brown on the cancellation of today’s Columbine-related Oprah broadcast

Westword
Michael Roberts 
April 20, 2009 

Kate Battan, Dave Cullen and Dwayne Fuselier on a Columbine-related episode of “Oprah” that will no longer air today. (for the 10 year anniversary)

As pointed out earlier today in a blog about the many media appearances of Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis, Colorado journalist Dave Cullen, author of the widely praised volume Columbine, was scheduled to appear on Oprah today, the tenth anniversary of the massacre at the high school. However, yesterday afternoon, Cullen sent out a note to folks on his e-mail list revealing that the program wouldn’t run due to “a production decision.” This choice was confirmed earlier today on the Oprah website. A note from host Oprah Winfrey reads: “I decided to pull the Columbine show today. After reviewing it, I thought it focused too much on the killers. Today, hold a thought for the Columbine community. This is a hard day for them.”

The Winfrey comment suggests that there’s more to the story – and there is. Randy Brown, father of Brooks Brown, a friend of Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who has worked indefatigably over the past ten years to make information about the killings public, says that he was among several members of the Columbine community, including relatives of victims he declines to name, who contacted producers to express concerns about the show, which was heavily promoted in recent days on Channel 4, Oprah’s broadcast home in Denver. Brown and company were especially distressed by the presence as guests of Kate Battan, Jefferson County’s chief Columbine investigator, whom Brown believes was part of an information cover-up, as well as Dwayne Fuselier, an FBI profiler whose son was a Columbine student who made a parody video depicting the destruction of the school two years before the assault.

Brown, who has appeared on Oprah in the past, doesn’t denigrate Winfrey for moving forward with this particular lineup. Instead, he praises her profusely for taking to heart complaints from families. “I think it’s an incredible sign of Oprah’s humanity and understanding that she would listen to these people and do something about it – not air the show out of respect for them,” he says. “That’s a really good thing.”

A spokesperson for Oprah doesn’t make the same cause-and-effect connection between the complaints and the change in the content of today’s show, which now features a segment about a mother released from prison. The spokesperson says family members voiced objections prior to the taping, and the decision not to air the Columbine program was Winfrey’s alone.

Whatever the case, Brown is clearly no fan of Cullen’s book. He posted a one-star review of the tome on the Amazon.com website in which he states, “This book is not the true story of Columbine.”

“The biggest problem I have with Cullen’s book is his conclusion that Eric is a psychopath,” Brown adds. “Whether that’s true or not, Dylan wasn’t a psychopath – and these children had motivation for what they did. As misguided and ridiculous as their response was, they had a motivation: bullying at the school, and the atmosphere there. You can’t bully and humiliate people without them having a response to it. Now, in this case, that response was ridiculous and violent and wrong. But to just say they’re psychopaths is so easy. People don’t have to think anymore. They don’t have to worry. They can say, ‘There’s nothing I can do about it.’ But that’s not true. You can do something. You can stop bullying and harrassment in schools and in the workplace.”

That Cullen would be joined on Oprah by Battan, who some Columbine families despise, and Fuselier, a man with what Brown considers to be a major conflict of interest on the Columbine story, only raised more red flags, Brown says. And he has just as many negative remarks to offer about DeAngelis, who appeared on the taping of the show last Wednesday via Skype. “He’s making his attempt to rewrite his place in the Columbine tragedy,” Brown argues. “And he’s very good at it.”

Such thoughts were shared in e-mails sent to the Oprah production office, Brown notes, “and a senior producer responded to – well, it’s an understatement to say ‘misgivings.’ More like anger at having Battan and Fuselier and Cullen on that show. And the people at Oprah listened to them and responded accordingly out of respect for the families.”

The eleventh-hour plug-pulling is a huge blow to Cullen, who declined to comment for this item. After all, author appearances on Oprah have provided larger book-sale boosts than any other promotion or forum in recent years. But Brown isn’t shedding any tears on the author’s behalf. Instead, he lauds Winfrey. “Television shows are big productions, and there’s a lot of work that goes into that show,” he says. “It had to be a difficult decision for Oprah. And I certainly think she made the right one.”

[Source]

Author Jeff Kass on how his Columbine theories differ from Dave Cullen’s

Westword
By Michael Roberts 
May 7, 2009

Local author Dave Cullen’s book Columbine has received an enormous amount of media attention – far more than another recently published tome, Columbine: A True Crime Story. And Jeff Kass, the ex-Rocky Mountain News reporter who penned the latter, has definitely noticed the discrepancy. He’s not surprised that the national press gravitated toward Cullen’s offering, which was issued by Twelve Books, a growing publishing powerhouse. (In contrast, Kass’ effort comes courtesy of Ghost Road Press, a modest, Denver-based outfit.) But he’s more bothered by inattention from local outlets. For instance, although Colorado Public Radio aired an enormous number of Columbine-related reports around April 20, the tenth anniversary of the attack on the high school, he notes that “they never interviewed me, and as far as I know, never mentioned by book.”

