About A Mother’s Reckoning 
 
 The acclaimed New York Times bestseller by Sue Klebold, mother of one of the Columbine shooters, about living in the aftermath of Columbine. 
 
 On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill twelve students and a teacher and wound twenty-four others before taking their own lives. 
 
 
 
 For the last sixteen years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. How could her child, the promising young man she had loved and raised, be responsible for such horror? And how, as his mother, had she not known something was wrong? Were there subtle signs she had missed? What, if anything, could she have done differently? 
 
 
 
 These are questions that Klebold has grappled with every day since the Columbine tragedy. In A Mother’s Reckoning, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible. In the hope that the insights and understanding she has gained may help other families recognize when a child is in distress, she tells her story in full, drawing upon her personal journals, the videos and writings that Dylan left behind, and on countless interviews with mental health experts. 
 
 
 
 Filled with hard-won wisdom and compassion, A Mother’s Reckoning is a powerful and haunting book that sheds light on one of the most pressing issues of our time. And with fresh wounds from the Newtown and Charleston shootings, never has the need for understanding been more urgent. 
 
 
 
 All author profits from the book will be donated to research and to charitable organizations focusing on mental health issues. 
 
 
 
 — Washington Post, Best Memoirs of 2016 
 
 
 
 ||||| 
 
 Sue Klebold and her son Dylan, who at age 17 would help commit the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School. 
 
 A MOTHER’S RECKONING: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy 
 
 By Sue Klebold 
 
 Crown Publishers. 305 pp. $28. 
 
 Five days after the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, and just hours after they cremated the remains of their son Dylan — cremation was the only option, really, because a grave site would certainly be vandalized — Sue and Tom Klebold returned to their Colorado home. It had been a crime scene for several days, but now the detectives were gone, the media vigil over. A single lamp Tom had left on still burned in the front window. Using sheets, thumbtacks and masking tape, they went from room to room, blocking any windows or sightlines into the house. “Only when we were sealed in this patchwork cocoon,” Sue Klebold writes, “did we finally turn on another light at the very back of the house.” 
 
 When your 17-year-old son has just perpetrated what was then the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, killing 12 students and one teacher and wounding 24 others before he and classmate Eric Harris turned their weapons on themselves, you’re not eager for prying eyes. The Klebolds tried to block out a world that had already found them guilty. 
 
 With “A Mother’s Reckoning,” Sue Klebold is taking those sheets down. Reading this book as a critic is hard; reading it as a parent is devastating. I imagine snippets of my own young children in Dylan Klebold, shades of my parenting in Sue and Tom. I suspect that many families will find their own parallels. This book’s insights are painful and necessary, and its contradictions inevitable. It is an apology to the loved ones of the victims; an account of the Klebold family’s life in the days and months following the shooting; a catalogue of warning signs missed. Most of all, it is a mother’s love letter to her son, for whom she mourned no less deeply than did the parents of the children he killed. “To the rest of the world, Dylan was a monster; but I had lost my child.” 
 
 That child, born on a September 11th and named for a poet who raged against the dying of the light, was a good kid, Sue explains. “He was easy to raise, a pleasure to be with, a child who had always made us proud.” Dylan loved Legos and origami, was in a middle school gifted program and worked sound equipment for school plays. They called him their Sunshine Boy. It was their older son, Byron, who gave them headaches. 
 
 Sue scours Dylan’s childhood for warnings. Dylan was unforgiving of himself when he failed at anything, “and his humiliation sometimes turned to anger,” she recalls. When he didn’t make the high school baseball team, he retreated into computers. And as some of Dylan’s buddies found girlfriends, he drifted into a closer friendship with Eric Harris, whose sadism would play off of Dylan’s depression. 
 
