Tag: Dylan Klebold

Not gonna share how I know her, but I know the girl who wrote this – and no, it wasn’t Martha or Marsha or whoever the people on Tumblr guessed. Anyway, she told me this story about eight months or so ago and didn’t reveal who he was to me until the end.

This letter was about Dylan Klebold. They weren’t super-close, but he was always nice to her – smart and funny too, if in an awkward way. They had classes together and would talk, and would always greet each other in the halls – sometimes with hugs. She described him to me as “John Smith’s [from Pocahontas] cuter, taller, dorkier little brother.” Anyway, she had a crush on him for over a year and when the shooting was going on, I can’t remember where she hid, but she wrote a note right then and there she was going to give to him if they survived describing everything she liked about him – his blue eyes, his laugh, his intelligence, etc., finishing with those three little words we all choke on the first few times.

Then, she saw the news. She was destroyed, but decided to try to deliver the note the only way she could. She told her mom that she had a crush on one of the kids who had died and her mom went with her to the memorial. She walked to the cross, touched it, and whispered a few things (you can imagine). Her mom asked what the hell she was doing, freaked out and they had what she said was probably the quietest shouting match ever. She left the note at his cross despite her mother being disgusted and angry – as she should have done. (I want to note that the crosses for Klebold and Harris had just as many notes and things left on them, although people who left things there would sometimes face abuse and threats from other mourners.)

Once she knew who the mystery boy had been, the girl’s mother didn’t want to hear anything about him. She told her she should be happy he was dead and not to grieve for him because he didn’t deserve it – even though she had been supportive when she first heard of her daughter’s crush a few months earlier, telling her it was “cute” and to “go for him,” and knew it was the same boy. It was as if her mother expected her emotions to just flip on and off like a switch. So not only was it general public opinion, but the girl’s own mother basically told her she was wrong for feeling sad.

Ironically, her mother also helped her grieve. Two weeks later, she told her daughter to tape King Of The Hill for her (this was in the days of VHS) because she had to work and couldn’t be home to watch it. The girl usually didn’t watch it but she saw the commercial with the angel and felt like it was a sign, almost. When she watched it, something just hit her. There were so many little scenes in it – she mentioned to me about Luanne asking where Buckley was; she said it made her wonder about the afterlife and where Dylan was, and then the comment about Buckley “guardianin’ another girl” – if Dylan was somehow on Earth as a ghost, he wouldn’t know to visit her because she never told him she loved him. There was also a scene in which one of the other characters is trying to use the angel like a genie and tells another character “Don’t touch [whatever the angel was coming to] or the angel won’t come back and I’ll be alone forever.” These little moments added up and Buckley putting the halo on was the straw that broke her floodgates.

She still has the VHS with nothing but this episode on it, with “ANGEL! [heart]” written on it in cute teenager writing and pink gel pen. She keeps it on a shelf in her house, on top of the school yearbook from that year. I asked her about it when I visited and she told me what I just told you, albeit with more dramatic delivery (as you can imagine).

Lostlove_Throwaway, a Reddit user, on the letter a Columbine survivor wrote to Mike Judge about “Wings of the Dope” (via fuckyeahdylanklebold)

Susan Klebold Memoir to be Published by Crown – The Crown Publishing Group

burnandraveatcloseofday:

The press release Crown Publishing put out about Susan Klebold’s memoir.

(September 23, 2014 – New York, NY): On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives. For the last fifteen years, Susan Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day, trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised for seventeen years, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not seen it? What, if anything, should she have done differently?

It is that question that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy, and she has spent the past fifteen years in tireless pursuit of the answer. While she has previously declined to publicly share her experiences, the devastating events at Newtown, UCSB, and most recently at Seattle Pacific University and Reynolds High School in Oregon have shown that the need for insight has never been more urgent. It has not been an easy decision for Sue Klebold to come forward after so many years of silence. But she has seen firsthand that sharing her story can help other parents—and she therefore feels a deep responsibility to broaden the circle of those who know it. If the lessons and insights she has gained in the terrible crucible of Columbine can help others, then she feels she has a moral imperative to share them. Knowing there is nothing she can ever do to atone for what Dylan did, she has dedicated her life to trying to prevent anyone from having to endure such suffering ever again.

Roger Scholl, Vice President & Executive Editor, acquired world rights from Laurie Bernstein of Side by Side Literary Productions, Inc., and will edit the book. The UK and Commonwealth edition will be published by WH Allen, an imprint of Ebury/Penguin Random House UK. A simultaneous publication date has not been announced.

With unflinching honesty, Klebold will share her story in this yet-to-be titled book in hopes of shining a light on one of the most pressing issues of our time. She will invite readers into the very private struggle of the last fifteen years as she and her family have tried to understand the events of that terrible day and the role they ultimately played in it. Klebold has shielded herself from nothing, exhaustively exploring the depths of her memories, interviewing family members and friends, combing through her journals, and meeting with countless mental health experts in an attempt to understand how her child could have hurt so many—without her ever recognizing anything was wrong. Klebold will never know if she could have prevented the events of Columbine, but her hope is that the insights she has gleaned from her experiences can help other families see the signs when their children need help. Although at times paralyzed by her grief and remorse, for close to a decade Sue Klebold has become a passionate and vocal advocate working tirelessly to advance mental health awareness and intervention. Author profits from the book will be donated to research and to charitable foundations focusing on mental health issues.

