Dylan Klebold Quotes

Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples. Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new. On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid. To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles, and like my friend Don did at Dylan Klebold's funeral,t hat death is not the final word. To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it. And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, we still make our song alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.

life is full of suffering, and this is mine. I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born. But I believe it would not have been better for me.

Dylan Bennet Klebold was born brilliant. He started school a year early, and by third grade was enrolled in the CHIPS program: Challenging High Intellectual Potential Students. Even among the brains, Dylan stood out as a math prodigy. The early start didn’t impede him intellectually, but strained his shyness further.

In 1999, and a mere ten days after a certain Thursday , eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and seventeen-year-old Dylan Klebold planted bombs in their Littleton, Colorado, high school and went on a shooting rampage that killed one teacher and twelve students, while wounding twenty-three, after which they shot themselves. So young Kevin—your choice—has turned out as American as a Smith and Wesson.

A resigned Dylan tried to comfort a horrified newcomer to the group: “You get used to it. It happens all the time.” It

Being made human without the possibility of BEING human; the cruelest of all punishments.

Even after more than ten years as a suicide prevention activist, I still find those numbers—and the general public’s ignorance about them—staggering. I taught Dylan, as I had taught his brother before him, to protect himself from lightning strikes, snakebites, and hypothermia. I taught him to floss, to wear sunscreen, and the importance of checking his blind spot twice. As he became a teenager, I talked as openly as I could about the dangers of drinking and drug use, and I educated him about safe and ethical sexual behavior. It never crossed my mind that the gravest danger Dylan faced would not come from an external source at all, but from within himself. In

There is perhaps no harder truth for a parent to bear, but it is one that no parent on earth knows better than I do, and it is this: love is not enough. My love for Dylan, though infinite, did not keep Dylan safe, nor did it save the 13 people killed at Columbine High School, or the many others injured and traumatized. I missed the subtle signs of psychological deterioration that, had I noticed, might have made a difference for Dylan and his victims - all the difference in the world.

In the aftermath of Columbine, the world’s judgment was understandably swift: Dylan was a monster. But that conclusion was also misleading, because it tied up too neatly a far more confounding reality. Like all mythologies, this belief that Dylan was a monster served a deeper purpose: people needed to believe they would recognize evil in their midst. Monsters are unmistakable; you would know a monster if you saw one, wouldn’t you? If Dylan was a fiend whose heedless parents had permitted their disturbed, raging teen to amass a weapons cache right under their noses, then the tragedy—horrible as it was—had no relevance to ordinary moms and dads in their own living rooms, their own children tucked snugly into soft beds upstairs. The

As I emerged from the dark and terrifying period of those last panic attacks, I felt like Dorothy stepping cautiously into the Technicolor land of Oz. Once safe on the other side I saw that my own crisis had served as an enlightenment of sorts. It had taught me some things I needed to know in order to better understand Dylan's life, and his death.

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.

I taught Dylan, as I had taught his brother before him, to protect himself from lightning strikes, snakebites, and hypothermia. I taught him to floss, to wear sunscreen, and the importance of checking his blind spot twice. As he became a teenager, I talked as openly as I could about the dangers of drinking and drug use, and I educated him about safe and ethical sexual behavior. It never crossed my mind that the gravest danger Dylan faced would not come from an external source at all, but from within himself.

Dylan and Eric planned the massacre together, and they acted together, but I believe—as most of the investigators who examined the evidence do—that they were two different people, who participated for very different reasons. So

An acquaintance working at a youth correctional facility told me some of the imprisoned boys cheered as they watched television coverage of the destruction at the school. A video project Dylan and Eric had made, leaked to the media, had become a rallying cry for bullied kids. These

[Dylan's friend] Zack's girlfriend, Devon, made a book for us.... There was Dylan--grinning while pushing Zack's dad into the pool; sporting a Hawaiian shirt and a bunch of leis at a costume party Devon had thrown; clowning around with Zack and making a hokey thumbs-up sign for the camera. I spent hours poring over these artifacts, desperate for confirmation that the sensitive, fun-loving kid Tom and I remembered had been real

If the portrayal of Dylan as a monster left the impression that the tragedy at Columbine had no relevance to average people or their families, then whatever measure of comfort it offered was false. I hope the truth will awake people to a greater sense of vulnerability—more frightening, perhaps, but crucial—that cannot so easily be circumscribed.

Tom mostly wonders if we will ever be reunited with him. This is on Tom’s mind constantly. He says he’d feel comforted if he knew he’d see him again. I think a lot about where Dylan is and whether his evil actions prevent him from resting in peace, in God’s care. I hope there is a forgiving God who will recognize that he was a child.

Awareness signs the warrant for suffering.

At least if Dylan died by suicide, I’d know he had wanted to die. Later, I would come to regret that wish almost as bitterly as I’ve ever regretted anything.

Like mothers all over Littleton, I had been praying for my son’s safety. But when I heard the newscaster pronounce twenty-five people dead, my prayers changed. If Dylan was involved in hurting or killing other people, he had to be stopped. As a mother, this was the most difficult prayer I had ever spoken in the silence of my thoughts, but in that instant I knew the greatest mercy I could pray for was not my son’s safety, but for his death.

cyber shrines to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. People are seriously crazy. She is clicking through articles on the Virginia Tech shooter, now: Cho Seung Hui,

The “Basement Tapes” were videos of Dylan and Eric talking to the camera in various places and times in the weeks before the shootings. Many of them were shot in Eric’s basement bedroom, which explains the name they were given by the media.

