Mother's Reckoning : Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (9781101902769)

by Klebold, Sue; Solomon, Andrew (INT)

  Dr. Mary Ellen O’Toole, a former FBI profiler and a forensic behavioral consultant, authored the FBI report “The School Shooter: A Threat Assessment Perspective,” shortly after the tragedy. She warns against relying on a kid’s self-reporting and advises parents to look at behaviors. If something seems inconsistent or inexplicable, get another pair of eyes on the problem, and don’t allow yourself to be mollified.

  Loving our kids makes us more susceptible to ignoring disturbing behaviors, or explaining them away. This is especially true when the kid in question is “a good kid,” and when we have a good relationship. It’s a fight to see these behaviors clearly, and to act when we notice something. But you’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t.

  If you’re worried, Dr. Moutier advises, seek expert help. If the child is okay, hearing it from a therapist will make you feel better; if there is a more serious problem, a therapist is more likely to recognize it, and can help.

  Dylan did not want to get help. His journals show he was trying to manage his problems by himself. Given this aspect of his personality (and his innate stubbornness), I’m not convinced I would have been able to force him to see a therapist; even if I had gotten him to the office, he would have been perfectly capable of sitting there in sullen silence for an hour. I asked Dr. Langman, who specializes in adolescents, what he suggests to parents whose child won’t cooperate; he told me he asks the parents to come in. Often a conversation with them is enough to determine whether further intervention, such as contacting a child’s guidance counselor at school (or even law enforcement) is necessary.

  Dylan promised he’d turn his life around, and then he did. According to Dr. O’Toole, that recovery might have been a sign in itself, one especially common among young women in abusive relationships. As soon as a parent moves to intervene—“I don’t want you seeing Johnny anymore”—the girl returns to actively managing their impression of her.

  There are, of course, no guarantees a child will be okay, even with professional help. Eric’s parents did send him to a psychiatrist after the arrest, and he began taking medication—none of which stopped him from putting into motion the events of April 20, 1999.

  These days, when I page through one of my old diaries and read an entry like “Dylan crabby when reminded to feed the cats,” part of my brain howls: How could you miss that?! Didn’t you know depression often presents as irritability in adolescent boys? I did not, and I am not alone. Somewhere out there in America right now, a suburban mom is pointing with exasperation at two hungry, hopeful cats threading around the ankles of a teenage boy who has forgotten to feed them. Chances are, that boy will grow up without event to lecture his own teenager over a pair of empty cat food bowls.

  But for some percentage of families, this will not be the happy outcome. Some unlucky mix of a child’s vulnerabilities and the circumstances that trigger them will combine to set off a much darker cascade.

  CHAPTER 14

  Pathway to Violence

  Dylan’s Senior Year

  Robyn pinning a boutonniere on Dylan the afternoon of their senior prom, three days before the shootings.

  The Klebold Family

  It has always been my feeling that one of the great tragedies of Columbine is the fact that yourselves and the Harrises shared nothing of your own lessons from Columbine. That is, you’ve failed to respond to the questions so many parents in the world have: What signs of hatred and despair did you see? What warning signs did you miss? Were you a family that ever spent much time at the dinner table together? What did your son talk about? What would you have done differently in raising Dylan?…

  The most nagging question to me involves what your son hid from you. I’ve heard a number of people say that teens can be very good at hiding items (e.g., bombs and guns) and secrets from their parents. I don’t disagree with that. But this was not just a case of hiding things. Your son was so angry and distressed and hateful and so troubled that he wanted to kill hundreds of his classmates. Hundreds! How in the world could you not have seen that your son was THAT hateful and troubled? How did you become so disconnected that you did not see this disposition of his? How could that happen?!?

  I think you could do a great service if you were to speak publicly about those lessons. Sure, it would be very difficult for you to do so. Painful, yes. Might people say you were terrible, neglectful parents? Sure. But obviously many say that already. To me what’s most important is that the pain you might encounter by being open and speaking publicly could not possibly be worse than the pain you’ve already experienced in losing your son in such a tragic way, not to mention the guilt associated with doing nothing as repentance.

