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Survivor gives er story of the massacre eat Columbine

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Shooting Massacre Survivor Shares Story of Survival During School Terror

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Morris Cerullo interviews Crystal Woodman Miller, who was a survivor of the horrific Columbine shooting. Watch this inspiring video as Crystal shares what it was like on that devastating day of disaster and how she not only survived, but was able to tragedy into triumph!

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At Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, two teens went on a shooting spree on April 20, 1999, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20 others before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide. The Columbine shooting was, at the time, the worst high school shooting in U.S. history and prompted a national debate on gun control and school safety, as well as a major investigation to determine what motivated the gunmen, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17.

Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris

At approximately 11:19 a.m., Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, dressed in trench coats, began shooting fellow students outside Columbine High School, located in a suburb south of Denver. The pair then moved inside the school, where they gunned down many of their victims in the library.

By approximately 11:35 a.m., Klebold and Harris had killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 other people. Shortly after 12 p.m., the two teens turned their guns on themselves.

Investigators later learned Harris and Klebold had arrived in separate cars at Columbine around 11:10 on the morning of the massacre. The two then walked into the school cafeteria, where they placed two duffel bags each containing a 20-pound propane bomb set to explode at 11:17 a.m.

The teens then went back outside to their cars to wait for the bombs to go off. When the bombs failed to detonate, Harris and Klebold began their shooting spree.

She Said 'Yes'

In the days immediately following the shootings, it was speculated that Harris and Klebold purposely chose athletes, minorities and Christians as their victims.

It initially was reported that one student, Cassie Bernall, was asked by one of the gunmen if she believed in God. When Bernall allegedly said, "Yes," she was shot to death. Her parents later wrote a book titled She Said Yes, honoring their daughter.

However, it later was determined the question was not posed to Bernall but to another student who already had been wounded by a gunshot. When that victim replied, "Yes," the shooter walked away.

Columbine Shooting Investigation

Subsequent investigations determined Harris and Klebold chose their victims randomly, and the two teens originally had intended to bomb their school, potentially killing hundreds of people.

There was speculation that Harris and Klebold committed the killings because they were members of a group of social outcasts called the Trenchcoat Mafia that was fascinated by Goth culture. It also was speculated that Harris and Klebold had carried out the shootings as retaliation for being bullied.

Additionally, violent video games and music were blamed for influencing the killers. However, none of these theories was ever proven.

Through journals left behind by Harris and Klebold, investigators eventually discovered the teens had been planning for a year to bomb the school in an attack similar to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Investigative journalist Dave Cullen, author of the 2009 book Columbine, described Harris as "the callously brutal mastermind," while Klebold was a "quivering depressive who journaled obsessively about love and attended the Columbine prom three days before opening fire."

Did you know? The deadliest school shooting in U.S. history took place on April 16, 2007, when a gunman killed 32 people before killing himself at Virginia Tech, a university in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Columbine Massacre Aftermath

In the aftermath of the shootings, many schools across America enacted "zero-tolerance" rules regarding disruptive behavior and threats of violence from students. Columbine High School reopened in the fall of 1999, but the massacre left a scar on the Littleton community.

Mark Manes, the man who sold a gun to Harris and bought him 100 rounds of ammunition the day before the murders, was sentenced to six years in prison. Another man, Philip Duran, who introduced Harris and Klebold to Manes, also was sentenced to prison time.

Some victims and families of people killed or injured filed suit against the school and the police; most of these suits were later dismissed in court.

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At Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, two teens went on a shooting spree on April 20, 1999, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20 others before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide. The Columbine shooting was, at the time, the worst high school shooting in U.S.

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Another early report of the columbine shooting

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TERROR IN LITTLETON: THE OVERVIEW

In the deadliest school massacre in the nation's history, two young men stormed into a suburban high school here at lunch time today with guns and explosives, killing as many as 23 students and teachers and wounding at least 20 in a five-hour siege, the authorities said.

The two students who are believed to have been the gunmen, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who were students at Columbine High School, were found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in the library, said Steve Davis, the spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department.

Beginning about 11:30 A.M., the gunmen, wearing ski masks, stalked through the school as they fired semiautomatic weapons at students and teachers and tossed explosives , with one student being hit nine times in the chest by shrapnel, the authorities said. Gunshots continued to ring out at the school for hours. One bomb exploded in the library, officials said, and one in a car outside. Two more cars were rigged with bombs.

About 3 P.M., hundreds of police officers evacuated the building and searched for the gunmen. Their bodies and those of several of their victims appeared to have been wired with explosives.

Sheriff John Stone said, ''It appears to be a suicide mission.''

Mr. Davis said that as many as 25 people were dead, ''a mixture of students and faculty.'' He said that most of the bodies were found in the school's entrance, the library and the commons cafeteria. No precise death toll was available.

