Family Portrait.
Tag: Vodka
Saturday, April 17
Cigarettes. A white stretch limo. A girl in a royal-blue prom dress and soft blonde curls. She’s holding his hand.
This was one of Dylan Klebold’s last nights.
Prom night for Columbine. Hardly the outsider, he was one of a dozen dressed-up kids who piled into a limo and dined at a ritzy LoDo restaurant. Then it was off to the dance at the Design Center on South Broadway in Denver.
Dylan wore a black tuxedo, a pink rosebud tucked into his lapel. His long wavy hair slicked back into an uncooperative ponytail.
His date was Robyn Anderson, now a valedictorian contender with her straight-A average. She asked him to the prom — just as friends.
In recent months, Robyn and Dylan’s relationship had been wobbling along that murky territory between friendship and romance.
Robyn later told a friend that Dylan behaved gentlemanly on prom night, complimenting her on her dress.
“They were holding hands and stuff,” said Jessica Hughes, one of the limo crowd.
Jessica sat next to Robyn and Dylan during dinner at Bella Ristorante. There was a lot of silly joking between them, playing with knives and matches.
“They were pretending to light themselves on fire,” Jessica said.
Dylan ate a big salad, followed by a seafood dish with shells, mussels she thinks, then dessert. “I was like, my Lord,” Jessica said.
Jessica and Dylan chatted about a party both planned to attend in a couple weeks, a reunion for kids who’d been in the gifted program in elementary school.
“He was all excited to see everyone,” Jessica said.
Dylan even agreed to bring pizza because he worked at Blackjack.
Back in the limo, no one was drinking anything stronger than Pepsi, Jessica recalled.
The car’s TV was off. The radio was turned to a hard-rock station and on so low the kids drowned out the music. They were being, well, normal goofy teens enjoying themselves. Cameras flashing. Lipstick smiles. Whisking through the night in a mirrored-ceiling car.
“We were flipping people off because the windows were so dark. We were making fun of people,” Jessica said.
Dylan even talked of everyone staying in touch after he left for college in three months.
“He was in a really great mood that night,” another friend in the limo, Monica Schuster, said.
Their senior year, Eric and Dylan went for some pretty cerebral subjects: psychology, creative writing.
One theme dominated Eric’s homework assignments. Guns.
As part of Eric’s government and economics class, students marketed a product and made a video of it.
“His product was the Trench Coat Mafia Protection Service,” classmate Matt Cornwell said.
“Dylan was not in the class, but he was in the video. If you paid $5 they would beat someone up for you. If you paid them $10, they would shoot somebody for you.”
Eric’s video stood out, Matt said.
“There were some pretty crazy products. Some people did Hit Man For Hire. Most of them were funny. This wasn’t funny at all. After it was over, everybody was like, ‘Whoa, that was weird."’
Matt and Dylan were in composition class, but they only talked once.
"That’s because he wore this Soviet pin on his boot,” Matt said. “One of the last days I was like, ‘Why do you wear that pin on your boot?’ And he was like, ‘Just to get a reaction out of people."’
Brooks Brown found himself in two classes with Eric in their last semester.
The two hadn’t talked in more than a year. They decided to patch things up, mostly for Dylan’s sake. That way, Eric could go along if Brooks invited Dylan for a smoke. Dylan wouldn’t feel torn between his two friends.
Brooks shook his family up one night when he announced at the dinner table that he and Eric were friends again. Judy Brown looked at her son in disbelief.
"He said, ‘He’s changed,"’ she recalled. "I said, ‘Stay away from him. It’s a trick."’
Brooks didn’t believe her. In their creative writing class, he even volunteered to read Eric’s essay describing a childhood memory.
Eric wrote about playing war with his brother Kevin, two little boys using the forest as their battlefield and pine cones as their grenades.
"It was real good,” classmate Domonic Duran said.
Students were asked to describe themselves as an inanimate object. Eric chose a shotgun and a shell.
Brooks doubts Eric took the assignment seriously. Although some students in the class adored the teacher, Judy Kelly, they said Eric clearly felt superior to her.
Dylan also chose violent themes, and once wrote about a killing.
Kelly was concerned enough about Eric and Dylan’s papers to talk to their parents at parent-teacher conferences in March.