  —Excerpt from a September 2007 letter from Tom Mauser, the father of Daniel Mauser, one of the boys killed on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School

  I know that people want a window into the last days of Dylan’s life, and so I have opened my journals and Dylan’s to build a parallel timeline.

  Threat assessment professionals talk about “a pathway to violence.” Dr. Reid Meloy explained: “Targeted violence often begins with a personal loss or humiliation. That incident becomes a decision point, where the person believes that the only way to resolve this grievance is to carry out an act of violence. The first step is researching and planning for the event. The next is preparation: the accumulation of weapons, the selection of a target. The next is the implementation of the attack.”

  Eric was on a pathway to violence, probably as early as April of 1997, when the boys first began to make little bombs. He believed that Dylan was on that pathway too, but Dylan’s journals tell a different story. He was pretty sure he was going to be dead long before Eric had the chance to execute his plan. Dylan’s personal pathway was toward suicide, until January of 1999, when suddenly it was not.

  It wasn’t that Tom and I didn’t know that something was wrong with Dylan in his senior year. We simply—drastically and lethally—underestimated the depth and severity of his pain and everything he was capable of doing to make it stop.

  • • •

  Made Dylan spend a few minutes with us when we all sat in the den and ate dinner. It’s so hard to connect with him—he just pushes us away. We’ve got to keep trying to have some kind of relationship. [8/20/98]

  Dylan came home from school on his way to work & I fixed him a snack. He felt lousy, thinks he’s getting a cold or worse. He picked out a yearbook picture before going to work. Tom got home late and I made a nice little dinner. Dylan came home and joined us before going out. [8/28/98]

  During the summer between Dylan’s junior and senior years, he acted like a typical teenage boy: sometimes funny, playful, and affectionate, other times withdrawn, cranky, and self-involved. I always had the feeling, though, that he was holding something back.

  Dylan was still on a short leash at home. We searched his room to make sure he wasn’t hiding drugs or anything stolen. He’d always been good with money, but he was short a lot that summer. Tom nagged him to get a job, but he didn’t want to settle for fast food; he wanted to work with computers. He was making restitution payments to the victim of his crime, and while he picked up a little extra money by doing odd jobs for us and for our neighbors, we made up the difference when he fell behind on his car insurance.

  At the Diversion orientation meeting, the parents had been asked not to contact the staff. If you don’t hear from us, they told us, it’s going well. Even though we found out later that he sometimes missed appointments or showed up late, we didn’t hear a thing. When Dylan’s original intake counselor left, a new one called to introduce himself, and that was it. Years later, I read the first counselor’s case notes. She said Dylan was a “nice young man, kind of goofy, and a bizarre sense of humor, he makes me laugh.”

  I’ve talked to the friends Dylan spent time with that summer many times since then. I’ve asked point-blank if they saw signs of depression or rage, but Dylan’s behavior seemed as normal to them as it did to us. Some of his si
llier moments were caught on film. Devon’s sixteenth birthday party had a luau theme, and she gave me a photo of Dylan in the lurid Hawaiian shirt and straw hat she’d lent him for the occasion. Underneath, she wrote: “He hated it, I could tell, but he put it on anyway.” She goes on to describe how much he ate.

  Nate slept over often. The two of them would stay up until nothing was on television but infomercials. They’d turn the volume down and make up dialogue to accompany the sales pitches, laughing so hard they’d give themselves stomachaches. Then the two of them would raid the kitchen. They ate Polish sausage, apple crisp, doughnuts, and ploughed through chips and salsa by the ton. Tom used to say we should buy stock in Oreos.

  Despite this apparent normalcy, in the journal entry dated August 10, Dylan writes a passionate and secret final good-bye to the girl he secretly has a crush on—one suicide note in a journal filled with them.

