THE mother of the Columbine School gunman has revealed how she “prayed for
death” to escape the reality of her son’s massacre of his school friends.
In her distressing account of the years after Dylan Klebold gunned down 12
classmates and a teacher, his mother quietly hoped her life would end to end
the “terrible nightmare”.
Seventeen years after the shootings which shocked the world, Sue Klebold
recalls how her younger son had been making excellent progress at school and
three days before the killings had enjoyed the “best night of his life” with
a date at the school prom.
But just three days later her happy content world came crashing down when
Dylan and his friend Eric Harris armed themselves to the teeth before
embarking on a murderous rampage of their school. They eventually turned the
weapons on themselves.
In her book A Mother’s Reckoning she writes: “I prayed I’d pass away in my
sleep, a quiet deliverance from the agony of waking up and realising it
hadn’t all been a terrible nightmare.”
When she was diagnosed with breast cancer the months after the tragedy she
welcomed the illness as a way out of her tortured existence. But she
recovered.
In her harrowing account, she goes on to consider how her son’s murders went
on to inspire others to murderous rampages like the Sandy Hoos Elementary
School killings. Gunman Adam Lanza was found to have “Columbine-related
materials” in his belongings.
It is thought at least 17 subsequent attacks on schools can be tied to
Columbine.
Mrs Klebold said she had written the book in the hope of helping other parents
recognise the tell-tale of the depression her son was suffering in the lead
up to the attack.
“Dylan’s depression was not recognised by anyone who knew him or loved
him,” she said.
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“Certainly not his family or his friends. The difficult challenge here is
that behaviors that might be indicative of mental illness or brain disorder
very often are very much like normal adolescent behaviors.
“The reason I wanted to make this story public is because I wanted people
to realise that if they love this person, try to dig deeper and look into
their lives, to ask more open-ended questions, to not be afraid to search
and be more probing.”