Susan Klebold Memoir to be Published by Crown – The Crown Publishing Group

Columbine Shooting Memoir by Susan Klebold

Killing many and yourself could be an easy ride into history, but what does it do to the surviving family when your name becomes a national headline? Here is a story from one such survivor.

The mother of one of the Columbine shooters has signed a book deal to write a memoir, 15 years after Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris opened fire at the Colorado high school, killing 13 and wounding 24 in one of the deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history.

Susan Klebold plans to confront the “indescribable grief and shame” she has experienced since the shootings, The Associated Press reports. Crown Publishing acquired the book, whose title and publication date are yet to be determined.

Shooting rampages at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Seattle Pacific University and other places prompted Klebold to share her story, according to a press release Crown Publishing put out Tuesday.

“Klebold has shielded herself from nothing, exhaustively exploring the depths of her memories, interviewing family members and friends, combing through her journals, and meeting with countless mental health experts,”says the release, to try “to understand how her child could have hurt so many—without her ever recognizing anything was wrong.”

In 1999, Newsweek writer Sharon Begley grappled with the complex reasons the shootings took place. They were an “event of extreme national trauma” that still haunted the nation on the 15th anniversary earlier this year, Newsweek editor Rob Verger wrote.

Klebold has previously spoken publicly about her son’s involvement in the shooting. “Dylan did not do this because of the way he was raised,” she told New York Times columnist David Brooks in 2004. “He did it in contradiction to the way he was raised.”

With her husband, Tom, she talked to Andrew Solomon for his 2012 book Far From the Tree, about parents who raise abnormal or exceptional children.

In an essay in O—The Oprah Magazine in 2009, Klebold addressed what it felt like to be accused of bearing some of the responsibility for the shootings.

“I was widely viewed as a perpetrator or at least an accomplice since I was the person who had raised a ‘monster,’” Klebold wrote in O. “Our elected officials stated publicly that bad parenting was the cause of the massacre.”

A Pew Research Center report in April 2000 found that shortly after the shootings occurred 85 percent of Americans said it was the parents’ responsibility to prevent potential perpetrators from going on shooting rampages like the one at Columbine. Nine percent thought it was the school’s responsibility.

Six out of 10 Americans surveyed the year of the study believed closer scrutiny of troubled children with “antisocial attitudes” would help prevent future shootings—a significantly higher number than those who thought school security, gun laws or violence in popular entertainment was responsible.

It can be unfair to assign responsibility for mass shootings to families, Peter Langman, a psychologist and the author of Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters, tells Newsweek. “For families to be blamed…is really misplaced anger,”Langman says. “People want to take out their rage on people who did not contribute in any way to the attack.”

Based on his research, “there are three basic types of people who commit school shootings,” Langman tells Newsweek. “Traumatized” shooters come from broken homes, where they suffered from physical and/or sexual abuse and had at least one parent with substance abuse problems and at least one parent with a criminal history, according to Langman’s article “Rampage School Shooters: A Typology. But most of the families, like the Klebolds, he says, are “basically intact, stable middle-class families.”

The day after Crown Publishing announced the memoir, a study released by the FBI on Wednesday showed that mass shootings have increased in frequency between 2000 and 2013. The study does not mention the shootings at Columbine High School.

One way Klebold has processed her son’s actions and coped with the shootings has been to involve herself in efforts related to children’s mental health and suicide prevention, according to Langman.

“I hope that someday everyone will recognize the warning signs of suicide,” wrote Klebold in O, “as easily as we recognize the warning signs of cancer.”

Klebold plans to donate the profits from her memoir to mental health research and charities, according to the press release from Crown Publishing.

“The fact that I never saw tragedy coming is still almost inconceivable to me. I only hope my story can help those who can still be helped,” Klebold wrote in O. “I hope that, by reading of my experience, someone will see what I missed.”

Source

I’d say she’s already got a good bit of her memoirs constructed from over the years of processing. With the help of editing it might not take that many years to publish.

Rosh Hashana and Dylan’s roots, part 1

burnandraveatcloseofday:

It’s Rosh Hashana (literally, “Head of the Year”), the Jewish New Year—happy 5775!

According to all sources, Dylan’s sole connections with his partially Jewish roots were: 1) his circumcision (but then most boys in the US are circumcised, regardless of their religion; Eric was, too!) and 2) his…

Can picture him mumbling the recitation of The Four Questions..
Rosh Hashana and Dylan’s roots, part 1

Susan Klebold, mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold, working on memoir

thedragonrampant:

superbuggledrpg:

peoplearesounaware:

can´t believe it.

Oh wow how exciting. I’m sure it will be an incredible book.

