About five years after the massacre, I spoke with a Columbine High School counselor. He told me that, after an earlier, publicized bullying incident, the high school had implemented closer supervision of the student body, including teachers in the hallways between classes, and in the cafeteria at lunch. But we agreed it’s impossible to control what two thousand students are doing on a campus—or to know what those kids are doing to one another in the Dairy Queen parking lot. Despite the administration’s claim that steps were taken to stem conflict among students, their efforts fell short. For many people, Columbine High School was a hostile and frightening place even if you were one of the most popular kids, and Dylan and his friends were not. One of our neighbors told us her grown son’s reaction to the tragedy, a refrain we heard many times: “I’m just surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”
Both Huerter and Larkin claim teachers turned a blind eye to harassment and even violence in the hallways, either because they did not take it seriously—“kids will be kids”—or because they sided with with the popular athletes doing the bullying. They cite instances where school administrators declined to take action, even after being informed of specific incidents. This isn’t as surprising as it would be now. Bullying wasn’t on the cultural radar in 1999: there weren’t federal laws against it or mandated school guidelines or New York Times bestselling books about queen bees and sticks and stones. Peer cruelty certainly wasn’t seen as the serious public health issue we now understand it to be.
Tom believes, as Larkin does, that the culture at Columbine was toxic, and a desire for revenge motivated the attack the boys launched on the school. Many experts disagree: despite Larkin’s claim that the propane bombs Dylan and Eric placed in the cafeteria were put under the tables where the jocks typically sat, they did not target popular kids or athletes during the attack, or anyone at all. (Of the forty-eight shooters profiled in Dr. Langman’s book School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators, only one of them specifically targeted a bully.) Furthermore, there is almost no mention of bullying in Dylan’s journal. If anything, he appears to have envied the jocks for their social comfort and ease with girls.
I personally fall somewhere in the middle. Bullying, however severe, is not an excuse for physical retaliation or violence, much less mass murder. But I do believe Dylan was bullied, and that along with many other factors, and perhaps in combination with them, bullying probably did play some role in what he did. Given Dylan’s temperament and core personality traits, it’s easy to understand why being bullied would have been especially hurtful to him. He hated to be wrong, and didn’t like to lose. He was extremely self-conscious and critical of himself. (Relentless self-criticism is, incidentally, another sign of depression.) He liked to feel self-reliant, and wanted to be perceived as someone who was in control. This sense of himself would have been badly eroded with each incident. Apparently, they were common.
One day, Dylan came home, his shirt spotted with ketchup. He refused to tell me what had happened, only that he’d had “the worst day of his life.” I pressed, but Dylan downplayed it, and I let him. Kids have disagreements, I thought. Whatever it is, it’ll blow over—and if it doesn’t, I’ll know. There has been reporting that the incident was more serious than I could ever have imagined: a circle of boys taunting Dylan and Eric, shoving them, spraying them with ketchup, and suggesting they were gay. That incident alone may not explain the deadly kinship forged between the boys, but it is the kind of shared humiliation in which a bond is formed.
Tom and I were aware of another incident. Junior year, Dylan had a parking space in a remote lot next to the school grounds. A few weeks after he confronted the freshmen, he told his father his car wasn’t running well. Tom found the hood flattened as if someone had stood on it, leaving an indentation deep enough to damage the fuse box. Dylan said he hadn’t noticed the dent. Tom asked him outright if the freshmen had intentionally damaged his car. Dylan said he didn’t know when or how it had happened, although he was certain it had happened in the school parking lot. The car was old, and we’d never expected it to survive high school without a few dings. But our failure to find out what happened to it is one thing I regret.
Tom and I did not perceive Dylan as being unpopular; he simply had too many friends for us to see him that way. Unfortunately, we did not have the slightest idea what his daily life was really like at school. Larkin cites a video Dylan made. He and a few other boys are walking down a hallway, filming nothing in particular. Four students approach from the opposite direction. One of them, wearing a Columbine Football sweatshirt, drives an elbow into Dylan’s side as he passes, causing him to cry out and the video camera to swing wildly. The athletes laugh, and Dylan’s friends mutter something inaudible. Larkin correctly sums up what’s so chilling, which is that Dylan and his friends continue down the hallway after the hit as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. “Apparently such behavior was common enough to be accepted as normative,” Larkin writes. This observation was supported by a number of interviews he did with students.
It mirrors our own conversations, too. One of Dylan’s friends told me he’d never seen any examples of students mistreating other students—and then, in the very next breath, told me about kids hurling a soda can full of tobacco spit in his direction at a school sporting event. Another of Dylan’s friends told us a car full of kids threw glass bottles and other trash at their group as they drove by. (Larkin reports that throwing trash from moving cars at lower-caste students was common.) A resigned Dylan tried to comfort a horrified newcomer to the group: “You get used to it. It happens all the time.”
It hurts that it was so easy for Dylan to hide what his life was like at school. I still have dreams in which I discover his hidden pain. In one, I am undressing him, still a toddler, for a bath. I pull his shirt off and see a bloody network of concealed cuts across his torso. Even writing about it now makes me cry.
