“I’d ask him what the hell he was thinking and what the hell he thought he was doing!”

— Tom Klebold, Far from the Tree

Like Father, like Son

The week after the shooting, Tom Klebold was filled with rage. ”He was angry about being detained at his home when he wanted to go intervene at the high school,” said Edgar Berg, a former colleague.  “He was angry about the availability of guns. He was angry about the access to weird images and videos. 

He was angry because he’d lost what he described as his best friend.”

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Michelle Hartsough described Dylan as a difficult person who was often rude. Hartsough said Dylan did not get along well with his father.

[Source]

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Mr. Klebold indicated that he and his son were very close and he is very upset with the way that the media has portrayed him.
Mr. Klebold said that he has no idea what happened or why and indicated that Dylan was his best friend and that they spent a lot of time together.

Mr. Klebold said that he believed that his son had a personality that was very similar to his….

Marxhausen, one of the clergymen who conducted a private funeral for Klebold on Saturday, said the young man’s father told him he "felt Dylan was his soul mate, and felt that he knew what was going on all the time.” The pastor said Klebold had told him, ” ‘I thought I was ready to let him go — he was a finished product.’ “

Dylan’s father, Thomas Klebold, 52, a former geophysicist who runs a mortgage business from his house, told the pastor he had detected “this slight tension” in his son a few days before the attack.  Klebold made a mental note of it and thought he would get back to it, the pastor said.

[Source]

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Tom, like Dylan, had been painfully shy in high school and felt that because of their similarities he knew Dylan instinctively; he can identify with how Dylan may have felt, but not with what he did.

[Source]

By third grade, when Dylan entered a gifted program at school, he had become his father’s most devoted chess partner. 

[Source]

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As a senior, Dylan was out of class by 1 p.m. He often came straight home and spent time with his dad, who worked out of the house. Tom treasured that time. He thought he and Dylan had grown extremely close.

[Source]

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About a month after the van break-in, Dylan scratched something into another student’s locker. Peter Horvath, the dean, doesn’t know why Dylan chose the locker, and doesn’t recall the student’s name, only that the student felt threatened when he saw Dylan scratching with a paper clip. Because Dylan didn’t finish, the design he was scratching was unclear, Horvath says.

Dylan was detained, and Horvath was with him for about forty minutes while they waited for Tom Klebold to arrive and deal with the incident. “Dylan became very agitated” waiting for his father to come to school to discuss the situation with Peter, and began pacing around the room, according to a summary of Horvath’s interview with police. 

Horvath tried to calm him down, and Dylan cussed at him, although it wasn’t personal. **********Dylan was “very upset with the school system and the way CHS handled people, to include the people that picked on him and others,” according to the police interview.

Horvath thought Dylan was a “pretty angry kid” who also had the impression that he had anger issues with his dad and was upset with “stuff at home,” the police report continued. 

Tom Klebold, who Horvath thought of as an “Einstein” eventually arrived. With his glasses, and salt and pepper hair, he was proper, eloquent, and astute. He also had serious problems with this second suspension, and asked Dylan to leave the room—an unusual move in Horvath’s experience. “He [Tom] felt as though it was too severe for what had happened,” Horvath said of the standard, three-day suspension for essentially a vandalism charge. “Can’t we do anything else? Can’t he [Dylan] just do, you know, twenty-five hours of community service, thirty hours of community service?” Tom Klebold asked. Nope. Horvath didn’t budge. Peter sensed that Dylan had some anger issues with his father.
  

[Excerpt from Columbine: A True Crime Story by Jeff Kass]

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Tom stepped in with his 1950s dress code standards and asked Dylan not to wear the hat to the hotel’s breakfast buffet. Dylan argued that we were on vacation, and it couldn’t possibly make a difference to anyone if he wore the hat. I shot Tom a “don’t sweat the small stuff” look, but didn’t want to sabotage his authority, so I gathered up a suitcase. “I’ll go down to the car and wait while you two work this out.” I’d forgotten the car key, though, so I leaned against the hood in the cold morning air, remembering how Tom would insist the boys tuck in their shirts and polish their shoes for church while the minister’s own kids wore T-shirts and jeans. I was angry at him for harping on the hat. I guess I still am.

