We need to talk about Dylan

March 2, 2016 2:34 AM

17 years after Columbine, the mother of one of the killers tells her story. A Washington Post review of "A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy" by Sue Klebold.

Also from the Washington Post: "There is no respite from the agony".

Sue Klebold previously on MetaFilter: "Confused, hurt, and ashamed."

posted by paleyellowwithorange (35 comments total)

Thank you. As a parent of a child with anger-related issues, I found it terrifying.
posted by hat_eater at 3:14 AM on March 2, 2016

I happened to hear her interviewed on Fresh Air. I had heard about this book, and I admit I thought it was sort of weird and sad to be writing this book and giving it so much press this long after Columbine. But after listening to the interview, I was really taken aback by her message and purpose of educating parents, and really the world, about the signs of depression in teens.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:53 AM on March 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

I read the book last week, and it's excellent: very sad, but searingly clear-eyed and honest. I have to say that all the things she says she did wrong - such tiny missed moments - are impossible to blame her for. Except with the benefit of hindsight, they seem totally unremarkable. The broader point is that the professional mental health support was patchy and inexact and that very disturbing elements of Eric Harris' writing and behaviour were ignored by police when they shouldn't have been (and the boys' relative privilege and white middle class appearance may have had something to do with that). Even those mistakes seem like fragile missed opportunities, though, and maybe the reality is that this kind of inward spiral is fundamentally incalculable and difficult to see from the outside or stop. It would help if people going through episodes of psychotic violent ideation didn't have easy access to guns.
posted by Aravis76 at 4:06 AM on March 2, 2016 [26 favorites]

the boys' relative privilege and white middle class appearance may have had something to do with that

especially if they were making high grades, or, at least, not bad ones
posted by thelonius at 4:09 AM on March 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Besides, which parent would think, my son is having problems, he's going to shoot his school up ?
posted by Pendragon at 4:18 AM on March 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

If I remember rightly, the judge who dealt with them after their first crime - breaking into a van and stealing some stuff - actually asked about their grades, and was approving when Eric Harris said he earned mainly As and Bs. They also exited the mandatory counselling program they were sent on because of that crime early, as they came across as so intelligent and personable and like they had learned their lesson. It's scary stuff, because there are so many situations where these would absolutely be the right decisions - of course you direct the 17 year olds who committed a first impulsive non-violent crime to counselling and community service rather than juvenile detention, of course you are flexible about the term and wipe the record of kids who seem to have benefited from the program. The injustice is that minority and poor kids don't get the same personalised concern from the justice system. It's astonishing bad luck that these particular privileged kids would have done better under a harsher approach, and a monstrous crime would have been avoided if they had been sent to juvenile detention for their first offence. But how could anyone - teachers, judge, counsellors, parents - predict that beforehand?
posted by Aravis76 at 4:22 AM on March 2, 2016 [10 favorites]

Also in this vein, "A Father's Story," by Lionel Dahmer, is excellent.
posted by oneironaut at 5:11 AM on March 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

If I remember rightly, the judge who dealt with them after their first crime - breaking into a van and stealing some stuff - actually asked about their grades, and was approving when Eric Harris said he earned mainly As and Bs.

Judges also appreciate people who are "talented footballers" and let them off, so judges are not the best judges.

Also, speaking for all the people who were caught in the 'trenchcoat mafia' blowback: fuck these guys.

I feel terrible for the mother because it was never her fault, and at least the US sorted out its crazy gun laws as a result of this, and nothing of the type happened again.
posted by Mezentian at 5:12 AM on March 2, 2016 [21 favorites]

Harris (iirc) boasted in his journals of how easy it was to fool the authority figures whom they had to satisfy, after their brush with the law.
posted by thelonius at 5:35 AM on March 2, 2016

[…] and that very disturbing elements of Eric Harris' writing and behaviour were ignored by police when they shouldn't have been […]

I would never want my mental state judged by the contents of my journals.

