Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Investigations over the ensuing months revealed an atmosphere of bullying at Columbine. “Unless you were a part of the in crowd and had your athletic résumé, you had no status,” Tom said. “So Dylan had to be resentful. The only thing that would certainly have prevented Columbine would have been to eliminate the chip on his shoulder, and the chip sprang from that school. He and Eric didn’t shoot us, and they didn’t shoot up Kmart or a gas station; they shot up the school. The whole social pattern at Columbine was unfair, and Dylan couldn’t do anything about it. That would cause enough anger in a sensitive kid to make him retaliate.”

  Unbeknownst to the Klebolds, Dylan had experienced significant humiliation at school, though he was six feet four and not easy to push around. He had come home one day with ketchup spots all over his shirt, and when his mother asked what had happened, he said he’d had the worst day of his life and didn’t want to talk about it. Months after his death, she learned of an incident in which Dylan and Eric had apparently been shoved and squirted with ketchup by kids calling them fags. “It hurt so much that I’d seen the remnants of that day and hadn’t helped him,” she said. When Tom went to pick up Dylan’s car from the police station a few weeks after the event, one of the officers said to him, “My son came home from that school one day and they’d set his hair on fire right in the hall—his whole scalp was burned. I wanted to take that school apart brick by brick, but he said it would only make it worse.”

  A year after the massacre, the police turned over Dylan’s journals to the Klebolds, who hadn’t known of their existence. “Dylan’s writing is full of ‘I’m smarter than they are,’” Sue said. “He experienced disdain for the people who were mistreating him. He liked to think of himself as perfect, I think, and that grandiosity came through in the shootings. He started being more withdrawn and secretive in the last two years of high school, but that’s not so unusual. The stereotype that he and Eric were these miserable little kids who were plotting because they were so isolated is false. He was bright. He was very shy. He had friends, and they liked him. I was as shocked hearing that my son was perceived as an outcast as I was hearing that he’d been involved in a shooting. He cared for other people.” Tom demurred, “Or he seemed to.”

  “I can never decide whether it’s worse to think your child was hardwired to be like this and that you couldn’t have done anything, or to think he was a good person and something set this off in him,” Sue said. “What I’ve learned from being an outcast since the tragedy has given me insight into what it must have felt like for my son to be marginalized. He created a version of his reality for us: to be pariahs, unpopular, with no means to defend ourselves against those who hate us.” Their attorney filtered their piles of mail so they would not see the worst of it. “I could read three hundred letters where people were saying, ‘I admire you,’ ‘I’m praying for you,’ and I’d read one hate letter and be destroyed,” Sue said. “When people devalue you, it far outweighs all the love.”

  Tom, like Dylan, had been painfully shy in high school and felt that because of their similarities he knew Dylan instinctively; he can identify with how Dylan may have felt, but not with what he did. Sue sees a terrible confluence of circumstances including depression, a school environment that caused rage, and an influential friend who had severe problems. “Dylan felt a little afraid of Eric, a little protective of him, and a little controlled by him,” she said. “He was caught in something I don’t understand that made him do this horrible thing. But I don’t, can’t, believe that that is who he was. Yes, he made a conscious choice and did this horrible thing, but what had happened to his consciousness that he would make such a choice? Something in him got broken. The same pathology that killed and hurt all the others also killed my son.”

  I was surprised that the Klebolds had stayed in the town where they had been party to so much anguish. “If we had moved and changed our names, the press would have figured it out,” Sue said. “I would have been ‘the mother of that killer’ in the eyes of everyone I met. Here at least I had people who liked me as me, and people who had liked Dylan, and that was what I needed—especially people who had liked Dylan.” Tom said bluntly, “If we’d left, they would have won. Staying was my defiance of the people who were trying to grind us into the ground.” I ventured that it must have been hard to keep loving Dylan through the aftermath, and Sue replied, “No, it never was. That was the easy part. Trying to understand was hard, coping with the loss was hard, reconciling myself to the consequences of his actions was hard, but loving him—no, that was always easy for me.”

  It seemed to me, as I talked to the Klebolds, that Sue was Germany and Tom was Japan. Sue was intensely introspective and burdened with terrific guilt, while Tom proclaimed that it was horrible and then tried to move on. “What are you going to do?” he said. “He felt that he had a reason. He suffered the ultimate: he’s no longer here. I’m sorry for the pain my son caused other people, but we had more than our share of pain in this, too. We lost our son; then we had to live with his memory being attacked.” Like Japan, he also externalized the causes, but only to a point. “I imagined Eric telling him, ‘If you don’t do this, I will come and kill your parents,’” Tom later said. “But Dylan’s willingness to participate is inescapable.” Sue believes that Dylan would have been able to foil pressure from Eric if that had been the pivotal factor. She has wondered whether he might have endured some precipitating trauma, even if he’d been raped by someone, but has never found any evidence to that effect. In writings that go back to his sophomore year, she said, “He talks like a thoughtful, introspective, depressed kid, mostly about how he has a crush on somebody, and she doesn’t know he’s alive. Three months before the tragedy he’s talking about how he wants to die, and he says, ‘I might do an NBK with Eric.’” She learned that NBK stood for Natural Born Killers. “So as late as January, Dylan hadn’t really decided that he was going to do this. He just wanted to die. But why blow up the school? I get in my car on a Monday morning, and I start thinking about Dylan, and I just cry all the way to work. I talk to him, or I sing songs. You have to be in touch with that sorrow.”

