Tag: Suicide


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January 30, 1998  ~ 19 years ago on this night ~  January 30, 2017

 Dylan was having a okay, ordinary day at school – even doing an Interview for the Rebel News Network in the afternoon (interview clip) – but by 8 pm that evening, his life had changed for ever.   All it takes is one day, one choice, one event that can alter destiny forever like the abrupt switch of a train on a different set of tracks.  It was the day that a bright, clean cut boy with so much future potential had made the wrong choice and had in effect, fallen from grace. The disappointment in his parents eye’s reflecting back at himself upon his arrest at the police station. Before, he could do no wrong..but now?   He felt his life a fuck up and with one major slip up, this was now a nail on the coffin to confirm it.  

The event wounded and mortified him deeply.

From that day forward, he would embark on the beginning of his end as he slowly eroded inside himself in silence.   It was the beginning of his downward spirals decent as a troubled juvenile on a crash course with an infamous destiny set to self destruct.

This is the tale of..

The January Incident 

The next incident during Dylan’s junior year was the most catastrophic of all.
On January 30, a few days after Dylan scratched the locker at school, he and Eric were arrested for breaking into a parked van and stealing electronic equipment.

Dylan had agreed to go with Zack to an activity at his church that night, and the two of them planned to come back to our house for a sleepover afterward. Tom and I were listening to music together in the living room when the phone rang around 8:30 p.m. It was Zack’s dad, audibly upset. Zack had quarreled with his girlfriend and left the event with her. He’d gotten hurt, possibly after stepping out of a moving car, and wasn’t making much sense. It was all very confusing, but Zack’s parents wanted us to know the plan had changed. Dylan wasn’t with Zack; he’d left the church with Eric.

I thanked Zack’s dad for the update and immediately called the Harrises, who were as concerned as we were not to know where the boys were. Both sets of parents promised to get in touch immediately if we heard from the kids. Within minutes, our phone rang again. It was the county sheriff. Dylan and Eric had been arrested for criminal trespass.

Tom and I drove to the local sheriff’s auxiliary office; the Harrises were already there. The offenses included First Degree Criminal Trespass and Theft, both of which were felonies, and Criminal Mischief, a misdemeanor.

My mouth hung open when I heard how serious the charges were. I could not believe that our Dylan, who had never done anything really wrong in his life, could do something so terrible. This was the kind of trouble that might seriously impact his future. Neither of us had ever been arrested, so we called one of our neighbors, a lawyer, for advice. He told us Dylan should “spill it,” tell the complete truth. Before he hung up, he reassured us. “Boys do dumb stuff. He’s a
good kid. He’ll be okay.”

We waited for what felt like an eternity. Mrs. Harris wept. Then a deputy followed the boys through the substation office door. I practically threw up when I saw Dylan paraded past me in handcuffs.

We waited hours to learn whether our children would be sent to a detention facility or allowed to return home. Finally, the officer who arrested them recommended they be considered for a Diversion program, an alternative to jail for first-time juvenile offenders accused of minor crimes. The program would provide supervised counseling and community service, and allow
the boys to avoid criminal charges and placement in a detention facility. The boys were released into our care.

Our drive home was silent, as all three of us contended with our various emotions: fury, humiliation, fear, and bewilderment. We arrived, emotionally and physically exhausted, around four o’clock in the morning. Tom and I needed to discuss how we wanted to respond. There would be consequences, we told Dylan, but we would talk about them after we got some rest. Exhausted as I was, the sun was up before I was able to close my eyes and sleep.

Tom woke before I did. When Dylan got up, they took a long walk. Afterward, Tom told me Dylan had been very, very angry—at the situation, the cops, his school, the unfairness of life. He was so angry that he didn’t seem to accept or acknowledge the wrongness of what he had done.

I was still mad myself, and didn’t want to talk to Dylan until I could be calm. Later in the day, the two of us sat together on the stairs. The master bedroom was on the ground floor, and Dylan’s room was upstairs, so we often sat on the stairs between them to talk. I recounted our conversation verbatim in my journal that night, and have relived it in my mind countless times since his death.

I began, “Dylan. Help me understand this. How could you do something so morally wrong?” He opened his mouth to answer, and I cut him off. I said, “Wait. Wait a minute. First, tell me what happened. Tell me everything, right from the beginning.”