Kaleb Newberry, 16, said: ''I was in class and one teacher came in and basically told us to run for our lives, I saw a girl maybe five paces behind me fall. She was shot in the leg, but a teacher helped her.''

Students said the gunmen were part of a group of misfits who called themselves the trench coat mafia, which expressed disdain for racial minorities and athletes. Members of the group found their way out of anonymity at the school by banning together, dressing in dark gothic-style clothing including long black coats. They became easy to notice among the 1,870 students at the school, since every day, regardless of the weather, they wore their coats. [Page A17.]

Today the gunmen appeared to aim at minority members and athletes at the 1,800-student school, as well as peers who had poked fun at the group in the past.

School officials had had no reports of trouble from the suspects, Mr. Davis said.

Some victims were forced to wait inside the school for rescue. By early evening, bodies had not been removed because of the crime scene investigation and the possible presence of explosives, a spokesman for the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department said.

Mr. Davis said at a news conference tonight that two other students at the school, thought to be friends of the gunmen, were in custody for questioning in connection with the shooting.

''You can't really go in and do this kind of damage without a lot of preparation.'' Mr. Davis said, ''without a lot of ammunition and apparently some type of bombs.''

Fourteen-year-old Katie Corona, said she was trapped in a classroom with her teacher and about 30 classmates for hours.

''I thought I was going to die,'' she said. ''I really didn't think I was going to make it. We would hear shots, then we heard crying. We had no clue what was going on.''

''Everyone around me got shot and I begged him for 10 minutes not to shoot me,'' one young woman, who was not identified, said tonight in an interview broadcast on the Cable News Network. ''And he just put the gun in my face and started laughing and saying it was all because people were mean to him last year.''

Another student, who said she heard more gunshots while hiding in the closet with a teacher and some friends, said she kept thinking to herself, ''This can't be happening to our school.''

''You should be safe at school,'' added a second young woman, who also was not identified. ''This should be a safe place.''

The families of those killed were being notified tonight at Leawood Elementary School, where students and parents had gathered.

The mass shooting was the first at an American school during this academic year, but revived memories of similar tragedies that struck six different communities last year and set off national alarms about teen-age violence. Four girls and a teacher were shot to death and 10 people were wounded during a false fire alarm at a middle school in Jonesboro, Ark., last March.

President Clinton immediately dispatched a crisis-response team to aid the school community and the victim's families.

''We don't know yet all the how's or why's of this tragedy; perhaps we will never fully understand it,'' the President said in a nationally televised news conference just before 8 P.M. ''St. Paul reminds us that we all see things in life darkly, that we only partly understand what is happening.''

He added, ''We do know that we must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons.''

A sunny spring day turned into a bloody nightmare for this suburb of 35,000 people southwest of Denver, as ambulances ferried the injured from the high school, past tennis courts, a baseball diamond and a packed student parking lot.

''I hope we can all pull together, because we will need all our strengths,'' Jane Hammond, Jefferson County superintendent of schools, said tonight. The blood banks in the Denver area have been overwhelmend with calls from donors. Tonight at least three church vigils for the dead and injured.

Just before 8 P.M., Lisa Appleton, 16, a sophomore, waited in front of the Leawood school for news of her best friend, Julie Toms, who had been missing since students began leaving the school.

''I can't even feel it,'' she said. ''There's no way to know whether she's dead or alive.''

About 3 P.M., SWAT teams police officers used a fire truck and an armored car to get close to the building, dozens of students raced out of the two-story building, some slipping in the mud, others holding up their hands in the air or behind their heads. Police said they feared that the gunmen would try to escape by mingling with the trapped students.

One student, bloodied from an injury, broke out a second-story window, and climbed down into the hands of the police.

As police officers established a wide perimeter around the beige school, students and school workers gathered on nearby tree-lined streets and told of the chaos and horror inside the building.

As fire alarms rang in the halls, students who had seen the gunmen trampled each other to get out of the building, running through one exit where three bodies lay on a staircase.

Trapped inside, others took refuge in classrooms, bathrooms and a choir room, frantically barricading doors with desks and file cabinets.

One cafeteria worker who barricaded herself in a woman's bathroom said, ''We could hear them blowing the heck out of the place.''

A student, Jonathan Ladd, said, ''I heard gunshots going off, bullets ricocheting off lockers.''

The trench coat mafia is a small band of about a dozen juniors and seniors at Columbine who are easily recognized yet little feared, according to people who live in the neighborhood near the school. Regardless of the weather, they favor long black coats and the Gothic look popularized by the rock singer Marilyn Manson, neighbors said. Some even wear white pancake makeup and dark eyeliner, one student said.

''It was that devilish, half-dead, half-alive look,'' said Bret, a 16-year-old sophomore who spoke on the condition only his first name be used.