I remember reading Deborah Curtis's book "Touching from a Distance," and in it there is a passage about how after Ian's death the police told her they used Ian's writings as an example of someone who was probably suffering from suicidal ideation. That never read true to me. Perhaps they did, and perhaps they actually said that to his widow, but just because someone writes disturbing things doesn't mean they are going to be homicidal or suicidal.

I had a friend that used to work with kids at risk of "going into the system." He tough journaling and described the journals as safe places. He ended up quitting over it, because the people in charge wanted to confiscate the journals and use them to judge mental states and to use them as evidence of crimes (either committed by or against). These journals had stories of drug use and sexual abuse and revenge fantasies. As far as I know, none of those kids ended up doing anything destructive.
posted by cjorgensen at 5:59 AM on March 2, 2016 [7 favorites]

I would never want my mental state judged by the contents of my journals.

I wasn't talking about Harris' journals but his website, where he made specific violent threats against particular people (the parents of one student threatened complained to the police). If the police had taken the threats seriously enough to actually get a search warrant, they might have found Harris' bomb-making equipment. If I remember correctly, they did take them seriously enough to get to the stage of drafting an application for a search warrant; for some reason, it was never actually put before a judge. It's a tiny mistake, which in most situations wouldn't matter. But it did in this one.
posted by Aravis76 at 6:04 AM on March 2, 2016 [8 favorites]

What a heart-breakingly difficult subject for any one person to ever have to write. Kudos to her for not belittling, justifying, or denying what happened. Thank you for the link.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 6:40 AM on March 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

But mostly this:

It would help if people going through episodes of psychotic violent ideation didn't have easy access to guns.

Which, unfortunately, is now one of the core principles of America.
posted by Artw at 6:42 AM on March 2, 2016 [9 favorites]

Another searing example of the genre: Andrew Solomon's New Yorker piece on Peter Lanza, Andrew Lanza's father, entitled The Reckoning, which MeFites discussed here. Solomon provided the introduction for Sue Klebold's book and also interviewed her in his book Far from the Tree, which explores dynamics in play when parents are raising children much different than they (e.g., Deaf kids, autistic people, offspring with Dwarfism, trans folk, prodigies, and others, as well as killers).
posted by carmicha at 6:51 AM on March 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

So, so painful. My brother has terrible anger, depression and learning issues and I fear if he had been a little younger when Columbine happened, that he would have taken the same path. I remember being so afraid of him when he was younger, and I am the older sibling by a decade.
posted by Sophie1 at 6:53 AM on March 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

“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),”

This is what terrifies me about being a parent. I feel like having been depressed and suicidal at times there is a higher than average chance that I would recognize the symptoms if I were to have a child, but at the same time, it's likely that I would not, particularly if they manifest this despair through anger, it would take me a lot of mental effort to get it.

I don't think most people have the presence of mind or simply the awareness to analyze their children's behavior in a psychologically meaningful way while juggling multiple jobs/routine tasks.

Taking care of another human's s psyche is a terrifying job and most of us luck out in the sense that most children don't have deep psychological issues, but if they do then what? And on top of this is the natural tendency we have to A. pretend everything is okay until it's too late, and B. loyally assume that our family members are always right and would never be capable of doing anything monstrous until the evidence is undeniable, and even then some of us still choose to live in denial.
posted by Tarumba at 7:07 AM on March 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Depression made Dylan vulnerable, but it was the random chance of the intense folie-au-deux with a psychopath, plus the availability of guns, that made it into a tragedy. I'm not so sure it was preventable, except through better gun control.
posted by yarly at 7:30 AM on March 2, 2016 [18 favorites]

What I'm seeing since I sit around reading articles in pubmed and university research about epigenetics, developmental disorders, environments impact on development- is that we are missing so many causal factors that turn up again and again in studies AND that the impacts to human biology and development can be passed on to offspring. You put a slaughterhouse in a town, domestic violence and aggressive crime goes up (which indicated that it's not just "violent people are attracted to violent jobs" going on)--- police force, military-- the associations with anger issues and training in these professions is huge.