He told me the story of his bizarre evening. After Zack left the church, he and Eric decided to go light some fireworks, so they drove to a parking area not far from our house where recreational cyclists stowed their cars while they biked the scenic canyon road. There, they saw an empty commercial van parked in the darkness. They saw electronic equipment inside. The van was locked. They banged on the window and tried to open it. Dylan rationalized this by
noting the van was deserted. When the window did not open, they broke it with a rock.

I asked Dylan if breaking the window was Eric’s idea. He said, “No. It was both of us. We thought of it together.”

They took the equipment and drove to a secluded spot close by. Minutes later, a deputy drove by and saw the damaged van. He found the two boys in Eric’s car with the equipment a short distance down the road. As soon as the officer approached the car, Dylan confessed.

When I’d heard the whole story, I asked my question again. “You committed a crime against a person. How could you do something so morally wrong?” His answer shocked me. He said, “It was not against a person. It was against a company. That’s why people have insurance.”  My jaw dropped. I cried out, “Dyl! Stealing is a crime against a person! Companies are made up of people!” I tried to appeal to his sense of reason. “If one of our renters decided to steal a light
fixture from one of our apartments, would it be a crime against a rental company, or against us?”

Dylan relented, “Okay, okay. I get the point.” But I didn’t stop. I explained that the owner of the van would have to pay a deductible to the insurance company. “There’s no such thing as a victimless crime, Dylan.” I’d heard a story about a programmer who figured out a way to siphon tiny, nearly untraceable amounts of money from calculations that left an odd penny. “Before long, you’ll know enough to do something similar,” I told him. “Do you think that’s ethical?” He said he knew it was not, and assured me he’d never do anything of the kind.

What he’d done was wrong, and I wanted him to know it. Appealing to his empathy, I asked him how he’d feel if someone stole from him. “Dylan, if you follow no other rules in your life, at least follow the Ten Commandments: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal.” I paused to consider which of the other commandments might have relevance, and then decided to stop
haranguing him. “Those are rules to live by.”

He said, “I know that.”
We sat in silence for a little while. Then I said, “Dyl, you’re scaring me. How can I be sure you’ll never do such a thing again?” He said he didn’t know, and seemed frightened to learn he could do something so bad on an impulse. He was obviously miserable. I felt no anger at that point, only compassion.

Before we stood, I told him he had broken our trust. We would be watching him more closely, and his activities would be restricted. He complained it wasn’t fair for us to punish him on top of the Diversion program; weren’t the legal consequences enough? But his actions had left us no choice. I also said I thought he should see a professional counselor. He said he absolutely did
not want to do that. When I told him we would seek help if it was in his best interest, he said definitively, “I do not need counseling. I’ll show you I don’t.”

I was grateful Dylan could get on with his life without going to jail. Years after his death, though, I visited a secure treatment program for juvenile offenders, the type of place Dylan would likely have been sent to, and learned that what I had feared so much would almost certainly have been better for Dylan than returning to school, especially if the culture at Columbine High School was as toxic for him as we believe it was.

The administrator told me, “We’re into saving kids, not punishing them.” He described the supports that would have been available to Dylan, such as professionals who specialized in dealing with mood disorders and PTSD, common in kids who have been bullied. The multidisciplinary team would almost certainly have diagnosed his depression, as well as any other brain health disorders he might have been living with. The staff worked closely with the
offender’s parents. There was even a computer training facility there.

We never know what lessons are in store for us, especially when our prayers are answered and events seem to turn out the way we want. At the time, we were grateful he’d qualified for Diversion. But I can’t help wondering if sending Dylan to a juvenile detention facility would have saved his life, and the lives of everyone he took with him.

~ end ~

Living In The Aftermath Of Tragedy

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. 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 sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently?

These are questions that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy. In A Mother’s Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible.

wamc.org  Click Listen for the audio interview

Living In The Aftermath Of Tragedy

How Could You Not Know? The Sue Klebold Story

By Patricia Salber MD, MBA (@docweighsin) -December 14, 2016 

On April 20, 1999, 17 days before his graduation, Dylan Klebold and his friend Eric Harris, killed 13 people, wounded 24 more before shooting themselves to death at Columbine High School. It was one of the worst school shootings American history.