  An event of such enormity completely disrupts one’s sense of reality. “I used to think I could understand people, relate, and read them pretty well,” Sue said. “After this, I realized I don’t have a clue what another human being is thinking. We read our children fairy tales and teach them that there are good guys and bad guys. I would never do that now. I would say that every one of us has the capacity to be good and the capacity to make poor choices. If you love someone, you have to love both the good and the bad in them.” Sue worked in a building that also housed a parole office and had felt alienated and frightened getting on the elevator with ex-convicts. After Columbine, she saw them differently. “I felt that they were just like my son. That they were just people who, for some reason, had made an awful choice and were thrown into a terrible, despairing situation. When I hear about terrorists in the news, I think, ‘That’s somebody’s kid.’ Columbine made me feel more connected to mankind than anything else possibly could have.”

  The Klebolds had letters from kids who idealized Dylan, and from girls who were in love with him. “He has his own groupies,” Tom said with an ironic half smile. They were heartened by unanticipated kindnesses. At a conference about suicide some years later, a man came up to Sue, knelt in front of her, and said, “I just want to tell you how much I admire you. I can’t believe the way you have been treated. Every day I picked up the paper, and I expected to read that people were coming up your driveway with pitchforks.” Sue has had strangers hug her. But the prospect of a normal life remains elusive. She recounted a recent trip to the supermarket when the checkout clerk had verified her name on her driver’s license. “And then she says, ‘Klebold . . . Did you know him?’ And I say, ‘He was my son.’ And then she started in with ‘It was the work of Satan.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Please, let’s bag the groceries here.’ As I leave the store, she’s
yelling out after me about how she’s praying for me. It wears you down.”

  Before I went to meet Tom and Sue the first time, a friend asked me whether I was afraid of the Klebolds, as if I might succumb to some contagious evil in their house. Ultimately, what proved difficult to reckon with was their underlying normality. One of Dylan’s friends said that he used to call them Ward and June, after the sunny couple on Leave It to Beaver, because their household seemed so pleasant and predictable. They showed me family photo albums and home videos. I was particularly struck by a video of Dylan on his way to his prom, three days before the massacre. He’s a little churlish in the mode of adolescents, but also has a sweetness about him; he seems like a nice kid. It would never have occurred to me that he could be on the verge of wanton destruction. His long hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, he’s adjusting his rented tuxedo and complaining that the arms are a little short, smiling while his date puts on his boutonniere. “Dad, why are you filming this?” he asks. Then he laughs and says, “Well, someday I’ll watch it again, and I’ll wonder what I was thinking.” It was impressive dissembling, because he imparts the feeling of someone who will one day remember being dressed up, with a pretty girl, on the way to the biggest party of his life. Near the end of the video, he says, “I’ll never have kids. Kids just mess up your life.” The sudden angry moment comes out of nowhere and evaporates just as fast.

  From the day of the bloodbath, April 20, until the following October, the Klebolds knew few details about what had transpired, except that Dylan was at the shooting and supposedly committed suicide. “We kept clinging to the belief that he hadn’t really killed anybody,” Sue said. Then came the police report. “It just launched my grief all over again, because I didn’t have denial anymore. They could talk about which people he’d killed. Here’s the little map of the school, with all the little bodies on it.” Then they saw the “basement tapes,” which Dylan and Eric had deliberately left behind, which reveal a Dylan unrelated to the young man in the prom video, someone spewing hatred, full of self-aggrandizing rage. “Seeing those videos was as traumatic as the original event,” Sue said. “All the protective beliefs that we’d held on to were shattered. There wasn’t hate talk in our house. I’m part Jewish, and yet the anti-Semitic stuff was there; they were going through every derogatory word: a nigger; a kike. I saw the end product of my life’s work: I had created a monster. Everything I had refused to believe was true. Dylan was a willing participant, and the massacre was not a spontaneous impulse. He had purchased and created weapons that were designed to end the lives of as many people as possible. He shot to kill. For the first time, I understood how Dylan appeared to others. When I saw his disdain for the world, I almost hated my son. I wanted to destroy the video that preserved him in that twisted and fierce mistake. From then on, no matter how lovingly he would be remembered by those who knew him, the tapes would provide a lasting contradiction to anything positive that could be said about his character. For me, it’s a smothering emptiness.” On these tapes, like the hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box, is one moment of kindness: when Eric mentions their parents, Dylan says, “My parents have been good to me. I don’t want to browse there.”

  If you take Tom and Sue back to their prelapsarian memories, ease creeps into their voices. “Dylan was a marvel,” Tom recalled of his son’s early childhood. “Completely self-motivated. Curious.” Every year on Dylan’s birthday, Tom goes up to the place where the two used to hike and takes a Dr Pepper, because Dylan loved Dr Pepper, and the stuffed koala that was Dylan’s childhood favorite. The Klebolds needed three years to clean out Dylan’s room and to remake it into the pleasant guest room in which I slept on my visits. Sue said, “He was a wonderful, marvelous, pretty-close-to-perfect child. He made you feel like a great parent, because he did everything right. Dylan had this incredible sense of organization, and structure, and all this executive functioning.” At three, he could already count to 110 and would use refrigerator magnets to make equations. He entered preschool a year early, earned top grades, and was accepted to the gifted-children program. “When he was very young, he would dump five or six puzzles into a pile, so he would have the thrill of working on them all at the same time. He liked mazes; he liked word searches. He played chess with Tom. He was just a delight.” Sue looked at me sideways, then said quietly, “You can’t imagine how long it’s been since I had a chance to brag about my son.” Later she said, “He was very malleable; you’d reason with him and say, ‘This is why I think you should do something,’ and you could almost always persuade him to change his mind. Which I used to see as a strength, from the perspective of a parent. But I see now that it might have been a terrible detriment.”

  Only one incident with Dylan, the year before the massacre, suggested something might be amiss. The spring of his junior year, Dylan had asked to spend the night at his friend Zack’s place, and when Zack had to cancel, Dylan took advantage and went driving with Eric. On their way to set off fireworks on a canyon road, they stopped at a parking lot and noticed a van with video equipment in the front seat. They grabbed a rock, broke the window, stole the equipment, then turned on their interior lights to inspect their haul. When a policeman stopped to see what was going on, Dylan confessed to the theft almost immediately, and both boys were taken to be booked. “The phone rings,” Sue said. “It was the sheriff’s department—the darkest night of our lives to that point.” They went down to the station to find Dylan and Eric in handcuffs. The police released the boys back to their parents’ custody and put them in a diversion program, which aims to help juveniles avoid a criminal record by assigning them community service, educational directives, and restitution. With hindsight, Sue believes that this putative act of mercy was a mean trick of fate; had they gone to jail, the boys would have been separated and out of the school where they felt debased.

  The family didn’t get home until dawn, and Sue was so angry she couldn’t speak to Dylan. When Tom went for a walk the next day with Dylan, he was startled by his son’s fury about the arrest. “He felt so above it all, totally justified in what he’d done,” Tom said. “The morality of the whole thing escaped him.” Sue noticed a similar attitude, and the diversion record remarks that he didn’t connect to the wrongness of what he did. “I said, ‘Dylan, help me understand this,’” Sue said. “‘How could you do something so morally wrong?’ And he said, ‘Well, I didn’t do it to another human being; it was to a company. That’s what they have insurance for.’ And I said, ‘Dylan! You’re scaring me!’ He said, ‘Well, it scared me, too, because I don’t know why I did it. Just, suddenly, we’d done it.’ His mother chalked it up to teenage impulse and made him promise that he would never do anything of the sort again. “He said, ‘I promise. But I’m scared, because I didn’t know I was going to do it this time.’ So I said, ‘Well, now you know.’”

  Sue asked the people in the diversion program whether Dylan needed counseling, and they administered standardized psychological tests and found no indication that he was suicidal, homicidal, or depressed. “If I could say something to a roomful of parents right now, I would say, ‘Never trust what you see,’” Sue said. “Was he nice? Was he thoughtful? I was taking a walk not long before he died, and I’d asked him, ‘Come and pick me up if it rains.’ And he did. He was there for you, and he was the best listener I ever met. I realize now that that was because he didn’t want to talk, and he was hiding. He and Eric worked together at the pizza parlor. A couple of weeks before Columbine, Eric’s beloved dog was sick, and it looked like he wasn’t going to make it, and so Dylan worked Eric’s shift as well as his own so that Eric could have the time with his dog.”

  In the writing Dylan and Eric left behind, Eric comes off as homicidal; his anger is all directed outward. Dylan comes off as suicidal; his energy fuels self-abnegation and self-criticism. It’s as though Dylan went along with the homicide for Eric’s sake, and Eric with the suicide for Dylan’s. Toward the end, Dylan was counting the hours he h
ad left. “How could he keep it so secret,” Sue wondered, “this pain he was in?”

  When I asked the Klebolds what they would want to ask Dylan if he were in the room with us, Tom said, “I’d ask him what the hell he was thinking and what the hell he thought he was doing!” Sue looked down at the floor for a minute before saying quietly, “I would ask him to forgive me, for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head, for not being able to help him, for not being the person that he could confide in.” Later she said, “I’ve had thousands of dreams about Dylan where I’m talking to him and trying to get him to tell me how he feels. I dreamed that I was getting him ready for bed, and I lifted up his shirt, and he was covered with cuts. And he was in all this pain, and I didn’t see it; it was hidden.”