The mother of one of the killers in the Columbine massacre has told Oprah Magazine that she had no idea her son was suicidal when he participated in the worst high school shooting in the United States.
Susan Klebold has remained silent since her son Dylan Klebold and his friend Eric Harris went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Denver, Colo., in 1999. Twelve students and a teacher were killed and 21 injured before Klebold and Harris killed themselves.
Klebold writes about her experience in the November issue of Oprah Magazine, saying she has been studying suicide since the tragedy.
"Dylan’s participation in the massacre was impossible for me to accept until I began to connect it to his own death," Klebold writes, in an excerpt released by the magazine.
"Once I saw his journals, it was clear to me that Dylan entered the school with the intention of dying there. And so in order to understand what he might have been thinking, I started to learn all I could about suicide."
In the article, Klebold said she had no idea her son was so depressed until after she went through the journals.
"From the writings Dylan left behind, criminal psychologists have concluded that he was depressed and suicidal. When I first saw copied pages of these writings, they broke my heart. I’d had no inkling of the battle Dylan was waging in his mind," she writes.
She also said she will be haunted by the "horror and anguish" that her son Dylan caused for the rest of her life.
"I cannot look at a child in a grocery store or on the street without thinking about how my son’s schoolmates spent the last moments of their lives," she said. "Dylan changed everything I believed about myself, about God, about family and about love."
The massacre raised many concerns in the U.S. about gun control laws, goth subcultures, bullying. It also sparked a debate about what role violent movies and video games played in the slayings.
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