Almost immediately, everyone was asking how could this happen? What was wrong with him? And, what was wrong with his parents? As his mom, Sue Klebold relates at the beginning of her TedMed 2016 talk, everyone was wondering, how could you not know? What kind of a mother were you? These are questions that she has spent almost 17 years trying to figure out.

She told the audience that the tragedy convinced her that she had failed as a parent. He was a completely different person from the one that she thought she knew. She said,

“Aside from his father, I was the one person who knew and loved Dylan the most. If anyone could have known what was happening, it should have been me. But, I didn’t know.”

Sue Klebold has spent the ensuing years combing through her memories to try to figure out where she had failed as a parent. But, she said,

“The truth is there are no clear answers. I can’t give you any solutions…I can only tell you what I have learned.”

By reading through his diaries after the tragedy, she discovered that Dylan had written two years before that he was cutting himself; he wrote that he was in agony and wished he could get a gun to end his life. She did not know this at the time—Dylan was very good at keeping his feelings and actions hidden from his parents. Once she discovered that he had been depressed and suicidal, she tried to learn how suicidal thinking could lead to murder.

Suicide is a brain health problem

She became active in the suicide prevention community and spent a lot of time talking to suicide survivors. Sue came to realize that the problem of suicide is a matter of mental health—brain health as she prefers to call it—because…

“from 75[%] to maybe more than 90% of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable mental illness of some sort.“

But many of them are never assessed or treated. People who have persistent ongoing thoughts of suicide and go on to devise a plan to carry out the act have a brain pathology. Their thinking is impaired. They are unable to make choices in the same way as people who are not so afflicted. She calls it a Stage 4 medical health emergency.

Dylan, she told us, had a perfectionistic, self-reliant personality and that probably played a role in his response to triggering events that had occurred at school. In addition, he had a complicated relationship with his friend, Eric Harris, a boy that she says was disturbed, controlling, and homicidal. Finally, she said, it was easy, way too easy, for him to get guns without her knowledge.

Being Dylan’s mom

According to her 2016 book, A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, it took her a long time to accept that Dylan had been an active participate in planning and carrying out the horrific acts that April day. She initially believed that he must have been duped by Eric or that he went along with it at the last minute. But the evidence that he was a full participant was incontrovertible, including videos he had made with Eric that showed the depth of his rage and intent to kill.

She alternated between grieving for her beloved son—the little boy she cuddled and the young man who was weeks away from attending the college of his choice—and shame and self-loathing for being the mother who raised a mass murderer. She wrote letters to all of the victim’s families even though she knew many hated her and blamed her, in part, for what happened.

The aftermath of Columbine took its toll on her. Two years after it happened, she developed breast cancer. And, four years after, she began having panic attacks that would last for weeks. She said,

“My mind would suddenly lock into this spinning cycle of terror…It felt as if my brain was trying to kill me.”

For the first time, she told us, she found out what it felt like to have a dysfunctional mind.

If love were enough

Everytime someone asks her, “How could you not have known?“, it feels like a punch in the gut. It carries accusation and plays into her feelings of guilt that no matter how much therapy she has had, she will never fully irradicate them. But she said, “here is something I have learned,

if love were enough to stop someone who was suicidal from hurting themselves, Suicides would hardly ever happen. But love is not enough.

No matter how much we believe that we can control everything that our loved ones think and feel, we cannot. And no matter how much we think we are different, that someone we love would never hurt themselves or someone else, can cause us to miss what is hidden in plain sight.”

We must learn, she says, to forgive ourselves for not knowing, for not asking the right questions, or finding the right treatment. When someone we love is in distress, we must listen with our whole being, without judgment and without offering solutions. In the end, however, we must accept the tragic fact that even the most vigilant and responsible amongst us may not be able to help.

“But for love’s sake, we must never stop trying to know the unknowable.”

[Source]

You don’t hear much about Dylan’s relationship with his brother. I’ve read Bryon being kicked out of the house because of drugs, but what was the relationship between the two?