  Days before the start of Dylan’s senior year, he was hired to do tech support at a computer store. He willingly accepted the store’s dress code, a collared shirt and black pants, and worked eleven hours on his first day, arriving home tired and proud. Tom and I noted that Dylan’s long day was likely the first of many if he chose a career in computers.

  As the fall approached, incoming seniors at Columbine High School were asked to submit pictures for the yearbook. A local photographer shrewdly suggested Dylan ask a friend to the session to help him loosen up, so Zack tagged along, and I loved the shots the photographer took of Dylan looking relaxed and happy among the pink rocks in the valley not far from our home. One of those photos would later be featured on the cover of Time magazine, under the headline “The Monsters Next Door.”

  • • •

  As Dylan began his senior year, life settled down for the whole family.

  Tom and I were cautiously optimistic and proud when Byron finally landed a job he loved at a car dealership. His supervisors were mature, encouraging mentors, as eager to teach him about the business as he was to learn. He moved nearby to be closer to work, so we saw him more often, and Tom and I watched with growing pleasure as our older son seemed to grow up overnight. He even adopted a kitten, and I was touched to see what a loving and nervous new dad he was.

  That job would prove to be a turning point in Byron’s life, the place where he transitioned into manhood and became the hardworking, responsible, thriving adult he is today.

  Tom and I purchased a second rental property downtown and rented the studio outbuilding on our property. The additional income alleviated our money worries, though we still didn’t know how we’d manage Dylan’s college expenses. Most important, Tom finally found a combination of medications to give him some relief from his chronic pain. He still had a few surgeries to go through, but he could do much more than he’d been able to.

  I’d settled into my new job, too, and enjoyed the freedom granted by my four-day workweek. With more time to cook, I shamelessly used food as a lure to get the family together. I made beef stew and lasagna; the gloppy, layered Mexican casseroles both boys loved; Dylan’s favorite pumpkin spice cake; and tapioca pudding by the vat. I put up triple batches: one to eat, one to freeze so I could get something on the table in a hurry, and the last so I’d have something extra to send home with Byron. Sunday dinner with the whole family happened almost every week. Byron and Dylan staged epic dish-towel-flicking fights in the kitchen; though they looked like grown men, they were really still boys.

  I also had time to concentrate on my art. I’d always loved the technical challenge of translating a three-dimensional world into two dimensions, and over the years I’d taken the occasional class and sporadically attended figure drawing sessions on Saturday morning with my friends. But between raising my family, running a household, and work, months would go by sometimes without an afternoon free.

  Certainly, I’d never before hit a creative groove the way I did that year. I could lose myself for hours in a drawing or a painting, thinking of nothing but how to more faithfully translate the colors and shapes I saw in nature onto the paper in front of me.

  My journals from those days are filled with the issues preoccupying me: chalky whites, muddy colors, tricky shadows, composition, detail, and form. After Columbine, convinced my trivial preoccupations had blinded me to Dylan’s distress and plans, it would be years until I could make art again.

  • • •

  11/5 Tom is having outpatient hand surgery tomorrow.

  11/6 We were at the hospital til 5, then we began our slow trek home through traffic. We stopped for Chinese takeout and medication. We were glad that Dylan stayed home so we could actually eat dinner with him. His car is broken so he was stuck here until a friend picked him up at about 9 to go to a movie. I want so much to be closer to him, but he is absent so much of the time. This is such an important time. He really needs to be planning for his future but he just isn’t moving ahead. At least he was pleasant tonight and ate with us.

  11/9 Dylan was cute and pleasant today and actually talked about wanting to go to school in Arizona to escape the weather.

  The previous year’s problems appeared to be behind Dylan. He could be moody and irritable, but what teenager isn’t? Sometimes we noted that he was tired, but the computer store job required a lot of hours, and he was taking calculus, advanced video production, English, and psychology, on top of an early morning bowling class.

  Without any prompting from us, he kept his appointments with his Diversion counselor, participated in community service at a local park, and took routine drug tests. Although drugs had never been a problem with Dylan, we were relieved to have one less thing to worry about. He started earning back the privileges he’d lost after the arrest, and when his computer store job proved too difficult to maintain around his school and Diversion appointment schedules, he was rehired at Blackjack Pizza.