Wayne Harris had justified his son’s fascination with weapons by saying he had been in the military and Eric hoped to join the Marines.
But then there was the dream.
To psychology teacher Tom Johnson, Eric’s dream wasn’t much weirder than a lot of others that landed on his desk.
It was February. Eric and Dylan were in the class together fifth period, after lunch. They would show up early, sit side-by-side and talk openly with other kids in the small, friendly class.
Dream analysis was optional. Students would type up a recent dream and hand it in. No names, no grades.
But the class figured out which one was Eric’s because it had so many references to “me and Dylan.”
“It occurred in a mall and the boys were being put upon by someone, and they retaliated,” Johnson said.
Guns were involved, and the dream was somewhat violent. But at the time it seemed fairly normal in the surrealistic dream world.
“Whenever there are guns involved, there’s anger. But it didn’t strike me as being particularly obsessive or compulsive,” Johnson said. “You do 100 dreams a day and many of them are in the same ilk.”
Johnson had taught Eric freshman government and economics. To him, Eric wasn’t much different his senior year, just more gothic, shorter hair and darker clothes. Eric was still motivated and worried about grades. He had a 99 percent.
Dylan, well, he’d missed a test and hadn’t made it up. Johnson couldn’t remember Dylan’s exact grade average, but knew it was lacking.
Some porn websites that Dylan had in his personal stuff.
The handwriting on the right is someone elses – possibly Eric’s but doesn’t look cramped enough. The url jotted down on the left is definitely Dylan’s. It’s amusing how the urls on the right are mainstream porn sites and on the left, Dylan is drawn to the obscure fetish website. Gotta love, Dyl. Oh, those shy boys and their hidden interests. 😉
Andrew Solomon about Sue Klebold
I just read an interview with Andrew Solomon,
the author of ‘far from the tree’, about parents whose child was different.
Autistic, blind, schizophrenic,….In the interview, Dylan and his parents are also mentioned,
here is what he has to say about Sue :Klebold’s mother says :’ I believe it…
Things Dylan will do if you mess with that freaking kid:
- *rip off your goddamn head
- *shove it so far up your freaking ass
- *make you cough dandruff for 4 freaking months
True, that.
How could we think for even a second that Dylan could shoot someone? Shame on us for even considering the idea.
Susan Kelbold, Dylan’s mother (via dylan-my-vodka)
He actually did at one time. In fact, even Judy Brown collaborated that to me a few weeks ago when I met her at an anniversary dinner for Columbine. Dylan had had a crush on her. I don’t know where that went. Rachel had actually tried to be friends with Dylan, not in a boyfriend-girlfriend kind of deal. She was a kind person. When everything went wrong for Dylan, I guess he kind of turned on her. Rachel was known as a Christian at Columbine and there was a lot of hate about Christians and Jews. They fed their anger. They had to keep it at a level and to do that they fed it through books, games, movies, very violent sources. They kept up this mock bravery or toughness and they fed one another with it. They had to keep that anger at a certain level in order for them to seed the plan they did. I know when Rachel was performing one night at a variety show, her tape got garbled. It was Dylan in the sound booth. I was told that he was so anxious to get that right because she was performing a mime during the tape. I think it was kind of a love-hate thing. He hated her for her Christian point of view, but, at the same time he was drawn to her because she was a kind person.
Beth Nimmo, mother to Rachel Scott, when asked if Dylan Klebold had a crush on her daughter (via sweet-rachel)
Suicide is the end result of a complex mix of pathology, character, and circumstance that produces severe emotional distress. This distress is so great that it impairs one’s ability to think and act rationally. From the writings Dylan left behind, criminal psychologists have concluded that he was depressed and suicidal. When I first saw copied pages of these writings, they broke my heart. I’d had no inkling of the battle Dylan was waging in his mind.
Susan Klebold (via lsd137)
Angies- Breakfast Run
“"i’ll put ketchup on my ciniminis”“
This restaurant used to be a Burger King. It is literally located 5 min from CHS. This is where The Breakfast Run was filmed on 04/19/99.
Breakfast Run Video:
Eric and Dylan’s first class during spring semester was bowling.
At 6:15 a.m.
“It’s just to have fun,” classmate Jeni LaPlante said.
