A year after the massacre, the police turned over Dylan’s journals to the Klebolds, who hadn’t known of their existence. “Dylan’s writing is full of ‘I’m smarter than they are,’” Sue said. “He experienced disdain for the people who were mistreating him. He liked to think of himself as perfect, I think, and that grandiosity came through in the shootings. He started being more withdrawn and secretive in the last two years of high school, but that’s not so unusual. The stereotype that he and Eric were these miserable little kids who were plotting because they were so isolated is false. He was bright. He was very shy. He had friends, and they liked him. I was as shocked hearing that my son was perceived as an outcast as I was hearing that he’d been involved in a shooting. He cared for other people.” Tom demurred, “Or he seemed to.”

“I can never decide whether it’s worse to think your child was hardwired to be like this and that you couldn’t have done anything, or to think he was a good person and something set this off in him,” Sue said. “What I’ve learned from being an outcast since the tragedy has given me insight into what it must have felt like for my son to be marginalized. He created a version of his reality for us: to be pariahs, unpopular, with no means to defend ourselves against those who hate us.” Their attorney filtered their piles of mail so they would not see the worst of it. “I could read three hundred letters where people were saying, ‘I admire you,’ ‘I’m praying for you,’ and I’d read one hate letter and be destroyed,” Sue said. “When people devalue you, it far outweighs all the love.”

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. Sue sees a terrible confluence of circumstances including depression, a school environment that caused rage, and an influential friend who had severe problems. “Dylan felt a little afraid of Eric, a little protective of him, and a little controlled by him,” she said. “He was caught in something I don’t understand that made him do this horrible thing. But I don’t, can’t, believe that that is who he was. Yes, he made a conscious choice and did this horrible thing, but what had happened to his consciousness that he would make such a choice? Something in him got broken. The same pathology that killed and hurt all the others also killed my son.”

I was surprised that the Klebolds had stayed in the town where they had been party to so much anguish. “If we had moved and changed our names, the press would have figured it out,” Sue said. “I would have been ‘the mother of that killer’ in the eyes of everyone I met. Here at least I had people who liked me as me, and people who had liked Dylan, and that was what I needed— especially people who had liked Dylan.” Tom said bluntly, “If we’d left, they would have won. Staying was my defiance of the people who were trying to grind us into the ground.” I ventured that it must have been hard to keep loving Dylan through the aftermath, and Sue replied, “No, it never was. That was the easy part. Trying to understand was hard, coping with the loss was hard, reconciling myself to the consequences of his actions was hard, but loving him— no, that was always easy for me.”

It seemed to me, as I talked to the Klebolds, that Sue was Germany and Tom was Japan. Sue was intensely introspective and burdened with terrific guilt, while Tom proclaimed that it was horrible and then tried to move on. “What are you going to do?” he said. “He felt that he had a reason. He suffered the ultimate: he’s no longer here. I’m sorry for the pain my son caused other people, but we had more than our share of pain in this, too. We lost our son; then we had to live with his memory being attacked.” Like Japan, he also externalized the causes, but only to a point. “I imagined Eric telling him, ‘If you don’t do this, I will come and kill your parents,’” Tom later said. “But Dylan’s willingness to participate is inescapable.” Sue believes that Dylan would have been able to foil pressure from Eric if that had been the pivotal factor. She has wondered whether he might have endured some precipitating trauma, even if he’d been raped by someone, but has never found any evidence to that effect. In writings that go back to his sophomore year, she said, “He talks like a thoughtful, introspective, depressed kid, mostly about how he has a crush on somebody, and she doesn’t know he’s alive. Three months before the tragedy he’s talking about how he wants to die, and he says, ‘I might do an NBK with Eric.’” She learned that NBK stood for Natural Born Killers. “So as late as January, Dylan hadn’t really decided that he was going to do this. He just wanted to die. But why blow up the school? I get in my car on a Monday morning, and I start thinking about Dylan, and I just cry all the way to work. I talk to him, or I sing songs. You have to be in touch with that sorrow.”