The group often gathered in the cafeteria after school. Chris McCaffrey, manager of Angie's Restaurant a few blocks from Columbine, said that residents had known about the group for about five years, and that no one considered it a threat.

''Mostly it was just kids who nobody wanted to have anything to do with,'' Mr. McCaffrey said. ''They weren't particularly feared. They were just a bunch of punks who kind of hang around the school.''

Students said the group was mostly boys, but that some girls appeared to be closely associated with it. One student described the group as ''nerds, geeks and dweebs trying to find someplace to fit in.''

Bret suggested the mafia might have targeted athletes out of resentment for their own lack of popularity and success at school.

The students ''weren't really accepted as younger kids and as they got older they were accepted by this group,'' Bret said. ''They got their fair share of being picked on. I could understand that they might have targeted some of the more popular kids.''

David Mesch, another student, who was searching for his mother who works for the school, said, ''They were wearing masks; they were members of the trench coat mafia.''

President Clinton said tonight that he was ''profoundly shocked and saddened by the tragedy today in Littleton.''

In an age when cellular telephones are increasingly common among high school students, several trapped students called television stations when they could not get through on 911 lines.

''I hear a couple of gunshots, people running up and down,'' a student said in a frightened whisper to KUSA-TV, a Denver television station. Identifying himself only as James, he added, ''There are a bunch of kids downstairs, I can hear them crying.''

Aware that the gunmen might be watching on a classroom television set, he said, ''I am staying upstairs,'' and then hung up.

In a state with a relatively low crime rate, the siege after the shootings was broadcast live by Denver television stations, without commercial breaks all afternoon. Broadcast and cable networks turned to local affiliates for help with their coverage.

''This is a cultural virus,'' Gov. Bill Owens of Colorado said before hurrying to the scene. Noting that he felt particularly affected by the tragedy because his 16-year-old daughter goes to a suburban Denver high school, he said, ''We have to ask ourselves what kind of children we are raising.''

At the White House, the President said the nation should focus on praying for the victims' families and others at the school. He said that Attorney General Janet Reno was closely monitoring the situation, and that he had spoken this afternoon with Governor Owens and Patricia Holloway, the county commissioner, whose comments he shared with the nation.

In midafternoon, police officers briefly detained three young white men who wore camouflaged pants and black jackets, next to the high school. After they were released, the men said they knew the gunmen inside the high school. Emblazoned on the back of one man's jacket were the words, ''Ban Religion'' and a red-painted stop sign printed over a cross.

''Blood was going all over,'' a shaken girl said, as she was comforted by her father. Those here were reminded of other school shooting incidents.

Bob Sapin, a student, told a television station minutes after watching the shootings, ''I just can't believe it is happening at my school.''

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TERROR IN LITTLETON: THE OVERVIEW; 2 STUDENTS IN COLORADO SCHOOL SAID TO GUN DOWN AS MANY AS 23 AND KILL THEMSELVES IN A SIEGE

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Armed youths identified as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold storm into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo, killing up to 23 students and teachers and wounding at least 20 in five-hour siege before killing themselves; at least 13 bombs are found in school; one, set with timer, explodes in school

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911 call from student inside Columbine High School

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(Originally published by the Daily News on April 21, 1999. This story was written by Helen Kennedy.)

One frightened high school student cowering under a classroom desk with a cell phone yesterday gave the entire nation a dramatic play-by-play as masked gunmen rampaged through his school's hallway.

"I can hear more gunshots. People are running up and down the hall. I can hear stuff being thrown now," said James, a Columbine High School student who called a local TV newsroom from his hiding place under a desk in an upstairs classroom.

"There are people crying outside," he said. "The door is locked. I'm just staying up here underneath this desk. I don't know if they know I'm up here. I just hope they don't."

James, who started attending Columbine High in February, was talking to KUSA-TV anchors in Denver. The feed was carried live on CNN, which broadcast the student's trembling whispers to the nation.

COLUMBINE HIGH SCHOOL SHOOTINGS LEAVE 15 DEAD AND 24 INJURED IN 1999

"Don't tell us where you are!" one anchor told the student nervously, fearing the gunmen might be listening and seek out the boy.

e caution illustrated the high tech aspect of the siege: Students kept in touch with family, the media and police with beepers and cell phones.

(New York Daily News)

At one point, CNN anchors said they were withholding some details because they feared the gunmen may be watching cable TV inside the school and would use the information to hunt down victims.

Anchors told James to call the police, who were desperate for information about what was happening inside the school. But 911 was busy, so James called back and kept talking.

All over the school, kids were hiding, many with mobile phones. One student was paged by his frantic mother and managed to let her know he was safe, hiding in the music room.