Sam Harris was the child of a military father. We know that being a child of a holocaust survivor or of a parent who lived through a famine can alter the child's biology and behavior-- what about having a parent in the military? Both through biological alterations and through being socialized to glorify violence and to be psychologically comfortable with killing "bad people".

When people say epigenetics is "controversial" I wonder how familiar they are with the full body of research going on because they tend to have cherry picked a handful of studies they could find errors in and ignored that there are at this point hundreds upon hundreds of studies documenting the ways environment alters biology and behavior in mammals and humans and can be passed on to offspring and yes I think we need to face up to what this implicates in terms of what we support in our culture and communities, what we are exposing parents of children to and what we are exposing children to. I don't expect people to take my word for it, I wish they would however do extensive research into it because laughing off something they haven't put an effort into understanding.

And... I agree with limiting access to guns, so much as well as taking it very seriously when anyone makes public desires to harm specific people and commit violence on them. I get where the mom comes from with wanting safe spaces for expression- being able to feel and express anger/rage is needed- and I'm not sure if the people he was expressing this about were people who have in fact committed violence and aggression on him making it hard to get MORE angry at some who has anger expresses the desire for retaliative violence against someone who assaulted them than at the people who actually do the assaulting. I do think that adults utterly fail kids who are being bullied leaving them with the feeling they have to take it into their own hands, and given that most adults (not all) but most believe violence has it's place in self defense, it's understandable that hurting kids whose brains are not developed enough to have the nuanced thinking about ethics in fighting for personal safety or the use of violence to stop violence (shit adults can sort through this stuff and often don't even have to so their lack of capacity to understand it isn't going to cause such horrible errors).
posted by xarnop at 7:34 AM on March 2, 2016 [6 favorites]

It's astonishing bad luck that these particular privileged kids would have done better under a harsher approach, and a monstrous crime would have been avoided if they had been sent to juvenile detention for their first offence.

Whoa, wait, what? That's a pretty big leap of logic to make there. There's no reason to think that a harsh approach would have successfully 'turned them around' or something.
posted by Saxon Kane at 8:11 AM on March 2, 2016 [15 favorites]

> Even those mistakes seem like fragile missed opportunities, though, and maybe the reality is that this kind of inward spiral is fundamentally incalculable and difficult to see from the outside or stop.

> But how could anyone - teachers, judge, counsellors, parents - predict that beforehand?

> I'm not so sure it was preventable, except through better gun control.

I think this is my frustration with the coverage of these types of tragedies, especially nowadays. The narrative so quickly devolves into, "Who is to blame for not preventing this?"

Granted, few and far between there are unambiguous signs of imminent danger that are reportable and should be reported. But most often it's a curious but seemingly harmless incident here or there or a dozen things witnessed by a dozen different people that add up to ALERT.

It's a sad realization to really grasp, but we simply cannot prevent everything.
posted by lock sock and barrel at 8:15 AM on March 2, 2016 [3 favorites]

Whoa, wait, what? That's a pretty big leap of logic to make there. There's no reason to think that a harsh approach would have successfully 'turned them around' or something.


I think the point is if they had been incarcerated in juvenile justice at the time, they wouldn't have been in school that day.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:19 AM on March 2, 2016

Dave Cullen also argues, in his book about Columbine, that the more systematic assessments and therapy available in juvenile detention would have picked up on Klebold's depression, if not Harris's homicidal preoccupations. He cites some other examples of teenagers with similar rage and suicidal fantasies having it uncovered while in juvenile detention and getting help.
posted by Aravis76 at 8:39 AM on March 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

just because someone writes disturbing things doesn't mean they are going to be homicidal or suicidal.

I've always had a "there but for the grace of God go I" reaction to authorities pointing to violent high school writing assignments as "this person is dangerous and should have a psychiatric evaluation".

When I was a sophomore in high school, I wrote violent stories and poetry, and submitted them to our school's literary magazine. One was about a boy who murdered his girlfriend, another was about a school shooting, a third was about a girl stabbing bugs and ants with needles and pins. (Meanwhile, my personal angst level was somewhere around "OMG MY PARENTS ARE SO UNFAIR/DOES [BOY] LIKE ME/I HATE MY MATH TEACHER".)