It was the only class she had with her closest friends: Sara Arbogast, Kim Carlin and Cindy Shinnick. Dylan and Eric bowled on a team with Nate Dykeman and Chris Morris.
One reason Kim and Sara liked the class is they could catch up with Eric. They hadn’t seen him much after quitting Blackjack in the fall.
“Eric bowled like an idiot,” Kim recalled, giggling.
“He’d throw it,” Sara said. “A lot of people laughed because it worked and he would get strikes and stuff.”
Sometimes Eric and Dylan shouted “Sieg Heil!” when they made strikes.
But something else stands out for the bowling partners: Dylan’s explosive temper.
Dylan would get so mad when he didn’t get strikes, Jeni said. One time he hit the bowling return machine really hard.
In fact, a tendency to flash quick anger was a trait Eric and Dylan shared.
“Eric had a short fuse,” said friend Joe Stair. “You could just tell he got mad easier than most people.”
But the way Joe saw it, Eric’s anger was a reflection of Eric’s passion.
“He got angry. But with other things he was really happy,” Joe said. “He was a very passionate person.”
Dylan Klebold Lived Life of Religious Contradictions
Dylan Klebold, one of two suspects in last week’s bloodbath at Columbine High School, led a life of contradictions.
Klebold, along with classmate Eric Harris, killed 12 fellow students and one teacher on April 20 before they committed suicide. Both were seniors at the Littleton high school, apparently members of a shadowy clique known as the Trenchcoat Mafia. Police have identified neo-Nazism and a fascination with Adolf Hitler as among several hate-oriented themes that influenced the pair.
Reports of the Klebold family’s Jewish ancestry first appeared last Friday in the Columbus Dispatch of Columbus, Ohio, where Dylan Klebold’s maternal great-grandfather, the late Leo Yassenoff, was a Jewish community leader and philanthropist. Also known as an outstanding football player for the Ohio State Buckeyes in his youth, Yassenoff had such lasting influence in Columbus that the city’s Jewish community center still bears his name.
The elder Yassenoff and his son, Milton Yassenoff, were members of the Columbus Reform congregation, Temple Israel, the Dispatch reported. Milton and his wife, Charlotte, who was not Jewish, raised their daughter Susan — Dylan Klebold’s mother — as a Jew. Although by Orthodox standards Susan wouldn’t be considered Jewish because her mother wasn’t Jewish, she was active in the Reform congregation during her youth his mother considered herself Jewish, yet the family belonged to a Lutheran church.
Dylan recited the Four Questions at a Passover seder recently held at his family home, yet he was buried in a Lutheran service on Saturday.
Traditionally given to the youngest person at the Seder table (usually the youngest son) to read aloud, the Four Questions are actually one question plus four clauses each of which are a short but complete overview of the story of Passover as told in the Passover Haggadah, or Book of Passover, which is given to each person at the table.
On Saturday, the Denver Rocky Mountain News carried an interview with her hairdresser, Dee Grantz, who said that Susan Klebold had spoken to her about her shock at her son’s deed.
She reportedly told Grantz: “It’s so hard to see my son portrayed as a monster when that isn’t the boy I know. I don’t know where all this comes about prejudice. We never taught any prejudice in our home. [Dylan] never talked that way to me. I’m Jewish.”
Rabbi Raymond Zwerin of Denver’s Temple Sinai might have been speaking on behalf of many area Jews when he questioned the apparent media fascination with the issue.
“I wouldn’t consider him to be Jewish in any way or form,” Rabbi Zwerin said of Dylan Klebold. “He wasn’t raised Jewish. I don’t see anyone making a big deal about the fact that Harris was Catholic. Let’s not blame religion for this. This has nothing to do with religion or the failure of religion.”
As for Klebold’s Jewish forebears, the rabbi said simply, “I’m sure the grandfather and great-grandfather are twisting in their graves.”
Susan Klebold did tell her pastor that something in her son’s voice spooked her Tuesday morning.
“The goodbye had an edge to it,” she said, describing her son’s tone to the Rev. Don Marxhausen as “almost fatalistic.” “She thought, maybe he’s in a bad mood,” he said. “Maybe he’s got a test today or something.” Dylan’s father, Thomas Klebold, 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.
The Everlasting Contrast 