An event of such enormity completely disrupts one’s sense of reality. “I used to think I could understand people, relate, and read them pretty well,” Sue said. “After this, I realized I don’t have a clue what another human being is thinking. We read our children fairy tales and teach them that there are good guys and bad guys. I would never do that now. I would say that every one of us has the capacity to be good and the capacity to make poor choices. If you love someone, you have to love both the good and the bad in them.” Sue worked in a building that also housed a parole office and had felt alienated and frightened getting on the elevator with ex-convicts. After Columbine, she saw them differently. “I felt that they were just like my son. That they were just people who, for some reason, had made an awful choice and were thrown into a terrible, despairing situation. When I hear about terrorists in the news, I think, ‘That’s somebody’s kid.’ Columbine made me feel more connected to mankind than anything else possibly could have.”

The Klebolds had letters from kids who idealized Dylan, and from girls who were in love with him. “He has his own groupies,” Tom said with an ironic half smile. They were heartened by unanticipated kindnesses. At a conference about suicide some years later, a man came up to Sue, knelt in front of her, and said, “I just want to tell you how much I admire you. I can’t believe the way you have been treated. Every day I picked up the paper, and I expected to read that people were coming up your driveway with pitchforks.” Sue has had strangers hug her. But the prospect of a normal life remains elusive. She recounted a recent trip to the supermarket when the checkout clerk had verified her name on her driver’s license. “And then she says, ‘Klebold  .  .  .   Did you know him?’ And I say, ‘He was my son.’ And then she started in with ‘It was the work of Satan.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Please, let’s bag the groceries here.’ As I leave the store, she’s yelling out after me about how she’s praying for me. It wears you down.”

Excerpt – Solomon, Andrew (2012-11-13)
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

The Klebolds went to stay with Tom’s sister for four days, returning home on the day of Dylan’s funeral. “We didn’t really know what had happened,” Sue said. “We just knew Dylan was dead, that he’d killed himself, that he was involved with the shooting.”

As Littleton’s period of mourning began, a carpenter from Illinois erected fifteen crosses on a hillside near the school. “I was so buoyed by this,” Tom said. “I wanted to be a part of the community. And I thought we could all grieve together.” Sue remembered, “There were flowers, and Dylan’s and Eric’s crosses had as many as everyone else’s.” Then the parents of some of the victims destroyed Dylan’s and Eric’s crosses. The youth group at a local church planted fifteen trees, only to have some of the victims’ parents arrive with a press escort to chop down Dylan’s and Eric’s trees. At the high school graduation ceremony a week later, there were encomiums for the victims, but the head of the school told friends of Dylan and Eric to make themselves scarce. Before long, reports referring to the incident started using the number thirteen rather than fifteen. “The shorthand was this,” Tom said. “Thirteen kids died. Two Nazis killed them, and the parents were responsible. It was a lynch mob.” Sue said reflectively, “I think the other parents believed they had experienced loss, and I had not, because their children were of value, and mine was not. My child died, too. He died after making a terrible decision and doing a terrible thing, but he was still my child, and he still died.”

The Klebolds’ lawyer had advised them not to talk to the press; their silence exacerbated local hostility. “You’d read something, and you couldn’t respond to it,” Tom said. “You knew that it was false, misleading, inflammatory.” Sue said, “It was just like constantly being hit, and being hit again. And you couldn’t fight back.” In an act of agonizing catharsis, Sue handwrote notes to the parents of each child who had died or been injured. Though she did not feel responsible for what had happened, she wanted to mitigate the devastation. “To me, the only way to heal this community was to try to have a one-to-one relationship with each of the victims,” she later explained. “My journey is not complete until I can say to these people, ‘If you ever want to speak to me, I am available to you. I will meet in your home, a pastor’s office, with a mediator if you want. If it would help you to talk to me, I’m here.’” She has never done it, because a counselor cautioned her that by contacting them, she might retraumatize them. “But I cried for their children just as I did for mine,” she said. While the Klebolds faced a great deal of hostility, moments of unusual love also surfaced. “A few weeks after Columbine happened, I got a hug from the checkout clerk at Home Depot,” Tom said. “Neighbors brought us food. And when I took my car in to have a bent wheel fixed, the mechanic said to me, ‘At least you didn’t change your name.’ He respected that.” 

Investigations over the ensuing months revealed an atmosphere of bullying at Columbine. “Unless you were a part of the in crowd and had your athletic résumé, you had no status,” Tom said. “So Dylan had to be resentful. The only thing that would certainly have prevented Columbine would have been to eliminate the chip on his shoulder, and the chip sprang from that school. He and Eric didn’t shoot us, and they didn’t shoot up Kmart or a gas station; they shot up the school. The whole social pattern at Columbine was unfair, and Dylan couldn’t do anything about it. That would cause enough anger in a sensitive kid to make him retaliate.”

