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 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 her book, “A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy,” she chronicles 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, drawing on her personal journals, the videos and writings that Dylan left behind, and on interviews with mental health experts.
In addition to volunteering on local non-profit boards for suicide prevention organizations, Sue Klebold is a member of the National Loss and Healing Council of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), and is a member of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Consumer-Survivor Subcommittee. She has participated in presentations, co-chaired conferences at the state and national levels, and written about the experience of surviving a loved one’s murder-suicide.