 “A Mother’s Reckoning” features searing scenes: when Sue, upon learning that Dylan was involved in the shooting, finds herself praying for his death, “the greatest mercy” she could imagine. When she and Tom and Byron reassure each other that they won’t commit suicide. When the three hold hands at the funeral home, and together they grasp Dylan’s cold fingers. (“We were finally by his side, a family again.”) When, less than two months after the shooting, the family is allowed to visit the school library, where many of the kids had died. Sue recognized her son’s lanky shape marked on the floor. “My tears splashed the floor,” she writes. “. . . I knelt beside the shape resembling my son and touched the carpet that held him when he fell.” 
 
 She understands why people blame her. “HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW??!” read one of thousands of letters. How could she not realize that their son was stockpiling weapons? How could she not glimpse the violence within him? Did she not love him? Didn’t Sue ever hug him? 
 
 Sue knows she will always be seen as “the woman who raised a murderer,” but she insists that she and Tom were loving, engaged parents. Though they recognized that Dylan had problems, “we simply — and drastically and lethally — underestimated the depth and severity of his pain and everything he was capable of doing to make it stop.” 
 
 [The Washington Post interviews Sue Klebold] 
 
 Trouble escalated during Dylan’s junior year. He was suspended for lifting locker combinations from the school’s computer system; he quit his job at a pizza place; he endured bullying. He became irritable, unmotivated. Most serious, Dylan and Eric were arrested for stealing electronic equipment from a parked van. “I practically threw up when I saw Dylan paraded past me in handcuffs,” Sue recalls. The boys entered a diversion program for first-time juvenile offenders, involving counseling and community service. For a while, the mothers agreed to keep them apart. 
 
 From Columbine to San Bernardino, here's a look at some of the notable U.S. mass shootings since 1999. (Alice Li/The Washington Post) 
 
 In his senior year, Sue writes, Dylan seemed to improve. He got a job, applied to college and was released early from the diversion program. “Dylan is a bright young man who has a great deal of potential,” the counselor wrote, three months before the massacre. 
 
 Six months after the Columbine shooting, authorities showed the Klebolds videos that Eric and Dylan had made — the notorious “Basement Tapes” — in which both spoke in violent and racist terms, drinking alcohol and brandishing weapons. They also received Dylan’s journals, drawn from school notebooks and scraps of paper, revealing his despair. “Thinking of suicide gives me hope that i’ll be in my place wherever i go after this life — that ill finally not be at war w. myself, the world, the universe — my mind, body, everywhere, everything at PEACE — me — my soul (existence),” he wrote. And later: “oooh god i want to die sooo bad . . . such a sad desolate lonely unsalvageable I feel I am . . . not fair, NOT FAIR!!!” 
 
 Sue repeatedly asserts that Dylan was responsible for his actions, but she highlights multiple factors enabling his descent. “We cannot dedicate ourselves to preventing violence if we do not take into account the role depression and brain dysfunction can play in the decision to commit it,” she writes. There is also Dylan’s co-conspirator. “For years after the attack, I resisted blaming Eric for Dylan’s participation,” Sue writes. “Given what I have learned about psychopathy, I now feel differently. I find the violence and hatred seething off the page in Eric’s journals almost unreadably dark.” Or as Andrew Solomon, author of “The Noonday Demon,” suggests in the book’s introduction: “Eric was a failed Hitler; Dylan was a failed Holden Caulfield.” 
 
 Sue also blames herself, in part. “Dylan did not learn violence in our home,” she stresses. Her fault was not amorality or indifference, she says, but ignorance. “Dylan did show outward signals of depression,” Sue writes. “. . . If we had known enough to understand what those signs meant, I believe that we would have been able to prevent Columbine.” 
 
 [Review of “The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought" by David Adam] 
 
 Some signals flash so bright they seem hard to miss. During Dylan’s senior year, his English teacher told Sue and Tom that one of his papers was disturbing. They asked Dylan about it, but didn’t follow up. A year after his death, they read it: It was about a man dressed in black who kills the popular kids in school. Even now, Sue isn’t sure how she would have reacted: “I cannot help but wonder if, as an artist myself, I would have seen it as a danger sign if I had read it before his death. Artistic expression, even when it’s unpleasant, can be a healthy way of coping with feelings.” 
 