This was 1989, though, so the warning bells weren't even in existence then, much less ready to be rung. Sometimes I wonder what would've happened if it'd been ten years later.
posted by Lucinda at 9:04 AM on March 2, 2016 [17 favorites]

The idea that more forced intensive treatment is always good or "healing" is probably misguided. When people propose we become more reactionary toward any small sign and more willing to remove freedom and institutionalize people before they have committed crimes- it also has it's downside. I do think we should be willing to use incarceration/institutionalization once people are behaving violently- but I also think multifaceted problems require multidimensional thinking and solution building which includes increasing access to VOLUNTARY counselling, emotional awareness building in schools, programs that build empathy and connection, addressing bullying, addressing factors known to increase violence and aggression and mental illness in populations (such as poverty, cultures that promote corporal punishment, addiction in parents) proving free as need counselling and addiction recovery to parents.

Sticking more kids into correction centers where they may be abused or forcing medicines down their throats with the law behind it (when some of those medicines are known to INCREASE aggression in youth!)

We often jump to the idea that one intensive aggressive response is "THE SOLUTION!" because it makes us feel safer and effective- when we really owe it to the world, to our children, to explore all the magnificent research being done in these areas and piece together a society that cultivates peace, health, emotional wellness, mental stability, personal awareness and awareness of others, knowledge of human health, financial supports and safety nets, awareness of how job and social exposures impact human wellness, how diet and sun exposure impact health-- the list goes on an on. And because the list is big and it seems overwhelming people throw their hands up. Say we can't do anything about it, and when they do feel passion about it want ONE EASY aggressive solution to control others. I would say if we must do that, gun regulation would be the biggest and most important.

That would make the hugest impact, in my opinion. But I do think there is more to heart of growing emotional health and wellness that people ignore until after damage is done, then get reactive for a time, then stop caring.
posted by xarnop at 9:16 AM on March 2, 2016 [7 favorites]

everyone lives in a fish tank. if you keep pouring sewage into the fish tank, some fish get sick. some fish seem to be more susceptible to illness. you could focus on keeping those fish from getting sick.

or, you could quit putting fucking sewage into the fish tank.
posted by j_curiouser at 9:49 AM on March 2, 2016 [6 favorites]

My impression from Cullen's writings is that Harris would have done something incredibly violent at some point. If he'd been in detention in high school, he would have been released eventually and still been a psychopath. Klebold, on the other hand, seems like a missed opportunity, but not through anyone's negligence.
posted by Mavri at 10:51 AM on March 2, 2016

I want to reiterate a few good points:

Journalling (and by extension) counselling needs to be a safe space. A lot of people have heavy stuff going on internally - either because of past abuse or shitty childhoods or just stress or whatever, and there needs to be healthy ways to work through all that. As cjorgensen mentioned: He [taught] journaling and described the journals as safe places. He ended up quitting over it, because the people in charge wanted to confiscate the journals and use them to judge mental states and to use them as evidence of crimes. That is almost unbelievably stupid. If you take away healthy ways for people to deal with shit, what are you expecting?

I think that (unfortunately) people with mental health issues are vulnerable to other people with worse ones - especially of the manipulative type.

Also, gun control. It works and the US needs it and if you don't think so, you're wrong. Sorry.

(On a personal note, I have a parent with anger/emotional issues and it's caused me no end of trouble, including really really bad depression as a teenager. I have exactly zero violent tendencies, which I'm thankful for, but I still don't know how I got through my teens and early 20s without those transferred anger issues causing all sorts of trouble for me personally.)
posted by iffthen at 11:33 AM on March 2, 2016 [9 favorites]

In the days leading up to the slaughter the news was wall-to-wall full of how heroic US sailors were sitting comfortably on ships shelling the shit out of Yugoslavia. And then we heard no more about Yugoslavia.
posted by telstar at 1:23 PM on March 2, 2016

> you could quit putting fucking sewage into the fish tank

I'm confused by your metaphor. What is the sewage, here?
posted by The corpse in the library at 2:15 PM on March 2, 2016

I'm confused by your metaphor. What is the sewage, here?