Kami Vest called her father from her hiding place inside the school, where she cowered with 30 other students. "They have been able to call out on a cell phone and tell us they are okay," Dale Vest said.

Student Bob Sapin called KUSA to relate in a breathless voice that he was hiding in bushes and had seen the gunmen through a window. "I'm praying to the Lord that they don't come out the back door," he said.

Panicked, he hung up, but he called back to explain what had happened to him.

"I was in Mr. Condon's math class when the shooting started. Everyone else ran away. My curiosity got the best of me. I wanted to see who this was. I hid in the bushes to see, but when I saw the men I chickened out and ran. I was afraid they were going to see me," he said. "They had black masks, black trench coats. I felt lucky I got away as fast as I did, and I thank the Lord I found a place to hide and they didn't blow me away," he said. "I ran all the way home."
Send a Letter to the Editor

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Columbine student hid and relayed the horror over the phone

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(Originally published by the Daily News on April 21, 1999. This story was written by Helen Kennedy.) One frightened high school student cowering under a classroom desk with a cell phone yesterday gave the entire nation a dramatic play-by-play as masked gunmen rampaged through his school's hallway. "I can hear more gunshots.

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Why did Eric and Dylan kill themselves?

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A place to discuss the Columbine High School Massacre along with other school shootings and crimes.

Columbine High School Massacre Discussion Forum

Anyone interested in researching, learning, discussing and debating with us, please come join our community!

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A place to discuss the Columbine High School Massacre along with other school shootings and crimes. Columbine High School Massacre Discussion Forum Anyone interested in researching, learning, discussing and debating with us, please come join our community!

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Memorial crosses for all victims of the Columbine shooting

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One of the first incorrect reports on the shooting at Columbine.

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Eric Harris (18) and Dylan Klebold (17) marched into the library of Columbine High School yesterday with guns and pipe bombs, demanding that "all jocks stand up. We're going to kill every one of you," said student Aaron Cohn.

One of them looked under a desk in the library and said "Peek-a-boo," then fired, Cohn said. Anyone who cried or moaned was shot again. One girl begged for her life, but a gunshot ended her cries.

Cohn said one killer put a pistol to his head but did not shoot him. Instead, he said, the shooter turned his attention to a black student, saying, "I hate niggers." Cohn heard three shots but couldn't see what happened.

The bodies lay crumpled in the schoolhouse where they were shot; officers delayed removing the corpses until later today because of possible booby traps.

Bombs were found in and around the school, including in two cars in the school parking lot. More than 11 hours after the shootings, a bomb on a timer blew up, but no one was injured.

At least 23 people were hospitalized, most of them with gunshot wounds. One girl suffered nine shrapnel wounds. At least nine victims were in critical or serious condition; one was in guarded condition.

The dead included students and at least one faculty member, said Superintendent Jane Hammond. Students and Denver media identified the gunmen as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both juniors at the school. The two exchanged shots with police and were later found dead in the library with self-inflicted gunshot wounds and bombs around their bodies, said sheriff's spokesman Steve Davis.

"It appears to be a suicide mission," said Sheriff John Stone. While the motive was unclear, several students said Harris and Klebold were members of a group calling itself the "Trenchcoat Mafia," outcasts who bragged about guns and bombs and hated blacks and Hispanics, as well as athletes. Police who searched Harris' home said they found bomb-making material. Harris and Klebold both had juvenile records in Jefferson County District Court, according to a district court clerk - they were implicated in a 1998 criminal trespass case. Klebold received a deferred sentence.

Sixteen-year-old Matt Good told the Denver Post that during the past year Harris had started wearing all black, spoke German, and was obsessed with anything German or about the Second World War. The local sheriff noted that yesterday was Adolf Hitler's birthday.

But some neighbours described Harris and Klebold as quiet boys - one said Klebold was a gifted and talented student who also took part in a fantasy baseball league. They said the Harris family moved in about two years ago and that the boy's father, Wayne, recently retired from the military. Harris may have taken his father's guns for the massacre, they said.

Littleton, a middle-class suburb of Denver with a population of 35,000, is the latest American community shocked by school violence. Since 1997, shootings have led to calls for stricter laws, tighter security and closer monitoring of troubled students. Two people were killed in an attack at a school in Pearl, Mississippi; three in West Paducah, Kentucky; five in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and two in Springfield, Oregon.

In Washington, President Bill Clinton's reaction was muted. He said intended to wait for the facts to emerge before taking any new steps to protect children in US schools. 'You know what we put out before,' he told reporters. 'You know the efforts we've made. And I just think that tonight we need to focus on the families that lost their kids, on the children that are wounded, on the grieving of the community.'

'We do know that we must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons. And we do know we have to do more to recognize the early warning signs that are sent before children act violently,' he added.

