The mother of one of the Columbine high school massacre killers has spoken for the first time about her sense of guilt for failing to spot any signs that might have prevented the atrocity.
Sue Klebold, whose son Dylan, 17, went on a shooting rampage with his friend Eric Harris, 18, at their high school in Colorado in 1999, says she still thinks about the victims every day.
But she also counts her son as one of the victims. “He was a human being. I feel that Dylan was a victim of some kind of malfunction going on in his brain,” she said.
Klebold said she still loves her son and does not believe he was a monster but cannot forgive herself for not realising something was wrong.
“You go back over every conversation, every gift, every moment, and what you feel is self-loathing,” she told the Guardian. “I let this happen; it was my role to keep him safe, and to keep others safe, too, and somehow this happened because of me, because I wasn’t able to stop it. The guilt one feels doesn’t fit in a room, it’s so huge.”
Klebold, 66, also admits that while she was shocked and devastated by her son’s role, she did not feel anger until six months after the killings, when investigators showed her the home video tapes Dylan and Harris had made. In them, the pair spew nihilistic hatred towards family members, as well as wider society.
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