My sense is that relationship grew apart in their teen years. Byron went to another high school while Dylan was in Jr. High. Byron likely began to hang with a group that was into smoking pot and possibly doing other drugs on a regular basis. This caused some tension in the family with the parents who, in addition, were also having some bumpy patch marital issues of their own. Unlike, Eric looking up to his three years older brother, Kevin, the gap experience for three years older Byron and Dylan became a vast chasm over a period of time where both boys were co-existing in their separate universes and neither could find common ground between one another. Byron was the troubled boy who caused drama in the family and Dylan was considered the ‘golden child’, the gifted one who was being groomed to follow an academic path to a future successful career. I think, Byron probably took the hint and picked up the subliminal messages his parents were inadvertently giving out, picking up on the fact that he wasn’t seen as the talented one and was resentful, and so he plunged himself into waffling in school with mediocre grades and partying.

According to Dylan (in the Basement Tapes), he recalls from his own POV “how popular and athletic his older brother Byron was and how he constantly “ripped” on him, as did his brother’s friends”  Basically, I think this amounted to Byron taking out his resentment on his kid brother who was somehow better than him by default. Dylan as a Jr. HS student was then at the age where he no longer wanted to spend as much time with mom and dad but he also didn’t really have a connection with his older brother so he began to isolate himself in his bedroom playing video games when he got home from school. It seems as though Byron let Dylan try alcohol and weed in his company and sadly, this may have been the only times they had a rare bonding moment. When Byron was kicked out of the house, basically asked to leave by his parents because of his drug habit in ‘97, Dylan then acquired his brother’s old bedroom. After that, I don’t think Byron came around much at all. Dylan probably only saw him for holidays or birthdays. Dylan essentially went from youngest to the old child in the household. Dylan was falling deeper in his depression and feeling numb and disconnected, I think most of his memories with his brother were not the best and so he seemed completely ‘meh’ about possibly never seeing his brother again. It’d be a sense of disdain and apathy sort of a ‘who cares, he never really gave a shit about me anyway and besides, he’s a fuck up with drugs and can’t get his shit together.’ On Dylan’s diversion intake form under the category of ‘least supporting family member’, he elects Byron as least supportive and then offers: “not involved w/ my life (not a problem).”. I think this basically says it all as to how he felt about his oldest brother. It’s a sad testament of the two brothers completely content to disengage from one another’s lives.

Byron, as the older brother now in his early twenties, was too self involved in his own life and apparently unable  or unwilling to reach out to his younger brother and be that supportive figure for him. Dylan, in turn, seemed to feel that Byron just abandoned him over a long period of time and his leaving home and being physically absent from his life seemed to have made no difference than if his brother was still living and co-existing in his own separate universe in the bedroom right next door. It’s sad really that they were like two ships passing one another by in their own home. I think Byron must have many regrets regarding how he conducted himself during that time period and that he literally just ignored or devalued his baby brother’s life rather than being mature enough and less self involved to be a supportive figure in Dylan’s life. That said, I do not think the problem ends and begins with Byron being a deadbeat brother to Dylan. It would seem that Byron’s own issues – his acting out with a drug habit he wasn’t about to quit, was possibly a result of some depression/mental health issues he was struggling with on his own and used drugs to cope – but also, in connection with some undercurrent, dysfunctional dynamics existing some where in the Klebold family unit. One contributing factor would be that Tom considered one son a fortuitous piece-of-cake  and the other an underachieving problem child. If both boys suffered depression, it would seem Byron wasn’t able to keep up appearances and tread water looking ‘normal’ and studious the way gifted Dylan was able to slack just enough but breeze through average level stuff while struggling with the challenges of those AP courses. Byron’s coping method may have been to just to throw in the towel with trying to be that A-B student and just not putting in a whole lot of effort  and also tuning out the pain with the use of drugs. He may have been even more discouraged because Dylan out performed him by default.  During the time period that the family was having issues with Byron’s drug problems, the family underwent group counseling. It was probably something Sue elected to do to help her family during a troubled time but I’m sure dad and the boys all went through it digging their heels uncomfortably and attending sessions perfunctorily. Meanwhile, the root, underlying family issues were never effectively aired and addressed. I’m sure for Dylan that must have been excruciatingly embarrassing to voice any thing that was hurting him in front of his family and so he probably fidgeted and mumbling one word answers the entire time.