On April 20, 1999, I woke up an ordinary wife and mother, happy to be shepherding my family through the daily business of work, chores, and school. Fast-forward twenty-four hours, and I was the mother of a hate-crazed gunman responsible for the worst school shooting in history. And Dylan, my golden boy, was not only dead, but a mass murderer. The

Brooks hasn’t given up. He still wants to change people. He wants to wake up the world to the problem of bullying, and he wants to reach victims and turn them off their violent fantasies. So he’s worked for the filmmaker Michael Moore on Bowling for Columbine and he’s set up an innovative website where bullied kids can communicate with each other and learn that the answer isn’t to kill. “It’s to use your mind and make things better.” Brooks, like me, does not see the shooters as people who are a world apart from everyone else. His friend Dylan Klebold, he says, was once a regular kid from a fine home with loving, involved parents. In fact, he warns, “We can just sit back and call the shooters ‘sick monsters, completely different from us.’ … Or we can accept that there are more Erics and Dylans out there, who are slowly being driven … down the same path.” Even if a victim doesn’t have a fixed mindset to begin with, prolonged bullying can instill it. Especially if others stand by and do nothing, or even join in. Victims say that when they’re taunted and demeaned and no one comes to their defense, they start to believe they deserve it. They start to judge themselves and to think that they are inferior. Bullies judge. Victims take it in. Sometimes it remains inside and can lead to depression and suicide. Sometimes it explodes into violence.

In the years since April 20, 1999, when the Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, murdered twelve of their classmates and one teacher, the country has been plagued by a string of these enormities, among them the massacres at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida (which claimed thirty-two and seventeen lives, respectively). Though there is no gauging the relative awfulness of these crimes, the December 14, 2012, massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was particularly devastating, largely because of the age of the victims: twenty first-grade students (along with six adult staff members) were shot to death by Adam Lanza, a profoundly disturbed twenty-year-old misfit with a generalized abhorrence of humankind, an obsession with serial murder, and a gun-loving mother who encouraged his interest in high-powered weaponry (and was the first to die at his hands). The impact of this horror on the country at large was summed up in the next day’s New York Times: “Nation reels after gunman massacres 20 children at school in Connecticut.

To the rest of the world Dylan was a Monster but I had lost my child.

he would go into the criminal justice system and be executed, and I couldn’t bear to lose him twice. I gave the hardest prayer I ever made, that he would kill himself, because then at least I would know that he wanted to die, and I wouldn’t be left with all the questions I’d have if he got caught by a police bullet. Maybe I was right, but I’ve spent so many hours regretting that prayer: I wished for my son to kill himself, and he did.” At the end of that weekend, I asked Tom and Sue what they would want to ask Dylan if he were in the room with us, Tom said, “I’d ask him what the hell he was thinking and what the hell he thought he was doing!” Sue looked down at the floor for a minute before saying quietly, “I would ask him to forgive me, for being his mother and never knowing

resurrection, we are made new. On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid. To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles, and like my friend Don did at Dylan Klebold’s funeral, that death is not the final word. To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it. And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, still we make our song alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.

Since mass and spree murder are essentially two manifestations of the same psychological phenomenon, a new term has recently been proposed that covers both kinds of crime. In a series of articles published shortly before the first anniversary of the Columbine massacre, The New York Times refers to figures like Dylan Klebold, Charles Whitman, and others as rampage killers—a highly expressive phrase that pinpoints the essential difference between these types of offenders and serial killers.

Was he evil? I've spent a lot of time wrestling with that question. In the end, I don't think he was. Most people believe suicide is a choice, and violence is a choice; those things are under a person's control. Yet we know from talking to survivors of suicide attempts that their decision-making ability shifts in some way we don't well understand. In our conversation, psychologist and suicide researcher Dr. Matthew Nock at Harvard used a phrase I like very much: dysfunction in decision making. If suicide seems like the only way out of an existence so painful it has become intolerable, is that really an exercise of free will? Of course, Dylan did not simply die by suicide. He committed murder; he killed people. We've all felt angry enough to fantasize about killing someone else. What allows the vast majority of us to feel appalled and frightened by the mere impulse, and another person to go through with it? If someone chooses to hurt others, what governs the ability to make that choice? If what we think of as evil is really the absence of conscience, then we have to ask, how is it a person ceases to connect with their conscience?

It’’s very hard to know who is going to commit an act of violence. But... prevention does not require prediction. It does require, however, that we increase overall access to brain health interventions. ... A... tiered system is already working in some schools. At the tier-one level, everyone should have access to brain health screenings and first aid, to conflict resolution programs, and to suicide prevention education. Peer intervention programs teach kids to seek help from trained adults for friends they’re worried about without fear of repercussion. A second tier of attention is trained on kids going through a hard time—a student grieving a lost parent, one who has suffered teasing or bullying, or those in known high-risk populations. For instance, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender kids are at disproportionate risk for bullying, so special efforts might be made to connect those kids to resources. The third level of intervention comes into play when a child has emerged as a particular concern. Perhaps he or she has an ongoing emotional disorder, has talked about suicide, or—as Dylan did— has turned in a paper with violent or disturbing subject matter. The student is then referred to a team of specially trained teachers and other professionals who will interview him or her, look at the student's social media and other evidence, and speak to friends, parents, local law enforcement, counselors, and teachers. The real beauty of these measures is not that they catch potential school shooters, but how effectively they help schools to identify teens struggling with all different kinds of issues: bullying, eating disorders, cutting, undiagnosed learning disorders, addiction, abuse at home, and partner violence — just to name a few. In rare cases, a team may discover that the student has made a concrete plan to hurt himself or others, at which point law enforcement may become involved. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, though, simply getting a kid help is enough.

The meeting will take more courage than I can muster. I can only have my own little construct of what really happened until I speak with the investigators. I don’t want them to destroy the Dylan I am holding on to in my mind.