The two gunmen, wearing fatigues and ankle-length black coats, opened fire in the parking lot around 11:30 a.m. MDT (1730 GMT) before entering the school cafeteria. Bullets ricocheted off lockers as students raced toward the exits.

Student Nick Foss saw one of the gunmen pull a sawed-off shotgun from under his coat. "Finally I started figuring out these guys shot to kill for no reason," Foss said. The gunman "didn't say anything. When he looked at me, the guy's eyes were just dead."

The killers fired as they walked into the cafeteria and continued shooting as they moved upstairs into the library. Cohn said he heard one girl begging for her life and then a bang. "They were laughing after they shot. It was like they were having the time of their life," he said.

Dozens of students hid in classrooms before escaping with the help of police in an armoured car. Others were trapped for hours while police commando teams searched for the gunmen and their bombs. Some students had called their parents on cellular phones from inside the building to whisper they were OK.

Hundreds of police officers from throughout the Denver area surrounded the school, which has 1,800 students. As TV images of the scene were broadcast nationwide, helicopter ambulances used a sports field as a landing pad, and officers in helmets and camouflage gear took cover behind squad cars.

Students who fled the building wept and held their hands above their heads while police frisked them. Many parents gathered at a nearby elementary school and answered questions from investigators, who were trying to identify some of the victims based only on what they were wearing.
Read Guardian Eye Topics

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Eric Harris (18) and Dylan Klebold (17) marched into the library of Columbine High School yesterday with guns and pipe bombs, demanding that "all jocks stand up. We're going to kill every one of you," said student Aaron Cohn. One of them looked under a desk in the library and said "Peek-a-boo," then fired, Cohn said.

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Sue Kelbold breaking her silence

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On April 20, 1999, when Sue Klebold heard about a shooting incident at Columbine High School, her thoughts immediately turned to her 17-year-old son, Dylan, who was a senior there.

"In the very beginning, I didn't know what to think," Sue tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I was aware that there was a shooting incident occurring at the school. I didn't know if Dylan was in danger, if someone was trying to shoot him, if he was doing something."

Gradually the truth emerged: Dylan and his friend, 18-year-old Eric Harris, had gone on a shooting rampage at the school, murdering 13 people and injuring 24 others before killing themselves.

For a long time, Sue was in denial about her son's role in the massacre. She told herself that Dylan had been brainwashed or coerced into the plan - or that he hadn't really shot anyone. But then she saw the "Basement Tapes," a set of videos Dylan and Harris had made in which they brandished guns and bragged about the destruction they were planning, and her understanding of Dylan's role in the rampage changed.

"Seeing those tapes was one of the most shocking, dramatically traumatic things that happened in the aftermath of this, because I had been living with such a different construct to try to cope with what I believed to be true," she says.

In her new memoir, A Mother's Reckoning, Sue describes theguilt, despair, shame and confusion that have plagued her in the 17 years since the Columbine massacre. She hopes that her book will honor the memories of the people her son killed, and perhaps help other parents whose children may be struggling with mental health issues. (All of the author revenues from the book, minus expenses, will be donated to research and charitable foundations focusing on mental health issues).

As for Dylan, Sue says she wishes she had listened to him more carefully in the years preceding the shooting. She wonders what questions she could have asked that might have encouraged her son to open up about whatever he was feeling. She adds that despite everything, she has never stopped loving him. "I will love him until I breathe my last breath," she says. "He's like an invisible child that I carry in my arms everywhere I go, always."

Interview Highlights
On realizing that one of the "Basement Tapes" had been filmed in her house

When I saw that one of those scenes was actually shot in our home one night, and it was a night when Eric had spent the night, it was jaw-dropping. All I can tell you is I gasped out loud and I said, "That's his room!" It was just a complete shock that something could happen like that in my own home - that I didn't know the two of them had weapons and that Eric had brought weapons to our house.

We went back and thought about that evening, and we remembered when Eric spent the night and he had brought a big duffel bag in and we had just assumed it was, I don't know, perhaps a video camera or a computer - we weren't in the habit of asking guests what they were bringing over - and we had to sort of put these pieces together of what the boys had been doing that night, and it was a complete shock.
On how she believed Dylan to be posturing in the Basement Tapes
What I saw in those Basement Tapes, what appeared to me to be occurring, was that he was posturing, that he was putting on some kind of a performance to prove not only to Eric but possibly to himself that he was this tough, hateful human being, who was kind of revving himself up to do this. So that was the sense I got from those tapes, and I think one of the things that was most frightening to me when I saw those tapes, was the thought that if and when these become available to the public, how the public couldn't possibly believe that the other child that I knew existed and was so different from the one on the tape. I knew that trying to illustrate that would be impossible, if they had seen this image of this hate-filled person.
On why she advocated for the destruction of the Basement Tapes
I advocated for their destruction because there is a great deal of research to show that making these available to the public is dangerous - that vulnerable kids will look at these and copy these and use what happened at Columbine as a benchmark for other events such as this. So there is certainly a lot of documentation to support that making them public is a very poor and very risky idea.