 Stories of victims are prevalent in our reckoning with mass shootings. They carry greater moral force, or less moral ambiguity, than those of perpetrators. But Sue Klebold is both the mother of a killer and of one of his victims, too. “Coming to understand Dylan’s death as a suicide opened the door to a new way of thinking for me about everything he had done,” she says. “Whatever else he had intended, Dylan had gone to the school to die.” 
 
 The author has remade herself as a suicide-prevention activist, and the book seeks to help families recognize red flags. “How does a concerned parent parse out the difference between garden-variety adolescent behavior . . . from real indicators of depression?” she asks. Look for shifting moods and sleep patterns; know that depression in teens may appear less as sadness than anger; implement mental health screenings in schools. 
 
 But beyond her recommendations, this book is littered with regret. “I wish I had listened more instead of lecturing; I wish I had sat in silence with him instead of filling the void with my own words and thoughts,” Sue writes. “I wish I had acknowledged his feelings instead of trying to talk him out of them.” 
 
 It’s not that she didn’t love him. “I loved him while I was holding his pudgy hand on our way to get frozen yogurt after kindergarten;” she writes, “while reading Dr. Seuss’s exuberant There’s a Wocket in My Pocket! to him for the thousandth time. . . . I loved him while we were sharing a bowl of popcorn and watching Flight of the Phoenix together, a month before he died.” 
 
 There were 374 mass shootings in 2015, according the crowd-sourced database Mass Shooting Tracker. Watch this motion graphic and hear the 911 calls to get a complete picture of the human toll. (Gillian Brockell,Julio Negron/The Washington Post) 
 
 It’s that love wasn’t enough. 
 
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 The book every new American citizen — and every old one, too — should read ||||| Sue Klebold’s son and his friend killed 13 people at Columbine high school. Nearly two decades on, she is still haunted by one question: is there anything she could have done? 
 
 One of the first things Sue Klebold does when we meet is apologise for her lack of hospitality. We are at a hotel in Denver rather than her home, not for want of congeniality on the 66-year-old’s part, but because, once you have been the target of large-scale hatred, it is never a good idea to let on where you live. Klebold looks like the last person on Earth for whom this designation might apply – a retired college administrator and community stalwart who describes herself as living a “nice little modest life”. Nonetheless, for the last 17 years, she has been a woman forever on the cusp of a dreadful public encounter. “I can be in a doctor’s waiting room and still hope they call me by my first name, rather than shout out Mrs Klebold,” she says. “Every time I meet someone and give my name, there’s a moment of hesitancy where I watch their face very closely. They may say, ‘Gee, why does that sound so familiar?’” 
 
 It is almost two decades since Klebold’s son Dylan and his friend Eric Harris murdered 13 people at Columbine high school before killing themselves, and in that time much about the American school system has changed. Bullying has become a frontline priority, with anti-bullying protocols laid down at the federal level. Gun control has become a central issue, too, and school security measures – lockdown drills and metal detectors at the doors – rolled out as standard, partly in response to what Klebold’s son did. What hasn’t changed, perhaps, is the assumption made in the aftermath of a shooting that the fault must lie predominantly with the parents – or, rather, with the mother. “A mother is supposed to know,” Klebold says. 
 
 'Dylan had killed children in cold blood': life after the Columbine massacre Read more 
 
 That she claimed not to have known any of it – that the teenager under her roof was profoundly depressed; that he had illegally bought a gun and hidden it in her house; that, with his friend Eric, he was planning a massacre – triggered hostility at the time and even now provokes disbelief. Klebold understands this instinct: for many years, she regarded herself with the same harsh incredulity. “The gentlest portrayal of us as parents in the media was that we were useless,” she writes in A Mother’s Reckoning, her new memoir. “In other accounts, we had knowingly shielded a hateful racist, turning a blind eye to the arsenal he was assembling under our roof, thereby exposing an entire community to danger.” 
 
