School shooter’s mom to be guest speaker at mental-health event

To kick off its inaugural Breakfast of Champions event in May, the Canadian Mental Health Association will have Sue Klebold, the mom of one of the shooters in the Columbine high school massacre, as guest speaker.

On April 20, 1999, Grade 12 students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold executed a complex and planned attack on their Colorado school, shooting and killing 12 students and a teacher and wounding 24 others before killing themselves.

Sue has written a book, A Mother’s Reckoning, in which she shares stories about Dylan, as well as her life since the shooting. She is now a suicide prevention activist. On May 1, the CMHA will hold its Breakfast of Champions at St. Clair College Centre for the Arts. The event is billed as a forum for thought-provoking, powerful conversations that touch on various aspects of mental illness. Kim Willis, the agency’s director of communications and mental health promotion, said Klebold was booked last year and it’s coincidental she is coming in the wake of shooting massacres at a Florida high school and a Las Vegas concert.

“She’s dealing with things on so many different levels,” Willis said. “Whether it’s a child that’s dealing with mental illness or the afterward grief and bereavement. Also, she has her own mental-health (issues) afterwards, so it touched on so many important topics that we thought she would bring as a great speaker here.”

The event will also include the presentation of the first Carol Mueller Mental Health Champion Award. Mueller was a leader of ALIVE Canada whose mandate was suicide prevention and education.

“We’ve made tremendous strides in the last decades toward addressing stigma, and change has happened and is happening, but we still come across people who are more reluctant to share when they are dealing with a mental illness,” Willis said. “So the more we normalize it and bring awareness to it, and getting people talking about it, the better.”

Tickets for the event are available at windsoressex.cmha.ca