I had an additional reason as well as that ... I knew that if people believed that someone who was going to do something as heinous as Dylan did, acted openly as Dylan did in that tape, they would develop a false sense of security to be able to say, "My loved one doesn't act like that, therefore I am safe. My loved one is not at risk." And I think for me, that was one of the most dangerous things about these tapes is to realize, this was not his [affectation] on a daily level, this was the two of them acting, doing theater, doing a performance, in front of a videotape, and it would be very deceptive to release that kind of information and have people expect to see behavior like that when someone was very disturbed, because that is not the truth.
On if she considered whether the Dylan in the tapes was the real Dylan
His writings tell a different story. His writings show that he was someone who was very focused on love, he was very focused on a sense of conscience, he had a secret crush on an unidentified female at his school, and his writings do not reveal the level of irrational anger that the tapes revealed. And also, the fact that I had known him, of course, all of his life and known him to be a gentle and a loving person, so from everything I have been able to learn about this, from every piece of evidence I can find, it was the behavior on the tapes that was the aberration, and it was something that he was doing, in many ways, I believe, to prepare himself to do what he was about to do.
On Dylan's suicidal thoughts
When I refer to Dylan's suicidal thoughts and his behavior, I want to make it very clear that I am not trying to discount the fact that he also committed murder. I perfectly am aware, always, every minute, of the lives that he took and the lives that he ruined, but murder-suicide, which is what this event was, is one manifestation of suicide. It is what can happen with a suicide. It is generally now believed more and more to be motivated by the same things that motivate a suicide rather than a homicide.

So I have done a lot of research on suicide and tried to understand Dylan's thinking. Yes, in his writings, a full two years before he died, he is talking about being in agony, being in pain, about his thoughts, wanting to end them. He writes about wishing he had a gun. He even wrote about cutting himself at one point. So, yes, I believe that he was experiencing persistent suicidal thoughts and depression at least two years before this event grew and grew and escalated into this terrible tragedy.

I wish that I had had the ability to delve deeper and ask the kinds of questions that would've encouraged him to open up more to me.
On whether she blames herself for Dylan taking his own life and murdering others
I, like many survivors of loss, when someone takes their own life, do think those thoughts. I felt for a very long time that it must've been something I did, and I went back to ridiculous detail into our past, and I remember at one point sobbing because when Dylan turned 3 I had only put sprinkles on his birthday cake, but when his brother turned 3, I had decorated the cake with icing, thinking, "It must've been something like that, where he didn't feel equally loved." I know that sounds ridiculous - that is the kind of work that you do in your head when something like this happens.

So I examined and I questioned and I blamed, and to this day I do it still - occasionally I fall back and think, "If I had done this, if I had not done this." But over time, with all the research I was doing into behaviors and losses due to suicide, I really began to see that these things were things within Dylan's brain and his thinking, and that I might've in some way inadvertently contributed to his perception of something at a given moment, but I did not believe and still don't believe that I caused this or caused him to have this perception of himself and his worldview.
On what she wishes she could've done differently as a parent
I wish that I had had the ability to delve deeper and ask the kinds of questions that would've encouraged him to open up more to me. I had parented my kids, in many ways, the way I had been parented, which means you listen to your kids' problems and you try to fix them. ... I think what I needed to do with Dylan more was to just shut up and listen, to try to get him to say to me what he was feeling and thinking about something, rather than to automatically jumping to a way to make him not feel that way or to fix the way he felt.
On people destroying the crosses for Dylan and Eric in a memorial of the victims
I can't presume to even know what [the families] were experiencing and what the level of their grief was. I completely understood their need to express what they were feeling, and that their feelings were such that they could not tolerate having those memorializations there. I feel certain that I would've felt the same way.

But like everything after a murder-suicide event, the feelings are so complicated that you feel so many things at once. There was a part of me that felt responsible and empathetic ... and there was a part of me, as a mother, that was very hurt by this expression of hatred for my son. But this is all part of why the experience was something I wanted to write about, because there are all kinds of feelings that we have, and I can understand the need to express that kind of rage, but I hope also that people will understand my need to love the child that I lost. ...

What I use as my guide is that I want to educate people. I want people to know that even family members of people who do horrible, heinous things are still human beings, and that perhaps by meeting me and seeing that I am not a crazed person, that maybe it will broaden their understanding and they will have a little bit more compassion for someone else.

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Columbine Shooter's Mother: I Carry Him 'Everywhere I Go, Always'

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On April 20, 1999, when Sue Klebold heard about a shooting incident at Columbine High School, her thoughts immediately turned to her 17-year-old son, Dylan, who was a senior there. "In the very beginning, I didn't know what to think," Sue tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

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Sue Klebold: My son was a Columbine shooter. This is my story

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Sue Klebold is the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two shooters who committed the Columbine High School massacre, murdering 12 students and a teacher. She's spent years excavating every detail of her family life, trying to understand what she could have done to prevent her son's violence.

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The official diagnosis and mental illnesses of Both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold described.

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Five years ago today, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates and teachers at Columbine High School. Most Americans have reached one of two wrong conclusions about why they did it. The first conclusion is that the pair of supposed "Trench Coat Mafia outcasts" were taking revenge against the bullies who had made school miserable for them. The second conclusion is that the massacre was inexplicable: We can never understand what drove them to such horrific violence.

But the FBI and its team of psychiatrists and psychologists have reached an entirely different conclusion. They believe they know why Harris and Klebold killed, and their explanation is both more reassuring and more troubling than our misguided conclusions. Three months after the massacre, the FBI convened a summit in Leesburg, Va., that included world-renowned mental health experts, including Michigan State University psychiatrist Dr. Frank Ochberg, as well as Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, the FBI's lead Columbine investigator and a clinical psychologist. Fuselier and Ochberg share their conclusions publicly here for the first time.

The first steps to understanding Columbine, they say, are to forget the popular narrative about the jocks, Goths, and Trenchcoat Mafia-click to read more about Columbine's myths-and to abandon the core idea that Columbine was simply a school shooting. We can't understand why they did it until we understand what they were doing.

School shooters tend to act impulsively and attack the targets of their rage: students and faculty. But Harris and Klebold planned for a year and dreamed much bigger. The school served as means to a grander end, to terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life. Their slaughter was aimed at students and teachers, but it was not motivated by resentment of them in particular. Students and teachers were just convenient quarry, what Timothy McVeigh described as "collateral damage."

The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting "the most deaths in U.S. history." Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn't just "fame" they were after-Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term-they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the "worst school shooting in American history." They set their sights on eclipsing the world's greatest mass murderers, but the media never saw past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis in precisely the wrong direction.

Fuselier and Ochberg say that if you want to understand "the killers," quit asking what drove them. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were radically different individuals, with vastly different motives and opposite mental conditions. Klebold is easier to comprehend, a more familiar type. He was hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal. He blamed himself for his problems.

Harris is the challenge. He was sweet-faced and well-spoken. Adults, and even some other kids, described him as "nice." But Harris was cold, calculating, and homicidal. "Klebold was hurting inside while Harris wanted to hurt people," Fuselier says. Harris was not merely a troubled kid, the psychiatrists say, he was a psychopath.

In popular usage, almost any crazy killer is a "psychopath." But in psychiatry, it's a very specific mental condition that rarely involves killing, or even psychosis. "Psychopaths are not disoriented or out of touch with reality, nor do they experience the delusions, hallucinations, or intense subjective distress that characterize most other mental disorders," writes Dr. Robert Hare, in Without Conscience, the seminal book on the condition. ( Hare is also one of the psychologists consulted by the FBI about Columbine and by for this story *.) "Unlike psychotic individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised." Diagnosing Harris as a psychopath represents neither a legal defense, nor a moral excuse. But it illuminates a great deal about the thought process that drove him to mass murder.

Diagnosing him as a psychopath was not a simple matter. Harris opened his private journal with the sentence, "I hate the f---ing world." And when the media studied Harris, they focused on his hatred-hatred that supposedly led him to revenge. It's easy to get lost in the hate, which screamed out relentlessly from Harris' Web site:

"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? Cuuuuuuuuhntryyyyyyyyyy music!!! . . . "YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? People who say that wrestling is real!! . . . "YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? People who use the same word over and over again! . . . Read a f---in book or two, increase your vo-cab-u-lary f*ck*ng idiots." "YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? STUPID PEOPLE!!! Why must so many people be so stupid!!? . . . YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? When people mispronounce words! and they dont even know it to, like acrosT, or eXspreso, pacific (specific), or 2 pAck. learn to speak correctly you morons. YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? STAR WARS FANS!!! GET A FaaaaaaRIGIN LIFE YOU BORING GEEEEEKS!

It rages on for page after page and is repeated in his journal and in the videos he and Klebold made. But Fuselier recognized a far more revealing emotion bursting through, both fueling and overshadowing the hate. What the boy was really expressing was contempt.

He is disgusted with the morons around him. These are not the rantings of an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he's not going to take it anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling inferiority. It may look like hate, but "It's more about demeaning other people," says Hare.

A second confirmation of the diagnosis was Harris' perpetual deceitfulness. "I lie a lot," Eric wrote to his journal. "Almost constantly, and to everybody, just to keep my own ass out of the water. Let's see, what are some of the big lies I told? Yeah I stopped smoking. For doing it, not for getting caught. No I haven't been making more bombs. No I wouldn't do that. And countless other ones."

Harris claimed to lie to protect himself, but that appears to be something of a lie as well. He lied for pleasure, Fuselier says. "Duping delight"-psychologist Paul Ekman's term-represents a key characteristic of the psychopathic profile.

Harris married his deceitfulness with a total lack of remorse or empathy-another distinctive quality of the psychopath. Fuselier was finally convinced of his diagnosis when he read Harris' response to being punished after being caught breaking into a van. Klebold and Harris had avoided prosecution for the robbery by participating in a "diversion program" that involved counseling and community service. Both killers feigned regret to obtain an early release, but Harris had relished the opportunity to perform. He wrote an ingratiating letter to his victim offering empathy, rather than just apologies. Fuselier remembers that it was packed with statements like Jeez, I understand now how you feel and I understand what this did to you.

"But he wrote that strictly for effect," Fuselier said. "That was complete manipulation. At almost the exact same time, he wrote down his real feelings in his journal: 'Isn't America supposed to be the land of the free? How come, if I'm free, I can't deprive a stupid f---ing dumbshit from his possessions if he leaves them sitting in the front seat of his f---ing van out in plain sight and in the middle of f---ing nowhere on a Frif---ingday night. NATURAL SELECTION. F---er should be shot.' "

Harris' pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and superiority read like the bullet points on Hare's Psychopathy Checklist and convinced Fuselier and the other leading psychiatrists close to the case that Harris was a psychopath.

It begins to explain Harris' unbelievably callous behavior: his ability to shoot his classmates, then stop to taunt them while they writhed in pain, then finish them off. Because psychopaths are guided by such a different thought process than non-psychopathic humans, we tend to find their behavior inexplicable. But they're actually much easier to predict than the rest of us once you understand them. Psychopaths follow much stricter behavior patterns than the rest of us because they are unfettered by conscience, living solely for their own aggrandizement. (The difference is so striking that Fuselier trains hostage negotiators to identify psychopaths during a standoff, and immediately reverse tactics if they think they're facing one. It's like flipping a switch between two alternate brain-mechanisms.)

None of his victims means anything to the psychopath. He recognizes other people only as means to obtain what he desires. Not only does he feel no guilt for destroying their lives, he doesn't grasp what they feel. The truly hard-core psychopath doesn't quite comprehend emotions like love or hate or fear, because he has never experienced them directly.

"Because of their inability to appreciate the feelings of others, some psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only horrific but baffling," Hare writes. "For example, they can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner."

The diagnosis transformed their understanding of the partnership. Despite earlier reports about Harris and Klebold being equal partners, the psychiatrists now believe firmly that Harris was the mastermind and driving force. The partnership did enable Harris to stray from typical psychopathic behavior in one way. He restrained himself. Usually psychopathic killers crave the stimulation of violence. That is why they are often serial killers-murdering regularly to feed their addiction. But Harris managed to stay (mostly) out of trouble for the year that he and Klebold planned the attack. Ochberg theorizes that the two killers complemented each other. Cool, calculating Harris calmed down Klebold when he got hot-tempered. At the same time, Klebold's fits of rage served as the stimulation Harris needed.

The psychiatrists can't help speculating what might have happened if Columbine had never happened. Klebold, they agree, would never have pulled off Columbine without Harris. He might have gotten caught for some petty crime, gotten help in the process, and conceivably could have gone on to live a normal life.

Their view of Harris is more reassuring, in a certain way. Harris was not a wayward boy who could have been rescued. Harris, they believe, was irretrievable. He was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something even worse.
The article originally identified Dr. Robert Hare as a psychiatrist. He is a psychologist. Correction, April 20, 2004: Return to the corrected sentence.

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At last we know why the Columbine killers did it.

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Five years ago today, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates and teachers at Columbine High School. Most Americans have reached one of two wrong conclusions about why they did it. The first conclusion is that the pair of supposed "Trench Coat Mafia outcasts" were taking revenge against the bullies who had made school miserable for them.

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This Web sight, created by Dave Cullen the author of Columbine, provides in correspondence with the book, the basement tapes, excerpts from both Dylan and Eric's journals, and all of the evidence used by Cullen during the 10 years of writing Columbine.

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Dave Cullen, author of expanded new COLUMBINE & gay soldiers book

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Dave Cullen, author of expanded new COLUMBINE & gay soldiers book

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New York Times bestseller Dave Cullen's expanded new COLUMBINE debunks myths & unravels killers' motives. Gay soldiers book will be published by HarperCollins