Sue Klebold breaks her silence on son
The mother of one of the Columbine killers has broken her public silence, almost 17 years after her son and his close friend killed 12 fellowstudents and a teacher in the infamous high school rampage.
Sue Klebold, Dylan Klebold’s mother, talked to ABC’s Diane Sawyer in an interviewaired Friday night.
After the shootings, Sue Klebold, and her husband, Tom, sealed the windows to their home, blocking sightlines from the outside and retreating into a safe, private place.
Questions and accusations were raised: How could the parents not have known about their son’s deadly plans? How could they have raised such a monster?
Klebold told Sawyer she certainly never saw the impending massacre and the lack of vision haunts her still.
“I think we like to believe that our love and our understanding is protective, and that ‘ If anything were wrong with my kids, I would know.’ But I didn’t know, and it’s very hard to live with that,” Klebold said.
“There is never a day that goes by where I don’t think of the people that Dylan harmed,” she said. “It is very hard to live with the fact that someone you loved and raised has brutally killed people in such a horrific way.”
Several times during the interview, she wept.
Tom and Sue Klebold are now divorced, driven apart by grief, Sawyer said, explaining why the father wasn’t on the program.
Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18, on April 20, 1999, carried out, at the time, the most deadly school shooting in the nation’s history. They also wounded 24 before killing themselves.
Klebold has written a memoir, on saleMonday: “A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy.”
The book, published by Crown, covers the author’s lifewith her son, before the tragedy, as well as after.
In the book, Klebold denies having insight that would have lead her to believe that the Columbine massacre would be perpetrated. Klebold explains the love she had, and still carries, for her son, describing him as a child, and a teen who had troubles but had seemingly shed them and had a bright future.
“I felt that I was a good mom ... That he would, he could talk to me about anything,” Klebold told Sawyer. “Part of the shock of thiswas that learning that what I believed and how I lived and howIparentedwas aninvention inmy ownmind. That it, itwas a completely different world that hewas living in.”
Klebold said the Sandy Hook shootings in 2012 helped convince her to share her story, and that she is donating any profits from the book to mental health charities and research.