  On September 11, 1998, Dylan turned seventeen. Our gift to him was a nod to his prodigious appetite—a small black refrigerator that he could take with him to college the following year. He loved it, and insisted on carrying it right up to his room, the cord dragging behind. As soon as Nate found out, he showed up with a companion gift: a supersized bucket of fried chicken, all for Dylan.

  That month, he volunteered to do the sound for a Halloween production of Frankenstein at school, and rekindled his friendship with Brooks Brown. The two of them had drifted apart after the conflict between Eric and Brooks the previous year, but they fell back into an easy friendship while working on the play.

  Dylan was proud of Frankenstein; he used a wide variety of unusual audio sources to develop the eerie soundtrack. The cast and crew recorded a surprise video to thank the drama teacher. In the video, Brooks, Zack, and Dylan clown around—saying they hope she’ll buy them beer, or pay them to pass down their senior year production know-how to the next crop of students. Judy Brown threw the wrap party, and took a picture of Dyl laughing at the video along with everyone else.

  Dylan promised he’d finish his college applications by Christmas. We had to nudge him a few times, but he did his usual thorough job, and Tom and I helped him to keep the paperwork straight. We asked him to consider some smaller schools, but he wasn’t interested. He applied to two schools in Colorado and two in Arizona, and we all celebrated when he dropped the four college application packets into the mail.

  Christmas was low-key and comfortable. As usual, Dylan led the way in finding and decorating our tree; he always wanted the biggest one we could fit on top of our car. It was an annual tradition for me to drag Tom and the boys to some festive event—a madrigal choir session, or a holiday event at the zoo. That last Christmas, it was dinner at a Moroccan restaurant, where we sat on cushions on the floor and ate without silverware, scooping the spiced dishes into our mouths with pieces of bread.

  Dylan had asked Tom if he could borrow some money to buy Christmas gifts, and I was touched to find a hardbound writing journal from him under the tree Christmas morning. It was perfect—thoughtful without being ex
travagant. I had no idea I’d be pouring my sorrow onto its pages four months later.

  Tom and I bought Dylan the long black leather coat he’d asked for. Tom thought it would look ridiculous on Dylan’s lanky frame, and privately I agreed. But several boys at the school wore similar black coats, and he’d already bought a black cotton duster. He thought it was funny when a teacher or some other person in a position of authority saw him and Eric in the hallway and teased: “You look like you’re in the Trench Coat Mafia.” But I didn’t know until after their death that there was a large, loose group of kids at the school who wore long black coats and called themselves that.

  A great deal was made of Dylan’s affiliation with the Trench Coat Mafia in the immediate wake of Columbine. It was one of the clues everyone hoped would elucidate what we’d missed—the key to unlock the mystery. Was the Trench Coat Mafia a gang of death-obsessed goths? Neo-Nazis? Satanists? A suicide cult? Like most such leads, the Trench Coat Mafia connection sputtered out without revealing anything—though not before a myth had been created. In fact, the Trench Coat Mafia was just a bunch of kids, some friends, some not, who favored a certain kind of coat to set themselves apart from the kids at Columbine High School who shopped at more conservative stores like Polo or Abercrombie & Fitch. Dylan and Eric hadn’t even thought of themselves as members of the group, although they were friends with a boy, Chris, who was.

  Regardless of how we thought the coat would look, it seemed harmless enough, and Dylan was thrilled when he unwrapped it on Christmas morning.

  • • •

  1/11/99 This long, hard day is over. Tom’s surgery was today. We had to get up at 4:00 AM to be there by 6:00. After sitting and waiting for 13 hours, I just needed to get home. Good thing I did because Dylan hasn’t exactly risen to a level of responsibility in my absence. He overslept and missed a class and was sleeping when I got home. Nothing taken care of that I needed him to do (like take care of the cats). What have I raised?