The day my lovely son massacred his school friends ...
A MOTHER’S RECKONING by Sue Klebold (WH Allen)
THE biggest cloud on Sue Klebold’s horizon, as she set off for work in Denver, Colorado, on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, was the declining health of Rocky, the elderly family cat.
Other than that, everything was hunky-dory. She had just turned 50, felt secure in a long and loving marriage, and had a rewarding job working with disabled students.
Best of all, her two sons, both named after poets, were thriving. The elder, Byron, had a decent job and was sharing an apartment with a friend.
The younger, Dylan, was in his final year at Columbine High School in Littleton, just outside Denver. He had put a few fairly innocuous disciplinary problems behind him and was making excellent progress.
Three days earlier, he had gone with a date to the school prom, looking happy and handsome. When she heard him get home at 4am, Sue had got out of bed to ask how his evening had gone. He’d said it was the best night of his life.
That was Saturday. But on this Tuesday morning a message flashed on her office phone. It was her husband, Tom, telling her to call him immediately.
His voicemail marked the abrupt end of her old, contented existence, and the start of a new one of unimaginable anguish. For 17-year- old Dylan, with his friend Eric Harris, had that morning taken an arsenal of guns and home- made bombs to Columbine High and murdered 12 pupils and a teacher, and wounded 24 others, before killing themselves.
In A Mother’s Reckoning, Sue chronicles the deeply painful soul-searching she has done since that terrible day. At times, the guilt and grief have been virtually unendurable. Tom often said he wished Dylan had killed them, too. After all, in a way, Dylan had. He had killed the people they were, and the lives they had led.
She, too, sometimes longed for death. ‘I prayed I’d pass away in my sleep,’ she writes, ‘a quiet deliverance from the agony of waking up and re ali sing it hadn’t all been a terrible nightmare.’
When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, less than two years after the tragedy, it at first seemed like a blessed exit route. But she recovered.
Almost 17 years on, the pain endures, and so do the questions. The more charismatic Eric appears to have been a homicidal psychopath, Dylan a suicidal depressive.
Eric wanted to kill, and didn’t care if he died. Dylan wanted to die, and didn’t care if he killed. It was a catastrophic cocktail of psychological frailties.
Yet Sue had no notion that Dylan was anything but a typical middle- class American teenager. She liked most of his friends( except Eric ), and enjoyed watching him mature as he prepared to goto college. He didn’ t seem unhealthily interested in guns, or violent imagery.
BEYOND the question of how they were going to pay for his college education (heartbreakingly, Sue berates herself for airing this anxiety in front of him, as if he might have decided to free them from the obligation), they had no real concerns about his future.
One afternoon, in an instinctive demonstration of a moth- er’s love, Sue threw her arms around him and told him how proud she and Tom were of him. ‘He looked down, embarrassed, and whispered his thanks,’ she recalls.
Less than two weeks later he had helped to perpetrate what at the time was the worst school massacre in US history. Adam Lanza murdered even more children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, but ‘Columbine-related materials’ were found in his belongings. It is thought that at least 17 subsequent attacks on schools can be tied to Columbine.
So how and why did it happen? This book, as harrowing as it is engrossing, challenges the glib if understandable verdict of all those who felt there must have been signs of impending tragedy, and that more engaged parents would have spotted them. For those of us who are also parents of teenagers (I have a son who is exactly the age Dylan was when he died), it would be somehow reassuring to know that theirs was a dysfunctional family or that there were indeed neon danger signs.
It wasn’t and there weren’t. Yet, plainly, on one basic level, Sue and Tom Klebold did not really know their son. The attack was carefully plotted, yet they had no idea that he was feeling unhappy, still less suicidal, still less murderous.
That’s what makes it such a scary book to read. The Klebolds were a family rather like mine, and maybe yours, too.
Yes, they lived in a society in which firearms are readily available, but Sue tried to pass on to her sons her own hatred of guns — and is sickened by the oft-aired argument from the powerful pro-weapons lobby that if her boy had grown up ‘more
habituated’ to guns, or if the teachers had been armed, Columbine could have been avoided.
Besides, even with access to guns, he didn’t really fit the profile of a potential school killer. He wasn’t a brooding loner, and although he was bullied, picked on by a group of younger kids for his height (he was well over 6ft tall) and long hair, it doesn’t appear to have been too much of a torment.
Alarmingly, he and Eric are lionised even now by some victims of bullying, as if they were heroes rather than mass murderers. But to Sue, it was no less alarming when, shortly after the massacre, the two boys appeared on the cover of Time magazine, next to the headline The Monsters Next Door.
‘Despite the monstrous nature of what he had done,’ she writes, ‘it hurt me terribly to see that word used to describe him and utterly surreal to see his face under that iconic logo. It was still hard to believe Dylan had done something horrendous enough that the neighbours would know about it, let alone the entire world.’ This book doesn’t just record her own turbulent emotions, but also the response of those neighbours, and of the wider world. Their lawyer told them to prepare for ‘a firestorm of hatred’, and it duly rained down upon them. But they received much kindness, too.
Even in the immediate wake of the massacre, the local community rallied round. Food was routinely delivered to their door (although the lawyer insisted they must check it for poison) and from further afield, people ‘from all walks of life wrote to us; clergymen, attorneys, teachers, social workers, policemen, US Marines, and prisoners.
‘The generosity was astounding. People offered legal services, confidential talks, massages, and private cabins where we could hide from the press.’
But they could never hide from their own heartache. This book explains how they continue to live with it, but whether I could in the same unthinkable circumstances, I’m still not sure.