 A Mother’s Reckoning is a tough read. It retraces Klebold’s mental processes of the last 17 years as she revisits every parenting decision she and her ex-husband, Tom, ever made, raking through memories in search of evidence they missed. It also examines the horrific, decades-long influence of the Columbine shooting on other violent young men and tells, from the inside, the story of what happens to parents when their children kill others. (Briefly: divorce, bankruptcy, illness, breakdown, followed by the more complex processes and rationalisations that allow Klebold to carry on living.) 
 
 She would give her life to recover one of the lives lost, but she won’t accept that her son was a monster 
 
 The most controversial element of the memoir, however, is what it asks readers to do with their notions of Dylan. At the time of the shooting, Sue Klebold worked in the same building as a parole office, and often felt alienated and frightened getting in the elevator with ex-convicts. After Columbine, she writes, “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.’” 
 
 Of course, Klebold feels compassion in part because she is asking for compassion – more than that, she’s asking for forgiveness. But she is also asking that a fundamental reassessment take place of what it is that can make teenagers kill. After almost 20 years spent thinking about it, and having immersed herself in the worlds of suicide and murder-suicide prevention, what Klebold concludes is, in its way, more shocking than the idea that she was a bad parent or that Dylan was “evil”. She would, she writes, give her life to recover “just one of the lives that was lost” at the hands of her son, but she won’t subscribe to the theory that he was a monster. “He was a human being,” she tells me, turning to look out of the window. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it does: she still loves him. 
 
 *** 
 
 Based on his mother’s account, the impression one gets of the young Dylan Klebold is of a straightforwardly wonderful child. Contrast can make colours shine brighter and there is, perhaps, a pull towards casting his infancy as particularly angelic, in light of how his life ended. Nonetheless, when Klebold writes that “our younger son was observant, curious and thoughtful, with a gentle personality”, there is nothing to suggest she is being untruthful. She called him her “sunshine boy” on account of his blond hair and sunny nature, and “our little trouper” because of his determination to see projects through. Of her two boys, Dylan was the one she thought she didn’t have to worry about. 
 
 It has taken Klebold a long time to reclaim this image of Dylan. In the aftermath of the shooting, she effectively lost him twice: first, physically; then as a memory. How does one mourn a kid one considered a decent and loving son when his photo appears on the cover of Time magazine under the headline The Monsters Next Door? The decision to include childhood photographs in her memoir seems like a plea to remember that Dylan was once blameless, even cute. But that’s not why she did it, Klebold says. “I wanted people to understand that he was loved. And cuddled. And held. And touched. And I had all kinds of pictures of Dylan on laps and with arms around him.” There was, she says, “an assumption that he was mistreated, or not loved”, one that Klebold knew not to be true, even as she scoured photos looking for external verification. Over and over she asked herself, “Did we hug him enough?” 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Students are led from Columbine high school on 20 April 1999. Photograph: Rodolfo Gonzales/AP 
 
 Other misconceptions were easier to dispel. One of the stories that took hold about the Klebolds after the shooting was that they were rich, and that Dylan’s violent behaviour was an extreme version of a spoilt child’s petulance. Aerial photos of the family house in Littleton, Colorado, made it look huge when in fact, Klebold says, they bought it for a song as a “fixer-upper”. Likewise Dylan’s BMW, which cost his parents $500 and which he and his father remodelled from scratch. They were that kind of family, eating around the table every night, watching old movies together, collaborating on projects. Whenever Byron, the eldest son, came over for dinner, Klebold would send him back to his apartment with a freezer bag full of food. 
 
 This would sound gilded, except here is Klebold, revisiting every detail in a way that implies it might have been easier on her psychologically if there had been a catastrophe in the household, something pointing to why Dylan did what he did. Instead, in the years before the shooting, there were only very ordinary domestic tensions. Tom Klebold, a geophysicist, was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, damaging his job prospects and causing the couple to worry about money. (Sue’s job, coordinating grants to help disabled people learn computer skills, was satisfying but not terribly well paid.) 
 