In A Mother’s Reckoning, Sue Klebold, for the first time, recounts, based on her recollections, her daily journals, and the difficult and harrowing writings and video recordings her son left behind, the days and months leading up to the tragic shooting at Columbine High School, where 12 students and one teacher, as well as the shooters themselves, died–and the indelible impact on Sue, her family, the community, and our culture. In large measure, this candid and unflinching narrative was written to explore how Sue and others close to Dylan missed potential signs. How did her beloved golden boy go so utterly off the rails, without her knowledge? Did she miss the indications, subtle or obvious, that Dylan was in trouble? That her child, who had just attended the senior prom and was soon to graduate and go off to college, had a dark, secret life, and an inner rage, that she could not even imagine? Is there something valuable and important that she can share with other mothers and families in terms of recognizing the signs that might get others the help they need?

In an age when the number of mass shootings has escalated to unprecedented levels, is there something we as parents and concerned citizens and community members can do to help our children and prevent such senseless tragedies? With fresh wounds from Newtown and Charleston, never has the need or yearning for insight and understanding been more urgent.

About the Author
Sue Klebold is the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two shooters at Columbine High School in 1999 who killed 13 people before ending their own lives, a tragedy that saddened and galvanized the nation. She has spent the last 15 years excavating every detail of her family life, and trying to understand the crucial intersection between mental health problems and violence. Instead of becoming paralyzed by her grief and remorse, she has become a passionate and effective agent 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.  
Available on Amazon Preorder

Do you think if Dylan hadn’t gone through with NBK, he would have eventually commit cuisine anyway? Or do you think he would just go to college and grow up and find some sort of contentment with living?

Well, I know how much Dyl looved food and I do believe he liked to dabble in cooking french egg cuisine dishes so just for that sake alone, if he decided not to go NBK, who knows? He might’ve been a master chef on Food Network committing killer cuisine dishes for his own show. 😉   

Ahem. Ok, in all seriousness… Dylan was struggling with chronic depression and also was trying to manage it all on his own without reaching out for help, so whatever he decided to do after high school would’ve been likely as much of a struggle for him as high school had been.  Dylan might’ve thought that leaving the town that he despised and going to the hot, dry, foreign desert landscapes of Arizona would’ve been that ticket to a fresh start, a way for everything to start looking up for him for once.  However, what if things were not going his way – the specific way in his mind’s eye he expected things to go?   So, he would still have been susceptible to those impulsive suicidal thoughts whether it be not doing well enough with college grades and still running empty on the motivation or not being able to make new friends the way he hoped to now being in a completely new town where no one knew him or whether that one girlfriend he managed to date five times and finally have sex with decided to friend zone him and date other guys. There’d always be something that didn’t quite turn out the way he’d hope because, hey, that’s just the way life is!  And so the question becomes: would Dylan be able to cope and handle those external life struggles living independently from his parents?  There would always be something that would test him and given that he was not getting therapeutic help, it is likely that he might’ve made suicide attempts.   There comes a point when Dylan’s self-reliance would hit a breaking point and he’d find himself alone in his dorm finding it easier to solely decide all alone to take matters into his own hands and  opt out rather than bother anyone about his sadness problems.  For Dylan to have conquered the depression he would need to have taken the first step and admitted and confided in someone that he had a problem and he would need to go get help so that he could manage his illness and ways to deal and cope with daily stressors and triggers. So, if Dyl hadn’t gone NBK, suicide was a strong potential outcome without getting the help he desperately needed.

I read your answer to the question what they might thought in their last seconds and I always thought they died in the same moment but you stated that Dylan lived a lil longer. Is that true, did he see his best friend dead?