Dylan’s struggles may have been hidden from us, but they were not uncommon ones. A 2011 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that 20 percent of high school students nationwide reported they had been bullied on school property in the thirty days before the survey; an even higher percentage reported they’d been bullied on social media. Anti-bullying advocates suggest the number may be closer to 30 percent.
A tremendous amount of research has been done on the effects of peer harassment, and there is unquestionably a correlation between bullying and brain health disorders that stretches all the way into adulthood. A Duke University study found that, compared with kids who weren’t bullied, those who were had four times the prevalence of agoraphobia, generalized anxiety, and panic disorder as adults. The bullies themselves had four times the risk of developing antisocial personality disorder.
There is also a strong association between bullying and depression and suicide. Both being a victim and bullying others is related to high risks of depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. Researchers at Yale found that victims of bullying were two to nine times more likely to report suicidal thoughts than other children.
The connection between bullying and violence toward others is more complicated, although again there’s a correlation. Bullied kids often become bullies themselves, which appears to be what happened with Dylan and Eric. Larkin cites a student who claims they terrorized her brother, a student with special needs, so badly he was afraid to come to school. Researchers call students who both bully and suffer bullying “bully-victims,” and find that these bully-victims are at the greatest psychological risk. “Their numbers, compared to those never involved in bullying, tell the story: 14 times the risk of panic disorder, 5 times the risk of depressive disorders, and 10 times the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior.”
The humiliation and degradation Dylan experienced at the hands of his schoolmates likely did contribute to his psychological state. At some point his anger, which had for years been directed toward himself, began to turn outward, and th
e idea of personal destruction he found so comforting began to include others. Repeated incidents of disrespect at school, an environment that should have been safe, may very well have constituted the pivot point.
Of course, even if Dylan did endure humiliation at the hands of his classmates, it cannot absolve him in any way of responsibility for what he did. At the same time, I have deep regrets I wasn’t more in tune with Dylan’s feelings about the place he spent his days. I wish I had spent much more time and energy on determining the climate and culture of the school (and how appropriate it was for Dylan) than on assessing it academically.
Once in a while, I allow myself to fantasize about the thousand ways the story could have ended differently, and all of those fantasies begin with a different school. My biggest regret, though, is that I did not do whatever it would have taken to know what Dylan’s internal life was really like.
• • •
At a suicide prevention conference I attended, a father described how he’d failed to recognize signs of depression in his twelve-year-old daughter. He’d noticed she’d been whinier and clingier than usual, sure, and complaining of invisible ailments, even after her pediatrician had found nothing wrong. My stomach hurts. My head hurts. She’d been more reluctant than usual to go to bed, too. Just to the end of this chapter. Five more minutes, I swear. But he had no inkling these were all potential signs of depression in a child of that age.
I hadn’t either. Years later, I mentioned this to a friend with an eleven-year-old daughter. She was sufficiently alarmed to conduct an informal poll of the experienced parents she knew. Would they have recognized clinginess, hypochondria, and sleep disturbances as possible symptoms of depression in their own kids? Not one of them would have. Would you?
More disturbingly, the father I met at that conference told me his daughter’s pediatrician had also not recognized these signs—never mind that she was at an elevated risk to die by suicide. In approximately 80 percent of completed suicides, the individual has seen a physician within the year before their death, and almost half have seen a doctor within the prior month. Dylan went to our family doctor with a sore throat weeks before he died.
It is essential for physicians to routinely screen for symptoms of depression and suicidal tendencies in their patients. Teachers, school counselors, coaches—these people can be powerful bystanders. Gatekeeper programs (like ASIST, the Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training program by LivingWorks) teach participants to identify people struggling with persistent thoughts of suicide. The interventions they make can save lives.
Dylan’s high school grades had never been particularly great, despite his intelligence, but they slipped far enough in the last few weeks of his senior year for two teachers to express concern. His hair was clean, but long and untrimmed, and it stuck out from the backwards baseball cap he always wore, and his facial hair was patchy and grizzled. Everyone in his life, including Tom and me, attached a value judgment to what we observed, instead of wondering if there might be something wrong.
This is one of the paradoxes we must confront. Of course it would be easier to help depressed teens if they were nicer to be around, or more communicative about their thoughts. If only they looked like the kids in the pamphlets do: clean-cut and attractive, staring out a rainy window with a wistful expression, chin propped on a fist! More commonly, though, a disturbed teenager will be unpleasant: aggressive, belligerent, obnoxious, irritable, hostile, lazy, whiny, untrustworthy, sometimes with poor personal hygiene. But the fact that they’re so difficult, so dedicated to pushing us away, does not mean they do not need help. In fact, these traits may be signals that they do.
• • •
The next incident during Dylan’s junior year was the most catastrophic of all.
On January 30, a few days after Dylan scratched the locker at school, he and Eric were arrested for breaking into a parked van and stealing electronic equipment.
Dylan had agreed to go with Zack to an activity at his church that night, and the two of them planned to come back to our house for a sleepover afterward. Tom and I were listening to music together in the living room when the phone rang around 8:30 p.m. It was Zack’s dad, audibly upset. Zack had quarreled with his girlfriend and left the event with her. He’d gotten hurt, possibly after stepping out of a moving car, and wasn’t making much sense. It was all very confusing, but Zack’s parents wanted us to know the plan had changed. Dylan wasn’t with Zack; he’d left the church with Eric.
I thanked Zack’s dad for the update and immediately called the Harrises, who were as concerned as we were not to know where the boys were. Both sets of parents promised to get in touch immediately if we heard from the kids. Within minutes, our phone rang again. It was the county sheriff. Dylan and Eric had been arrested for criminal trespass.
Tom and I drove to the local sheriff’s auxiliary office; the Harrises were already there. The offenses included First Degree Criminal Trespass and Theft, both of which were felonies, and Criminal Mischief, a misdemeanor.
My mouth hung open when I heard how serious the charges were. I could not believe that our Dylan, who had never done anything really wrong in his life, could do something so terrible. This was the kind of trouble that might seriously impact his future. Neither of us had ever been arrested, so we called one of our neighbors, a lawyer, for advice. He told us Dylan should “spill it,” tell the complete truth. Before he hung up, he reassured us. “Boys do dumb stuff. He’s a good kid. He’ll be okay.”
We waited for what felt like an eternity. Mrs. Harris wept. Then a deputy followed the boys through the substation office door. I practically threw up when I saw Dylan paraded past me in handcuffs.
We waited hours to learn whether our children would be sent to a detention facility or allowed to return home. Finally, the officer who arrested them recommended they be considered for a Diversion program, an alternative to jail for first-time juvenile offenders accused of minor crimes. The program would provide supervised counseling and community service, and allow the boys to avoid criminal charges and placement in a detention facility. The boys were released into our care.
Our drive home was silent, as all three of us contended with our various emotions: fury, humiliation, fear, and bewilderment. We arrived, emotionally and physically exhausted, around four o’clock in the morning. Tom and I needed to discuss how we wanted to respond. There would be consequences, we told Dylan, but we would talk about them after we got some rest. Exhausted as I was, the sun was up before I was able to close my eyes and sleep.
Tom woke before I did. When Dylan got up, they took a long walk. Afterward, Tom told me Dylan had been very, very angry—at the situation, the cops, his school, the unfairness of life. He was so angry that he didn’t seem to accept or acknowledge the wrongness of what he had done.
I was still mad myself, and didn’t want to talk to Dylan until I could be calm. Later in the day, the two of us sat together on the stairs. The master bedroom was on the ground floor, and Dylan’s room was upstairs, so we often sat on the stairs between them to talk. I recounted our conversation verbatim in my journal that night, and have relived it in my mind countless times since his death.
I began, “Dylan. Help me understand this. How could you do something so morally wrong?” He opened his mouth to answer, and I cut him off. I said, “Wait. Wait a minute. First, tell me what happened. Tell me everything, right from the beginning.”
He told me the story of his bizarre evening. After Zack left the church, he and Eric decided to go light some fireworks, so they drove to a parking area not far from our house where recreational cyclists stowed their cars while they biked the scenic canyon road. There, they saw an empty commercial van parked in the darkness. They saw electronic equipment inside. The van was locked. They banged on the window and tried to open it. Dylan rationalized this by noting the van was deserted. When the window did not open, they broke it with a rock.
I asked Dylan if breaking the window was Eric’s idea.
He said, “No. It was both of us. We thought of it together.”
They took the equipment and drove to a secluded spot close by. Minutes later, a deputy drove by and saw the damaged van. He found the two boys in Eric’s car with the equipment a short distance down the road. As soon as the officer approached the car, Dylan confessed.
When I’d heard the whole story, I asked my question again. “You committed a crime against a person. How could you do something so morally wrong?” His answer shocked me. He said, “It was not against a person. It was against a company. That’s why people have insurance.” My jaw dropped. I cried out, “Dyl! Stealing is a crime against a person! Companies are made up of people!” I tried to appeal to his sense of reason. “If one of our renters decided to steal a light fixture from one of our apartments, would it be a crime against a rental company, or against us?”
Dylan relented, “Okay, okay. I get the point.” But I didn’t stop. I explained that the owner of the van would have to pay a deductible to the insurance company. “There’s no such thing as a victimless crime, Dylan.” I’d heard a story about a programmer who figured out a way to siphon tiny, nearly untraceable amounts of money from calculations that left an odd penny. “Before long, you’ll know enough to do something similar,” I told him. “Do you think that’s ethical?” He said he knew it was not, and assured me he’d never do anything of the kind.
What he’d done was wrong, and I wanted him to know it. Appealing to his empathy, I asked him how he’d feel if someone stole from him. “Dylan, if you follow no other rules in your life, at least follow the Ten Commandments: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal.” I paused to consider which of the other commandments might have relevance, and then decided to stop haranguing him. “Those are rules to live by.”
He said, “I know that.”
Mother's Reckoning : Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (9781101902769) Page 22
