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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