Eric had his back to the bookshelves, at an angle, and Dylan had his back towards the book cart. Both were facing outward but kitty-corner parallel towards the tables and main library windows but neither were looking directly at one another.   Eric shot himself first and had his knees bent up towards his chest and put the shotgun in his mouth. The force of  the shotgun propelled him back and partially on his side. How he was discovered is pretty much how he landed. Dylan would have only peripherally seen Eric shoot himself but would not have witnessed him committing the act straight on – as in – his direct line of vision. He certainly would’ve heard the deafening sound of impact and blood spatter as Eric fell back and his knees dropped as though he were laying down, with the gun underneath his leg. After Eric committed the act, Dylan followed up and shot himself with his left hand to the left temple no more than a couple of seconds after Eric pulled the trigger. Dylan fell face down on top of Eric’s legs and bled out on top of his friend’s leg and boot. Dylan was, for all intent and purpose, already brain dead when his body began to convulse, cough and sputter. This was his body’s involuntary response of futilely trying to aspirate and purge the blood out of his lungs; his secondary cause of death was futility drowning within his own bodily fluids since his brain was no longer in charge of his body.  It’s unclear if when Dylan ‘coughed’ that he somehow managed to roll onto his back as he was dying and expire – or –  the cops came in and simply kicked him off Eric just to check and see if he was dead. So, no, it’s a myth that the two counted “1, 2, 3” and then shot themselves simultaneously nor did Dylan and Eric look each other as they off’d themselves.  Dylan experienced Eric’s death but not directly. He probably peered down a brief second and witnessed Eric’s legs sprawling out in loss of bodily control. I do not get the sense that he looked back over his shoulder to immortalize his friend and brother as a bloody pulp of gore for one last impression on his mind to go out with.  In that moment, bereft and utterly alone, Dylan’s focus became solely about his own physical escape from the world.  Of course, this is my own extrapolation from the evidence…   


Suicidal Tendencies

There are more than 99 ways to die… and I thought of them!

[Redacted] can get me that gun I hope, i wanna use it on a poor
SOB. I know..his name is vodka, dylan is his name too.

If by fate’s choice, [Redacted] didn’t love me, i’d slit my wrists & blow up atlanta strapped to my neck. It’s good understanding
a hard road since my realization, but it gets
easier, BUT IT DOESN’T! Thats part of existence, unpredictable. Existence is pure hell & pure heaven at the same time.

–Dylan Klebold

I don’t mean to be rude but I believe Dylan’s way to commit suicide was just so girly. Way too girly. There you are watching your best friend’s brains splattered pretty much everywhere and you take that shot to the temple? I don’t get it, seriously.

yuzu-nishi-ichi:

vodkasvixen:

c0atimundi:

alwayshereblog:

I think it was the way he choose. I don’t know why he choose that way. And I don’t think is girly at all. Many people commit suicide like that: a shot in the temple.

This anon seems kinda stupid tbh… I mean, for one, implying that girls are sissys by saying that a less gory/violent means of suicide is feminine. Two, ranking one form of suicide as more serious than another when both are done with the intent/expectation to die. Maybe if you were comparing someone impulsively swallowing a handful of tylenol to someone planning months in advance to shoot a shotgun slug through their head, maybe, but that really doesn’t apply here.

Now, onto what I’m guessing/hoping the anon’s point might have been, or at least what can be salvaged from it; “Why did Dylan shoot himself in the side of the head rather than through the roof of his mouth like Eric did, also, why did Dylan use the weaker 9mm Tec-9 rather than his shotgun?” I’ve wondered this a few times myself. Shooting yourself through the roof of the mouth is almost universally more effective than shooting yourself in the side of the head. I’m not sure why adeadlyinnocence feels the opposite is true, unless by “through the roof of the mouth” we are including putting the gun below your chin, in which case to the temple would probably be more effective (with the barrel on your chin, the bullet or buckshot has more bone and tissue to go through to reach the brain, also, you might flinch when pulling the trigger and just destroy your face, this is how most people who try to off themselves with a shotgun but survive end up failing). Most people don’t know which method (to the temple or roof of mouth) is more or less effective or if their is a difference, unless they do some research, I’m guessing Dylan did not research suicide methods. Maybe he chose the temple just because it’s slightly easier and is what is typically depicted in movies/tv/games (the reason probably being that you get a clear unobstructed view of the persons face if the gun is to the side of the head, thus showing us the persons expression and if they had the gun in their mouth they wouldn’t be able to say some dramatic one liner before they pull the trigger. Basically, it “looks cooler” so we see it depicted more.). As to why he didn’t use his shotgun, I have a few ideas; perhaps because it was a double barrel shotgun he couldn’t easily fit it in his mouth, and maybe he wanted to use the tec-9 so his face would be better preserved. It may seem somewhat strange to have that desire, but not that uncommon, nobody likes to think about what happens to your body when you die, and if you’re intent on offing yourself you especially don’t want to chicken out at the last moment because you don’t like the idea of blood and brains splattered everywhere or your face being impossible to recognize. So maybe he chose the less gory method of using the 9mm because he didn’t like to imagine the gore from using the shotgun, or maybe he didn’t want his family to have to see him like that. Another idea is that he didn’t think there would be a difference in effect and just used the tec-9 because that was what was in his dominant hand and thus easier to manipulate.

Maybe we’re just over-analyzing it and to him a gun was a gun and either one would do.

Plus putting a TEC-9 in your mouth is kind of awkward. He just wanted to get the job done.

image

I love your response, c0atimundi!

Definitely all of that. Plus…Dylan spent a lot of time fantasizing about killing himself. The Suicidal fantasy foreplay was not exactly how it had begun to play out in reality. So, I think when he actually got to the moment, Dylan found himself…stalling.. a bit. The police found a small pile of his items near by his body, personal items of significance to himself: his necklace, a silver pocket watch, and his triple-barred cross (the only thing he left on himself was his black onyx ring and that may have been something he overlooked as it was on his glove encased trigger hand.) Dylan seemed to be preparing himself, almost as if in a ritualized fashion and that very spot was his like a burial ground. Unlike Eric, he’d thought of suicide many times before but now.. he had preceded carefully preparing for his death. If Eric decided to do it quickly, to avoid losing the nerve or having second thoughts, Dylan likely saw or heard peripherally as his best friend just blew his brains out, saw the blood spatter on the ceiling. If this was the case, Dylan was then standing there all alone, probably having a bit of an out-of-body experience, standing by himself in a vacuum of time – seconds..a minute? feeling like hours.. time enough.. to consider and prepare for death by his own hand in actuality. I also think he considered he would not want to be disfigured for himself as well as his family’s sake. He obliterated his computer data but he left his personal journal and he also decided to leave his physical body intact. It was his choice.

Fuck me / Die me

The Many Goodbyes of Dylan Klebold (Part 2)

2 (poems) Fuck me / Die me

Soon I will be at peace I hope…

…wanna die and be free w/ my love…
if..she even exists.

If by fate’s choice, [redacted] didn’t love me, I’d slit my wrist and blow up atlanta strapped to my neck. It’s good, understanding a hard road since my realization, but it get’s easier. BUT IT DOESN’T! That’s part of existence. unpredictable. Existence is pure hell and pure heaven all the same time.

I will go away soon, but I just had to write this to you, the one I truly loved. Please, for my sake, don’t tell anybody, as it was only meant for you. Also, please don’t feel any guilt about my soon to be “absence” of this world. It is solely _my_ decision: nobody elses.

I want to go to a new existence you know what I mean (Suicide? _y_) I have nothing to live for and I won’t be able to survive in this world after this legal conviction. However, if it was true that you loved me as I do you,…I would find a way to survive. Anything to be with you.
I would enjoy life knowing that you loved me.

Well, I guess this is it — goodbye & I love(d) you.

This is probably my last entry. I love myself a close second to [redacted] my everlasting love. goodbye.

I hate this non-thinking stasis. I’m stuck in humanity. maybe Going NBK (gawd) w. eric is the way to break free.
i hate this. Love You.

(Part 1)


Goodbye…Sorry to everyone..I just can’t take it…

The Many Goodbyes of Dylan Klebold (Part 1)

Goodbye,
Sorry to everyone…
I just can’t take it…
all the thoughts…
too many…make my
head twist..
I must have happiness..
love, peace,
..goodbye..

I don’t fit in I’m thinking of suicide gives me hope, that I’ll be in my place wherever is after this life – that I’ll finally not be at war with myself, the world, the universe – my mind, body, everywhere, everything at PEACE – w/ me – my soul (existence)

That’s all for this topic…maybe I’ll never see this again…

oooh god, I want to die so bad…such a sad, desolate, lonely unsalvageable I feel I am…not fair NOT FAIR!!!

[redacted] can get me that gun I hope, I want to use it on a poor S.O.B.
I know..his name is vodka, dylan is his name too. What else can I do/give..

I hate everything, why can’t I die..not fair.

No emotions. not caring
yet another stage in this
shit life. suicide…
Dylan Klebold

Soon I will be at peace I hope…

Abandonment. this room sux..wanna die

————————————————————————————
“He had a lot of pain – he told me that,”
says his friend Sarah Slater, 16.