 Then there was Byron. Before the late 1990s, the biggest upset to have shaken the Klebold family was when a small amount of marijuana was found in Byron’s room, a discovery they reacted to in a way that quells any notions they were too liberal as parents. Byron, still at school at the time, was made to attend counselling sessions, and his parents intervened to end friendships they believed “weren’t in his best interests”. 
 
 The fact that, a few years later, they would fail to sever their younger son’s friendship with Eric Harris when the two got into similar trouble was, Klebold says, testament to Harris’s charm and their faith in Dylan’s good sense. 
 
 It was also evidence of the fact that, up to that point, the most Dylan had ever given them to worry about was being a little on the shy side. After the shooting, he would be characterised as a dysfunctional loner with a single, psychopathic friend: Harris. But Klebold says that simply wasn’t the case; he wasn’t the most popular kid in class, but he had a small, close circle of friends, of whom Eric was just one. In the memoir, all she will say of the Harrises is that the father was ex-military and that “we liked them, although we didn’t see them socially”. Of Eric, she writes, he was “always respectful and perfectly polite”. 
 
 The strain around these remarks is palpable; after the shooting, Klebold’s first impulse was to blame Harris – he must have brainwashed Dylan, she thought, or coerced him in some other way. 
 
 I've met several mothers of mass shooters, and they are as sweet as can be. You wouldn’t know what brought us together 
 
 Klebold no longer thinks like this; one of the hardest tasks of the last 17 years has been to accept that Dylan played an equal part in planning and executing the massacre. Nevertheless, when she writes about Harris, she struggles to extend to him the same sympathy she reserves for her son. After the shooting, the boys’ respective journals were found and while Dylan’s was full of maudlin and often nonsensical dreams about killing himself, Harris’s was full of violent and sadistic fantasies about hurting others. 
 
 I suggest that she makes a moral distinction between the two boys. “I don’t know if moral is the right word,” she says. “They had different brain conditions. I believe Dylan had some kind of a mood disorder. I believe psychopathy is in a different category. For whatever reason, the two were like magnetic poles. They stuck together. They fed each other.” She says, “I don’t want to say someone commits crimes because they have a mental illness – that is not true – but I believe strongly that both Dylan and Eric were victims of their own pathology, just as everyone else was a victim of that pathology.” 
 
 I tell her that, reading her book, one is inclined to think, oh, well, if it wasn’t the Klebolds who caused this, then it must have been the Harrises. “And that is exactly what people do when there is a crime like this. We like to feel that something like that could never happen to us. It can happen to someone else, it can’t happen to us. And that’s why I think so many people get comfort from vilifying the parents of shooters, because it makes them feel safer. I understand; but one of the frightening things about this reality is that people who have family members who do things like this are just like the rest of us. I’ve met several mums of mass shooters, and they are as sweet and nice as they can be. You wouldn’t know, if you saw all of us in a room, what brought us together.” 
 
 *** 
 
 The changes were tiny and almost indistinguishable from the normal fluctuations of adolescence, but Klebold now believes that, if she had known then what she knows now, she might have been able to spot them. “Dylan did show outward signals of depression,” she writes, “signs Tom and I observed but were not able to decode. If we had known enough to understand what those signs meant, I believe that we would have been able to prevent Columbine.” 
 
 Dylan’s sleep patterns changed. He went from being an early riser to a late one. He was short-tempered and withdrawn, and his hair went ungroomed. He wrote an English essay that contained violent imagery, which should have flagged him immediately, she says; but no one was looking out for these things back then. For the first time in his life, he got into trouble at school, vandalising some lockers with Eric. Finally, a year before the shooting, the boys stole some electrical equipment from an unattended van and were arrested. The Klebolds were appalled, but also relieved that, because it was a first offence and the boys came from “good homes”, they were let off with some counselling and community service. She now wishes they’d been given a custodial sentence; if they had, Columbine almost certainly wouldn’t have happened. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dylan Klebold at a restaurant with his family, about three weeks before the shooting. Photograph: Courtesy of Sue Klebold 
 
 At the time, although worried, she told herself, “Dylan’s growing up. He’s testing his boundaries. He’s doing things he’s never done before. They’re terrible choices, but good, he’s learned his lesson. I was never for a moment thinking that he was a danger to himself or to anyone else.” 
 