Eventually, Dylan came down to the car alone, his head bare. I wanted to say I agreed with him, and that it was okay with me if he wore the hat, but I did not. I only said, “I’m sorry the morning started out like this. I see you decided not to wear the hat.” Dylan sounded tired but determined to brush it off. “It’s not worth fighting about; it’s just not a big deal.”

I was frankly surprised. I’d expected a little more sputtering and complaining from a seventeen-year-old. “Wow, Dyl. I’m impressed,” I said, mistaking his willingness to withdraw from the conflict for maturity. I praised him for controlling his anger but I wish now he had stomped and screamed, giving me a glimpse of the rage burning inside him. Now I wonder if he had stopped caring about anything at all.

[Excerpt from A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold]

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The Klebolds also are struggling, as is their eldest son Byron, Brown said.”When I talk to Sue, we always make a pact not to talk about ‘it’ but that’s impossible, and soon we’re deep into it,” she said. “She didn’t see this side of her son. She wishes she had answers for the victims’ families, but she does not. 

“And Tom, poor Tom. He and Dylan were closer than ever. He misses his son every second of the day.”  

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Like Father, like Son

Given all the accounts mentioned above it becomes easy to piece together that Dylan and his father, Tom, were very similar in personality and temperament. They mirrored back at one another to the point where a Dylan in his late teens began to harbor a deep-seated resentment towards his father.

Tom Klebold had mentioned that he was painfully shy in school exactly like
Dylan.   Dylan was an intelligent, quick learning child
and was categorized as a ‘gifted’ student.
Tom gave off the intimidating impression of an astute ‘Einstein’ type to
others.  It’s a likely possibility that
Tom was a gifted child too. However, back in his day, there were probably few scholastic
programs to define and hone advanced children as such.  

Dylan suppressed his emotions, his
upsets until his temper reached a boiling point and the rage, including some of his childhood temper tantrums, boiled over like a raging volcano.  Tom Klebold appeared to also have a raging
temper as evinced in the snippets above which demonstrate how his anger and
frustration seemed to be the easily most accessible, second-nature way of handling the tragedy
immediately after it occurred.  Sixteen
years on, and he appears to still be somewhat stuck in a residual anger stage
of the grieving process.  When asked what
he would say to his son all these years later, his immediate knee-jerk response
back was in the form of a rhetorically posed question of a parent’s berating indignation:

“I’d ask him what the hell he was thinking and what the hell he
was doing!”

It’s as if Tom’s upset was left on ‘pause’ to resume exactly where it left off should his son Dylan suddenly be transformed alive again.  

Is it any wonder
why Dylan paced nervously while
waiting for his father to arrive to speak to the Dean at Columbine for his
transgression of passive-aggressively scratching something on the locker of
someone that pissed him off?   Then, only to have his father dismiss him from the room so that dad could
address the Dean one-on-one.  There is
almost an air of imperiousness of the manner in which Dylan was automatically disqualified
from being present in the room as his father hard-ball negotiated and bargained for a lighter punishment.  Did this type of controlling
behavior in which is father automatically dismissed him like a child cause
Dylan to silently stew?  Dylan paced a good 40 minutes before his father arrived.  How did Dylan’s father
handle his son by the time they got home?

 I
would speculate that when an argument ensued between Dylan and his father, Tom
was typically remote and coolly superior most of the time in that level-headed, intellectual
upper-hand sort of manner. The usual punishment was silent but effectively reinforced
in a manner in which Dylan would simply have no control or say. When he’d done
something wrong at school, his computer keyboard would literally be unplugged and  taken away the CPU. So, the natural consequences of that particular transgression meant his life was miserable and isolated without gaming with friends or surfing the net for however long his parent’s deemed necessary.   But, I speculate that like Dylan, his father at times, became unpredictably explosive having reached a boiling point of
no-return in his one-sided lecture, escalating it with resounding boom and having the
last word over a very nervous, frustrated Dylan.  Unlike Dylan’s mother, I
speculate that the ‘resolution’ of an argument with his dad rarely if ever
included open, receptive discussion or a later addressing of the situation that might allow for healing communication.  Instead,
when dad reached that ..point.., he let his temper just blow with an explosive berating lecture.  Meanwhile, Dylan took on the resentment in spades and he internalized it, learning to
automatically shut down by going to his room and slamming the door behind him.  Peace at last in self-reliance.