Adding to his frustration is the willingness of so many reviewers and observers to accept Cullen’s conclusions as definitive. In Kass’ view, “Columbine is a major social issues, and it deserves a lot of books to be written about it – a lot of serious books.” Moreover, he says, “I have issues with some of the things he says in his book. I just don’t find the attribution for a lot of it. There’s room for contradictory and conflicting opinions as long as they’re backed up by facts – and I feel I’m able to back up everything in my book.”

Of course, the authors agree on plenty of things, including the relative unimportance of bullying as a motivator for the killing spree launched by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold – a major bone onetime Columbine parent and activist Randy Brown has to pick with Cullen. Kass bases his beliefs in this area on diaries kept by the murderers. “They write about everything from losing their Zippo lighter to not being able to get a date,” he points out. “But they barely talk about bullying, period, and they never talk about being bullied themselves. And you’d think they would have if it had been such a factor for them.”

Likewise, Kass concurs with Cullen about Klebold’s depressive tendencies. But he’s not as willing to suggest that Klebold merely followed Harris’ orders. “Dylan’s writings show him to be pretty entranced by the plan. And their code word for the shootings – NBK, which stood for Natural Born Killers, one of their favorite movies – came from him. He was the first to mention doing an NBK, going NBK. That says to me that he wasn’t such a secondary participant.”

Kass and Cullen also have slightly different takes on Harris. Both argue that he was probably a psychopath – although Kass acknowledges some evidence to the contrary. “The trademark of a psychopath is that you have no emotion, no feelings. And in Eric’s diaries, he does have emotion. For one thing, he worries about what’s going to happen to his parents, and he feels bad about not being able to bond with his father more. And he feels devastated that he has no friends and that people ignore him and he can’t get dates.”

This last point is a key one from Kass’ perspective. “He says Eric Harris was this wildly popular student, especially with the girls – that he’s dating or having sex with all these girls at school. And I totally disagree with that. I don’t find any attribution in his book or in the end notes for that. I don’t know where it comes from. I’d like to know. And he says similar things about Dylan. He says Dylan had all these friends, and that he was well-connected at school and at least was more popular than we thought he was. And I don’t know where he comes up with that, either.”

"Now, maybe you can find a study showing that if you have five close friends, you’re a normal high school student in America,” he goes on. “But even if you could prove that Dylan had five close friends, that doesn’t mean he was a normal high school student, because Dylan didn’t believe that himself. Dylan was blinded to friends by his depression, and Eric was blinded to any friends he had by his rage. So I think you’re in this academic situation. You could say, ‘Gee, Eric and Dylan, you had a lot of friends, and you lived these great middle-class lives.’ But that didn’t get through to them. They thought their lives were miserable. So it’s a classic case of perception versus reality.”

As for Kass’ perceptions, he says, “I think both Eric and Dylan died virgins. And even though it’s sort of a weird topic to get into – their sex lives – I really think it’s illustrative of how well-connected, or not connected, they were to the school community. I feel they were outcasts. I feel they were among the most unpopular kids in the school – and my evidence is their diaries. Pick up almost any page and all they talk about is how much they are outcasts, how they don’t feel part of the school or any community.”

More distinctions between the books crop up in terms of the topics the authors tackle. Cullen focuses almost entirely on the crime itself, whereas Kass devotes his epilogue to what he describes as “the cover-up” conducted by Jefferson County law-enforcement officials. He also attempts to find links between Columbine and other school shootings around the country, and his research leads him to conclude that the vast majority take place in suburban communities in the southern and western parts of the United States. He’s also come up with a theory to explain the regional nature of the phenomenon.

“I found studies done before Columbine and with, from what I could tell, no notion of school shootings in mind that talked about the culture of honor,” he says. “It’s a well-known concept in the South, but also in the West, where, if you feel your honor has been violated, you feel the need to retaliate to defend it – and you feel that it’s okay to do that with violence. That’s seen as an acceptable means of avenging your lost honor.”

For Kass, getting this information out to the broader public remains important – and even though Columbine’s tenth anniversary has passed (with Cullen grabbing the vast majority of spotlight time), he hasn’t given up on reaching readers. He’s hoping to arrange a book tour to other places that have suffered through mass shootings at schools, such as Jonesboro, Arkansas, Blacksburg, Virginia and West Paducah, Kentucky.

“I think there’s still a window of opportunity to promote the book, and really, it’s always going to have relevance,” he says. “Even if all of this was to stop tomorrow, people would still want to know about what happened and why.”

[Source]

[Jeff Kass]