 And quite quickly, Klebold says, he appeared to get “back on track”. Dylan’s mandatory counselling sessions went well. He applied to and won a place at the University of Arizona. Three days before the shooting, he attended his high school prom with a girl. 
 
 There was one odd incident. This was a year before the massacre, and one of the very rare moments in the book when one questions Klebold’s handling of her son. Dylan was rude to her, as he had been a lot that spring, and when she lost her temper, challenging him on his bad attitude and pushing him against the fridge door, he said, “Stop pushing me, Mom. I’m getting angry, and I don’t know how well I can control it.” The voice he used was soft and “carried warning power”, Klebold says, and she immediately backed off. Later, she apologised to him. I remark to her that it was a chilling exchange. 
 
 “It was. It was.” 
 
 It was also, clearly, a threat. Klebold says she was never frightened of Dylan, but there is a sense, around that time, that she was walking on eggshells. Wasn’t she inclined to say, “How dare you threaten me?” 
 
 “I never thought of saying that,” she says. “It isn’t in character for me to say something like, How dare you threaten me. I listened to what he said; he asked me to stop, I stopped. And then we circled back and we both apologised. I now have a strong sense that I should’ve responded by saying: ‘I don’t understand – this isn’t like you.’” 
 
 She says, “I could see his behaviours were changing. I attributed it to being an adolescent, and it is my deep regret that those behaviours might have indicated something else: depression, perhaps. That is why I say to people: if your children misbehave, if a young man is irritable, if your daughter has a lot of somatic complaints, this could be a mental issue. We have to be able to ask questions such as, do you wish you could just die sometimes? Have you ever thought about suicide? I think we have to do a better job of listening and not trying to fix our kids’ lives.” 
 
 Along with this compassion for Dylan’s suffering, she must, surely, be deeply, deeply angry with him? “I never had anger towards him, except for the moment when I saw the Basement Tapes at the sheriff’s department, six months after he died.” These were the home videos made by Dylan and Eric before the shooting, in which they cavorted around, viciously slamming everyone they knew, throwing out racist epithets and talking about the killing they intended to do. “I felt about a day of anger because he was bad-mouthing everybody and everything – family members – and pulling things out of his past, some incident in day care when he was three years old. He was trying to latch on to things that made him feel angry, and he was grasping at straws because he’d had such a good life. But I just couldn’t sustain that anger.” 
 
 I have forgiven myself to some degree. I don’t think I will ever completely forgive myself 
 
 How can the Basement Tapes make her angry with him and not the fact that he perpetrated a massacre? “I feel that Dylan was a victim of some kind of malfunction going on in his brain. If you explained suicide to a child, [you might say] your grandfather died because he got sick in his brain and hurt grandma and then he hurt himself. That’s my thinking with Dylan. The Dylan I knew and raised was a kind person. He was thoughtful. He was conscious-ridden, which is why this is still so difficult for me to understand.” There is a long pause. “I feel a need to apologise to anyone who might be offended because I’m not angry at him, or don’t judge him. But I don’t, because he is my son, and because I believe that whatever killed all the others, killed him, too.” 
 
 *** 
 
 When Dylan Klebold left the house that morning, he yelled goodbye in a tone that gave his mother pause. It had a “flat, nasty” ring to it, she says, which she has since “analysed like a Rubik’s cube; I have turned it every which way. Was he saying to me, you were a bad mother?” He had left the house early to attend a bowling class; the school permitted students to take bowling as an elective PE module, hence the title of the Michael Moore documentary about Columbine, Bowling For Columbine. But Dylan never showed up. Instead, he met Eric Harris and the two of them made their way to the school carrying guns and explosives. 
 
