On 20 April 1999, Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18, took guns and explosives into Columbine high school, Littleton, Colorado, and killed 12 students and one teacher, wounding 21 others. In this book, Dylan’s mother, Sue, relates her grief, horror and shame, trying to work out how her beloved son came to carry out one of the worst school shootings in US history. Now a suicide prevention activist, Klebold will contribute the profits from her book to mental health charities and research into links between “brain health”, depression and murder-suicides such as Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook.
This is a harrowing read – in one sense, a long scream of maternal confusion and pain. With the unflinching honesty she felt she owed the victims, Klebold tackles the questions that haunt her most. How could she and her husband, Tom, not have realised her son’s true state of mind? What clues lay in Dylan’s inherently stable, loving middle-class upbringing? What had they missed?
Devastated by Time magazine’s Columbine cover (“The monsters next door”), Klebold is keen to dispel images of Dylan as a warped loner or spoilt, rich brat. There are family photos of their shy, sensitive “sunshine boy”, who enjoyed origami. If anything, it was his older brother, Byron, who was the more wayward. Dylan was the son they “didn’t have to worry about”. University-bound, he’d attended the school prom a few days before the massacre. He could be unkempt, surly and uncommunicative, but then so can many teenagers. While Dylan’s “terrible interdependence” with his friend Eric Harris was evident prior to Columbine (they’d been caught stealing electronic equipment), the family thought they were through the worst.
Klebold unsparingly describes the “firestorm of hatred” after the tragedy, the civil court suits from the victims’ families and the painful process of rebuilding their lives (the Klebolds are now amicably divorced). Sometimes, Klebold uses direct quotes from a journal she kept at the time to stay sane (a gift from Dylan, the journal depicted Edvard Munch’s The Scream on the cover). Initially convinced that her “kind, funny, goofy” son had been tricked or drugged into killing, she only acknowledged his full guilt after seeing the so-called “basement tapes” in which Dylan spouts racist, vengeful obscenities with Harris (both had been bullied at the school).
Klebold discusses a variety of Columbine-related topics, including copycats, “contagion”, media sensationalism, school bullying and the influence of violence in the wider culture. Odd, then, that, despite being anti-gun, she’s frustratingly non-committal about US gun laws. Her focus is on mental health, her conviction that Columbine was her son’s way of committing suicide, and how such tragedies might be averted if people could read the signs.
Klebold frequently revisits the fact that while Harris exhibited psychopathic traits, Dylan was depressed, suicidal and suggestible – killing fewer people, letting others go. A “mother’s reckoning”, indeed. (Would Dylan’s lower body count be much consolation to the families of the victims?) However, at no point in this brave, sad, self-castigating book does Klebold excuse her son’s crimes (“Brain illness is not a hall pass”). She observes that the truly frightening fact was not that Dylan was a “monster”, but that he was ordinary – at the same time trying to explain why, despite everything, a mother will always love her son.
A Mother’s Reckoning is published by WH Allen (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £12.99