“Some god I am…. All people I ever might have loved have abandoned me, my parents piss
me off & hate me … want me to have fuckin ambition!! How can I when I get screwed &
destroyed by everything??!!! “

Tom/2 / Dylan 0. End Game.  Having been bested in a spat with dad, Dylan would then defeatedly stomp up to his bedroom and finish off the night with several rousing, repetitive mindless bloody battle sessions of shooting up zombies and simultaneously nursing a Screwdriver which would allow him to to swallow his pain having
been bested by dad and yet another lousy day at school.  

Tom mentioned that he felt very close to Dylan, that his son was so like
himself that Dylan was his ‘best friend’ or ‘soul mate’ even.   Since Dylan was a small child, the two
played chess, played sports together, hiked together and like his father, Dylan
got into competitive Go-Kart racing.  Once
Bryon, the oldest son left home, it was just Tom promoting bonding
activities with his youngest boy, the easy-to-raise one, his ‘golden child’
with the smarts.    Dylan
would get home from school early in his Senior year, and Tom probably snagged Dylan
to do stuff which he probably didn’t care to do all that much but would do so anyway for his dad.   From
Tom’s perspective, the two of them enjoyed mechanics and the fixing up his old
cars.  When Tom needed to tend to his
rental properties, he dragged along a very reluctant Dylan who hated it.  It’s not that all of these activities were a
bad thing, it’s just maybe that to Dylan, his father was forcing ‘the bonding’,
to get his son to do mostly the types of things he himself loved and enjoyed to which were not necessarily what Dylan found interesting or fun to do.  Dylan
did not protest much though he probably whined a bit and dragged his heels looking
forward to the moment he could go upstairs to at last, the privacy and serenity of his bedroom sanctuary.  

The two had a fair amount of mutual bonding
over sports until Tom was afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis and could
no longer actively engage in sports activities with his son the way he once
used to do.  That must have been a big blow for Dylan and it was likely the last time he engaged in sports in a physical way. From there on out it was Fantasy Baseball trades which was entirely an intellectual stimulating challenge not a physical one.  But I do wonder if Tom ever wanted
to share in some of the things that Dylan personally had an interested in
doing. For example, did his father ever consider
knocking on Dylan’s bedroom door and learning to use the opposing game controller and Doom or Quake
death matching with his son?  Tom thought
he knew Dylan as he knew himself and that they shared a very close
connection while  in actually, Dylan was
dutiful doing stuff by his dad’s side yet not really connecting and engaging in the way that his father perceived
them to be.   Dylan also had very mixed
feelings; he still harbored unexpressed resentments towards his father which never had been openly discussed and aired properly. It seemed that just as Tom had dismissively excluded Dylan from the Dean’s office, Dylan was likely unable to fully
articulate and verbally express in conflicting confrontation because he
realized he was not warranted being heard or having equally footing.  Arguments with his dad, the publicly perceived
‘Einstein’, was rarely if ever up for debate.   Tom saw his own personality and intelligence
in Dylan and felt they were kindred, of the same ilk. He took pride in feeling accomplished in raising a near perfect son who
would go on to exceed himself in future successes.  Conversely, Dylan was resentful of his father
because of their similar shared emotionally stunted outburst-like temperaments
which caused him to disconnect and distance in response to his father’s
unpredictable volcanic wrath.   The two having such strong, paralleling similarities in personality and intellect ended up with dad appreciating his younger self through Dylan and Dylan rejecting his mirror image through his dad’s inept emotional stunt unavailability and unpredictable volatility. 

Dylan had so much bottled up, unresolved animosity
toward his dad that by April 20th 1999, he casually omits his dad and only chooses to
address his mom in his last Basement Tape goodbye: 

“Hey mom. Gotta go. It’s about a half an hour before our little judgment day. I just wanted to apologize to you guys for any crap this might instigate as far as [inaudible] orsomething. Just know I’m going to a better place. I didn’t like life too much and I know I’ll be happy wherever the fuck I go. So I’m gone. Good-bye. Reb . ..”