 Dylan’s mother will never know why he did it. All she can say is that “a certain percentage of people who die by suicide take the lives of others at the time of their death”. In fact, according to the US Department of Health, murder-suicide represents a tiny fraction of the overall suicide rate: around 3%. But suicide itself is the second leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds and it is, Klebold believes, “a juxtaposition of biological factors, psychological factors, social and environmental factors and trigger events”. 
 
 She was at work when her husband rang, telling her there had been an incident at the school and yelling at her to turn on the TV. Her first thought was, “Dylan is in danger.” By the time she got home, the gunmen were both dead and had been identified as wearing black trenchcoats of a kind the Klebolds knew Dylan and Eric owned. Tom rang their lawyer, who rang the sheriff’s office, who told them that Dylan wasn’t a victim, but one of the perpetrators. 
 
 And so the spiral began. The Klebolds’ lawyer told them to expect a “firestorm of hatred”. They fled their house. Tom told his wife he wished Dylan had killed them, too. Sue wished she could die quietly in the night. In the days that followed, they considered changing their name and moving towns. Distant cousins of Tom’s received death threats. When sympathetic well-wishers sent around food for the couple, their lawyer made them throw it out, in case it was poisoned. 
 
 And yet, at the same time and to their intense gratitude, their friends and family rallied around. While the couple were still in hiding, their neighbours hung a banner outside their house that read “Sue & Tom We Love You We’re Here for You CALL US”. In the end, Klebold says, “I felt, well, if I move away, I’m just going to be the mother of that killer. So I stayed where I had the support of people who knew us.” 
 
 She received vast mountains of letters, some supportive, some hate mail, some – most disturbingly – mail praising Dylan and what he had done. “Girls will write about loving Dylan and wanting his baby,” she says. Books were written, movies were made, none of which Klebold saw, but she heard about them – the Gus Van Sant film Elephant; Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need To Talk About Kevin – and they made her shudder. 
 
 “I had the distorted belief that Dylan belonged to me. He was mine. And when I see movies, or plays, or songs, I have a sense that someone is taking him away from me, that they’re claiming ownership of something they know nothing about.” She also thinks these works risk “perpetuating the myths” of Columbine. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Flowers cover the ground after a memorial service for victims of the Columbine shooting. Photograph: New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images 
 
 The week before we meet, two girls in Denver are arrested for allegedly planning a copycat shooting. References to Columbine were found in materials owned by Seung-Hui Cho, the 2007 Virginia Tech shooter, and Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of 2012’s Sandy Hook elementary school massacre. In 2014, an investigation by ABC News found that at least 17 attacks and a further 36 alleged plots or serious threats against schools involved references to Columbine. 
 
 Klebold puts this down to the fact that the shooting roughly coincided with the boom in 24-hour news and was among the first to be subjected to obsessive rolling coverage. She also thinks “there’s almost something symbolic in the town: Littleton. It’s like an Everyman thing. It was the shot heard round the world. But the thing we have to remember, because there were so many copycats who refer back to Columbine, is that Dylan and Eric were copycatting. They were copycatting a movie. They referred to their incident as NBK – Natural Born Killers.” In Oliver Stone’s movie, the two protagonists cause a media sensation by going on multiple shooting sprees. 
 
 One surprising aspect of Klebold’s response to the massacre is that, although she has always been opposed to guns, and in spite of the fact that one of the two guns the boys used was legally obtained, she did not become a vehement advocate of gun control. It’s not her issue, she says. “My focus has been on suicide prevention because – and I don’t ever want to make it seem that I’m discounting the murders that Dylan did, which were terrible and significant and anguishing – but my thinking is that murder-suicide is one manifestation of suicide. And by focusing on suicide, I believe we can prevent things like Columbine.” She calls for suicide-prevention training to become as standard in high schools as CPR: “Mental health first aid training for everybody.” 
 
