A mother’s guilt

Sue Klebold has spent the past
17 years trying to work out
where she went wrong, says
Emma Brockes in The
Guardian. In 1999 her son
Dylan and his friend Eric Harris
shot dead 13 people at
Columbine High School, before
killing themselves. Klebold
intinctively blamed herself. “A
mother is supposed to know,”
she says. Yet she’d had no idea
that her teenage son was
profoundly depressed, or that he
was hiding an illegal gun in the
house – let alone that he was
planning a massacre. She has
gone over and over Dylan’s
stable, middle-class childhood,
looking for clues as to how her
gentle “sunshine boy” turned
into a killer. “I remember being
certain that the birthday cake
I had given Dylan on his third
birthday wasn’t as pretty as
the one his brother had had on
his third birthday, which made
him feel unloved, and therefore
this happened. You go back over
every conversation, every gift,
every moment, and what you
feel is self-loathing. I let this
happen: it was my role to keep
him safe, and to keep others safe
too, and somehow this
happened because of me,
because I wasn’t able to stop it.”
She now believes that Dylan had
shown some signs of depression
– changing sleep patterns,
moodiness, getting into trouble
at school – but she failed to
recognise them. “I could see his
behaviours were changing. I
attributed it to being an
adolescent. That is why I now
say to people: if your children
misbehave, if a young man is
irritable, if your daughter has a
lot of somatic complaints, this
could be a mental issue.” And
don’t kid yourself that it
couldn’t happen in your family.
“One of the frightening things
about this reality is that people
who have family members who
do things like this are just like
the rest of us. I’ve met several
mums of mass shooters, and
they are as sweet and nice as
they can be. You wouldn’t know,
if you saw all of us in a room,
what brought us together.”