I cannot wait to read this. What a wonderful thing for her to do. =)

Amazing, wonderful news. *applauds* If anyone can do this, Sue Klebold can. She’s finally moved past the long, hiding-in-shame mode and can now reach out with her story about Dylan, to help educate and potentially prevent other shootings. It won’t need to be in vain.
Susan Klebold, mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold, working on memoir

I guess it’s time to tell you who I am. I was in a class with you 1st semester, & was blessed with being with you in a report. I still remember your laugh. Innocent, beautiful, pure. This semester I still see you rarely.
I am entranced.

— Dylan Klebold’s Love Letter Poetic Stanza Eight

Excerpt from “Do You Believe in God?” Columbine and the stirring of America’s soul – October 6, 1999

I wandered around the cemetery, driven by the notion that Dylan Klebold might be buried there in an unmarked grave. In fact, I came across a fresh grave that had no marking—not even the temporary flower holder like those that adorned Rachel’s and Corey’s graves. But it was clearly a grave; its recently laid blankets of sod had a not-yet-integrated-into-the-lawn look. I found a small piece of paper stuck in the sod. It was the remnant of a note. The only words that were legible were: sample, memory, family.

As I stood over that strange grave—not knowing whether it belonged to Dylan Klebold—I wondered, Is the cross big enough for even this lost son’s crimes?

A responsive recitation of Psalm 130 served as part of the Invitation to Worship at Klebold’s funeral, conducted by the Reverend Don Marxhausen, pastor of Saint Philip’s Lutheran Church in Littleton. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?” Marxhausen’s message was based upon 2 Samuel 18:28–33, in which King David learns of the death of his son Absalom after his treachery: “The king was overcome with emotion. He went up to his room over the gateway and burst into tears. And as he went, he cried, ‘O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I could have died instead of you! O Absalom, my son, my son.’ “

“Who knows why sometimes our sons and daughters do well or do wrong?” Pastor Marxhausen asked rhetorically in his homily. “Who knows why we ourselves do good and sometimes do wrong?”

“One of the old prayers of the church for confession reads: ‘O God, Our heavenly Father, I confess unto Thee that I have grievously sinned against Thee in many ways; not only by outward transgressions but also by secret thoughts and desires which I cannot fully understand, but which are known unto Thee.’"Who would have known?” he asked.

Indeed, as Marxhausen explained to me, Tom and Sue Klebold never saw this coming. He told me about a video the Klebolds showed him, shot on prom night—the Saturday before the Tuesday shootings. An awkward and flustered Dylan, pulling his cuffs, straightening his tie, was receiving his boutonniere. He said into the camera: “Dad, we’re going to laugh about this in 20 years.”

“It’s not easy to define evil,” says Marxhausen. “For me, evil is radical disconnectedness. If we are created in the image of God, we’re created to have relationships. Wholeness is connectedness; evil would be the opposite—relationships broken apart. In one sense, the final word [of sanity] before the shooting started was when the boys told a friend of theirs [in the school parking lot], ‘Go away and don’t come back.’ From that point on, it was chaos and evil. Fingers and arms were shot off of people they knew. That had to be the total destruction of connectedness.”

“The hardest thing for me sitting with this family—they are very nice people—is to turn off that switch in my head and not pursue the why? and just listen to how they’re processing what has happened to them. Before I did the [funeral] service, I asked, ‘Who wants to say something about Dylan?’ There was a family who poured out their tears, saying they just couldn’t believe it was Dylan because of how much they loved him. There was a family who told stories about Dylan being at their house wrestling with their kids. Then the parents: the father asked, ‘How can this happen? We didn’t even have a gun in our house. We have a BB gun to take care of woodpeckers.’ His mother was saying, ‘How can he be anti-Semitic? We do Seder in the house and he reads the questions.’

"This is my theory,” says Marxhausen. “First part: Rage builds up over the years of being different and outcast and shamed. One of the stories about these two boys took place the year before with a certifiable senior bully. He started throwing ketchup packages at them in the dining hall, and he and his friends would say, ‘Why don’t you fags kiss? You guys are such sweethearts.’ This guy was an all-state wrestler in the heavyweight division.

"Second part: These kids had a tremendous capacity to hide their anxiety. Their parents were not privy to it. Number three: Evil occurs incrementally. Fourth part: You get a plan. So you take some rage, some evil, and a plan, and somewhere they crossed over and got lost. The Book of Job doesn’t give any answers as to why evil happens. It’s like trying to make sense out of nonsense. But you still have to be people of faith. Insanity falls on you like a meteor falls on a house. The question is, now what do you do?”

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this tragic episode was the pleasure these boys seemed to derive from their evil deeds coupled with the fact that they could have been our own sons. How could such evil arise out of young men who had so much going for them?

I have wondered if it would have been less horrific if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold hadn’t been laughing and taunting their victims. Would it have been more “normal” if they had just moved about the library killing people? They were at the epicenter of evil, totally disconnected from their community, their families, the Author of all that is good. What else, but scorn, could animate them?

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