 She says, “I know many, many school districts that don’t want any suicide-prevention training in their schools, because they’re so afraid of risks and lawsuits. They’re afraid that if they bring in a suicide-prevention programme, and that if someone then dies by suicide, it will look as if it has been suggested. The research does not support that, but it’s a widely held belief.” 
 
 Other aspects of the fallout were more predictable. As Klebold and her husband differed in their ways of dealing with the trauma – broadly speaking, she looked outwards, he retreated in – their marriage of 43 years collapsed. They ran up large legal bills. Civil lawsuits brought by the families of the victims dragged on for years and were eventually settled: between them, the Harrises and the Klebolds contributed more than $1.5m in compensation to the families, most of which was paid for by their home insurance. And Klebold began the lonely task of ploughing through years of self-blame. 
 
 “I remember being certain that the birthday cake I had given Dylan on his third birthday wasn’t as pretty as the one that his brother had had on his third birthday, which made him feel unloved, and therefore this happened. You go back over every conversation, every gift, every moment, and what you feel is self-loathing. 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. And the only thing that helps with guilt like that is trying to understand brain health. And over time, with all the conferences I went to and all the books I read, some of the guilt shifts and you begin to think: my son died of a brain disease. And yes, he might’ve been helped, if I had known. But it wasn’t me who made him die.” 
 
 Over the years, she has taken refuge in small variations in the way Dylan behaved that day as opposed to Eric: the fact that he shot fewer rounds, “and he shot fewer people. What a bizarre way to find comfort, but that was all I had. That somehow this was less bad. Still horrible. But somehow less bad.” 
 
 Has she forgiven herself? “I have forgiven myself to some degree. I don’t think I will ever completely forgive myself. I still have dreams about Dylan where he is in danger, or climbing up on a high ladder, and I’m grabbing for him and he falls. I have this feeling that I allowed him to slip through my fingers.” 
 
 You still love him, I say. “I didn’t have any choice. You love your children. When everyone else was seeing the last moments of his life as vicious and evil and sadistic, I was thinking, that’s my poor kid, he was in this horrible situation, he dishonoured himself. I don’t know any other way to respond to him than with love.” 
 
 It doesn’t change anything. Klebold smiles bleakly. “Love is not enough.”
– When Sue Klebold learned that her son, Dylan, was involved in the Columbine High School massacre on April 20, 1999, she prayed not for his safety, but for his death—"the greatest mercy" she could imagine. That prayer was answered when Dylan, along with fellow shooter Eric Harris, committed suicide in the school's library after killing 12 students and one teacher and wounding 24 others. In A Mother's Reckoning, out Monday, Klebold apologizes to the loved ones of her son's victims, provides an account of her family's life after the shooting, and catalogs the warning signs she failed to see. "Most of all," Washington Post critic Carlos Lozada writes, "it is a mother’s love letter to her son, for whom she mourned no less deeply than did the parents of the children he killed." Here are some of the "painful and necessary" insights and details from the book: Dylan was "easy to raise … a child who had always made us proud," but hard on himself when he failed, "and his humiliation sometimes turned to anger." Klebold says her son is responsible for his actions, but the "role depression and brain dysfunction can play" must be acknowledged. She resisted blaming Eric Harris for years. "Given what I have learned about psychopathy, I now feel differently." From the book's introduction by Andrew Solomon: "Eric was a failed Hitler; Dylan was a failed Holden Caulfield." Visiting the school library after the shooting, Klebold recognized her son's shape marked on the floor. Weeping, she knelt and "touched the carpet that held him when he fell." Klebold was never angry with her son, she tells the Guardian, until she saw the videotapes he and Harris had made before the shooting. "He was trying to latch on to things that made him feel angry. But I just couldn’t sustain that anger." On the morning of the massacre, Klebold says her son's shouted goodbye to her had a "flat, nasty" sound. "Was he saying to me, you were a bad mother?" Regarding Dylan's depression: "If we had known enough to understand what those signs meant, I believe that we would have been able to prevent Columbine."