I'm confused, too...something like 'modern American culture'. I mean, I hate to go all repo-man-society-made-me-do-it...but some contributing bits might be

- white American suburban affluent monoculture
- everyday vicious bullying
- canonization of student athletes, and the subsequent double-standards and privilege they enjoy
- schools-as-worker-factories
- criminalization of addiction
- stigmatization of mental illness

for my money, we could just begin by prosecuting bullies for assault. relentlessly. and prosecuting school administrators and teachers as negligent accessories.
posted by j_curiouser at 2:37 PM on March 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

I did not read this article, because I have recently read others about the same, and my heart breaks for her. I don't think she was a bad or negligent mother, but this is something she has to carry for the rest of her life. I think it's good she wrote this, and I understand why she waited so long.

I am not that much older than what Dylan Klebold would be, but at the time, I was acutely aware of how different things were for me and him. I was recently out of high school, two years or so, but it was a sea change. I was a geeky outcast in high school, but things got meaner, quick. Not to excuse them, at all, but it's become a hell of a lot harder for kids. My daughter is 14, and that was only 22 years ago for me, so I still remember, and teenage life has become harder and meaner and scarier. She's had classmates who have committed suicide. She has more who threaten, or who self-harm. It scares the shit out of me.

And why? Why are we, the US society, failing our children so badly? What has changed?
posted by Ruki at 5:44 PM on March 2, 2016

I guess it's because I'm not American, but I don't understand the propensity to sue in the US when unforseen tragedies like this happen. I noticed it in the Diane Schuler case, too, among others. The article states there were 36 lawsuits against the Klebolds. It seems excessive to me. I understand that some are probably suing for medical expenses for injures, but the others? I know the families want someone to blame, but, I view actions like this as close to impossible to forsee and the sole fault of the perpetrators-- and the perpetrators are dead. I can maybe understand suing the gun manufacturers, or the people who provided them with guns, but grieving families? What do they hope to accomplish in suing? It's not like it will teach them a lesson that hasn't already been taught, or prevent tragedies like this in future. So is it solely about money? Is it just revenge or anger? Is it just to also ruin their lives more than they are already? I guess I just don't get it but it does seem like a lose-lose scenario for both parties, that appears to be an exercise in prolonging their pain, but I don't know. I guess there's a reason I'm not thinking of, but I've just always wondered about it, given that it doesn't seem to happen where I'm from.
posted by Dimes at 12:55 AM on March 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

Also, gun control. It works and the US needs it and if you don't think so, you're wrong. Sorry.

This is so true. It's like giving toddlers the right to own and use a box of matches. Sure it could go wrong, but FREEDOM.
posted by adept256 at 3:08 AM on March 3, 2016 [4 favorites]

I think the litigation culture in the US is heavily influenced by the role of insurance companies and privatised heathcare; the families of injured victims recovered some of their medical costs from the Klebolds' insurance company. Probably the incentives are not the same in countries where medical expenses are not so crippling and liability insurance is not so normalised.
posted by Aravis76 at 4:07 AM on March 3, 2016 [6 favorites]

I've always had a "there but for the grace of God go I" reaction to authorities pointing to violent high school writing assignments as "this person is dangerous and should have a psychiatric evaluation".

I have the same feeling. One of my friends and I wrote a detailed plan at one point for attacking our school and killing off the staff and students we didn't like. We both had small collections of weapons and did a lot of reading about explosives, booby traps, etc. We also wore black trench coats much of the time (due to the influence of the Crow rather than the Matrix.)

Neither one of us hurt anyone or ever intended to. We were fascinated by weapons and war because we were adolescent boys and role players. We mocked up the attack on the school because it was a place we were familiar with that we could imagine doing all the stuff that we read about, but that was way to dangerous to do in real life. If Columbine had happened while we were in school and someone had gone through or notebooks, things would have gone badly for us.
posted by pattern juggler at 8:58 PM on March 3, 2016 [1 favorite]