Unbeknownst to the Klebolds, Dylan had experienced significant humiliation at school, though he was six feet four and not easy to push around. He had come home one day with ketchup spots all over his shirt, and when his mother asked what had happened, he said he’d had the worst day of his life and didn’t want to talk about it. Months after his death, she learned of an incident in which Dylan and Eric had apparently been shoved and squirted with ketchup by kids calling them fags. “It hurt so much that I’d seen the remnants of that day and hadn’t helped him,” she said. When Tom went to pick up Dylan’s car from the police station a few weeks after the event, one of the officers said to him, “My son came home from that school one day and they’d set his hair on fire right in the hall— his whole scalp was burned. I wanted to take that school apart brick by brick, but he said it would only make it worse.” 

Excerpt – Solomon, Andrew (2012-11-13)
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, seniors at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, placed bombs in the cafeteria, set to go off during first lunch period at 11: 17 a.m., and planned to shoot anyone who tried to flee. Errors in the construction of the detonators prevented the bombs from exploding, but Klebold and Harris nevertheless held the whole school hostage, killing twelve students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves. At the time, it was the worst episode of school violence in history. The American Right blamed the collapse of “family values,” while the Left mounted assaults on violence in the movies and sought to tighten gun-control laws. Wholesale critiques of the larger culture were offered as explanation for these inexplicable events.

The number of people killed that day is generally listed as thirteen, and the Columbine Memorial commemorates only thirteen deaths, as though Klebold and Harris had not also died that day in that place. Contrary to wide speculation then and since, the boys did not come from broken homes and did not have records of criminal violence. The wishful thought of a world that witnessed this horror was that good parenting could prevent children from developing into Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold, but malevolence does not always grow in a predictable or accountable manner. As the families of autistics or schizophrenics wonder what happened to the apparently healthy people they knew, other families grapple with children who have turned to horrifying acts and wonder what happened to the innocent children they thought they understood.

 I set out to interview Tom and Sue Klebold with the expectation that meeting them would help to illuminate their son’s actions. The better I came to know the Klebolds, the more deeply mystified I became. Sue Klebold’s kindness (before Dylan’s death, she worked with people with disabilities) would be the answered prayer of many a neglected or abused child, and Tom’s bullish enthusiasm would lift anyone’s tired spirits. Among the many families I’ve met in writing this book, the Klebolds are among those I would be most game to join. Trapped in their own private Oresteia, they learned astonishing forgiveness and empathy. They are victims of the terrifying, profound unknowability of even the most intimate human relationship. It is easier to love a good person than a bad one, but it may be more difficult to lose a bad person you love than a good one. Sue Klebold once said to me, “I watched Rosemary’s Baby the other night and my heart really went out to Rosemary.” When Barbara Walters interviewed the father of one of Dylan’s classmates after the events, he said of the Klebolds, “They’re in a glass cage. And they have no more pieces to this puzzle than anybody else.”

The last Sue Klebold heard from Dylan, the younger of her two children, was “Bye” as he let the front door slam on his way to school that April 20. In the middle of the day, Tom received a call about the shootings at school and learned that Dylan was a suspect. He called Sue. “I had a sudden vision of what he might be doing,” Sue said. “And so while every other mother in Littleton was praying that her child was safe, I had to pray that mine would die before he hurt anyone else. I thought if this was really happening and he survived, he would go into the criminal justice system and be executed, and I couldn’t bear to lose him twice. I gave the hardest prayer I ever made, that he would kill himself, because then at least I would know that he wanted to die and wouldn’t be left with all the questions I’d have if he got caught by a police bullet. Maybe I was right, but I’ve spent so many hours regretting that prayer: I wished for my son to kill himself, and he did.”

That night, police told the Klebolds to leave their house— both so the police could turn it inside out, and for their own safety. “I thought about Dylan being dead,” Sue said, “and I thought, ‘He was young and healthy and maybe he could be an organ donor.’ And then I thought, ‘Would anyone want the organs of a murderer?’ That was my first taste of how the world would see my son.”

Excerpt – Solomon, Andrew (2012-11-13)
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity