IT STARTED like any ordinary day.

Sue Klebold was getting ready for work on April 20, 1999, when her 17-year-old son bounded out of the house to go to school.

But life was about to take a shocking twist and Mrs Klebold would go to bed that night as the mother of a sadistic killer.

Breaking her silence 17 years after Dylan Klebold carried out one of America’s most deadly high school shootings, Mrs Klebold has revealed the heavy burden she has carried since the massacre.

Dylan and his friend Eric Harris stormed Columbine High with machine guns and homemade bombs and slaughtered their classmates, killing 13 people and injuring more than 20. The pair then turned the guns on themselves.

In an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s 20/20 program, Mrs Klebold admitted she sometimes blamed herself.

“It’s very hard to live with the fact someone you loved and raised brutally killed people in such a horrific way,” she said.

“The last moments of his life were spent in violence, sadism and he was cruel and hateful and I have to own that.”

Mrs Klebold has spent years in hiding, she told Sawyer she would turn on the radio and would hear people calling her a disgusting parent.

“The one thing of course I want to say is I am so sorry for what my son did, yet I know just saying ‘I’m sorry’ is an inadequate response to all this suffering,” she said.

“There’s never a day that goes by where I don’t think of the people Dylan harmed.”

Mrs Klebold recalled to Sawyer what is was like getting an urgent call from her husband on that fateful day. She remembers hoping her son wasn’t hurt.

She described her son as a happy and precocious little child and they used to call him “sunshine boy” because of his thick golden main which bordered his innocent face.

Mrs Klebold told Sawyer she has felt afraid and ashamed for 17 years.

She had devastating pain in her eyes and would break down sobbing while trying to recount the tragic end of so many lives, and what led up to it.

When she discovered her son was one of the trench coat killers, she said she prayed to God he would die.

“Just make it stop, don’t let him hurt anybody,” she told Sawyer.

Mrs Klebold said she has now gone through her son’s teenage years with a magnifying glass, trying to figure out where it all went wrong.

It’s something that has been hard for her to comprehend, she put him to bed with stories, prayers and hugs and considered herself a good mother.

He was a senior when he massacred the school and Mrs Klebold told Sawyer he had started to lose interest in his grades and became distant and quiet in the lead up.

She would ask him if he was OK and told him he seemed tired but he would claim to have a lot of homework and go to bed.

“I let it go,” she said.

“If it were me today I would dig and dig and dig.

“I had an illusion everything was OK because my love for him was so strong, I felt I was a good mum and he could talk to me about anything.”

She wrote off his changing demeanour as an adolescent phase.

In summer, in Dylan’s sophomore year, Mrs Klebold was writing in her diary about how her son was “yucking it up”, with no idea he was writing in his own journal about is desire to kill himself.

He talked about how he hated his life, and while he had a nice family, a good house, and a couple of good friends, he had no girls and nobody accepting him.

In his journal was also a list of all the people he loved, who did not love him back.

Mrs Klebold’s devastation was evident as Sawyer probed more into the person Dylan was.

He started acting up about a year and a half before the school shooting.

He hacked the school’s computer system and broke into a van and stole electronic equipment.

Mrs Klebold told Sawyer that was the worst thing she expected him to do.

She told her son it was wrong to steal and took away his privileges.

She remembered one night when he refused to do his chores and she was so frustrated, she pushed him against the fridge and told him to stop being so selfish.

“I gave him the old mum lecture, then I said ‘by the way, today is Mother’s Day and you forgot’,” she said.

Dylan told her softly not to push him because he didn’t know how much he could control himself.

She then sobbed as she remembered he went and bought her a Mother’s Day present, African violets, after their fight.

“He was so sweet,” she said.



Mrs Klebold told Sawyer she had questions over the influence Harris had on her son.

The ABC report spoke about how Harris’ diary differed from Dylan’s.

While Dylan drew hearts and talked about finding true Love, Harris wrote about his fantasies of raping girls and drew pictures of Nazi symbols and decapitated heads.

“I don’t blame Eric’s parents,” Mrs Klebold told Sawyer.

“They are not Eric.”

After the shooting, Mrs Klebold told ABC she considered changing her name.

“I finally realised I can’t run from this,” she said.

“Changing my name and moving doesn’t allow me to leave this behind.”

Mrs Klebold told Sawyer she wanted to die but when she got breast cancer she realised she couldn’t live with such guilt.

“You just have to let some of it rest and say ‘I didn’t kill these people, Dylan did’,” she said.

Mrs Klebold’s interview coincides with the release of her book, A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy.

She plans to donate money raised from the book to mental health and suicide prevention organisations.