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