title:  Columbine Shooter Dylan Klebold’s Mother Breaks Silence In Riveting New Interview (VIDEOS)
text: Columbine was the original school shooting. Sure, there had been others, but that was the one that got the world s attention. It was the horror that was to become all too common in America s high schools and colleges. On that fateful day   April 20, 1999   the nation was rocked when 17-year old Dylan Klebold and 18-year-old Eric Harris went to their own high school and opened fire. They wounded 24 victims and killed 13 more. The truly horrific part of all of this is the fact that it could have been much worse   because, even more than a school shooting, Columbine was a failed bombing. Klebold and Harris had brought several homemade propane bombs with them in their efforts to make sure their attack on their school reached maximum effect   but the bombs failed to detonate.In the past, the parents of these infamous school shooters have refused to talk to the press on television. However, that all changed when Sue Klebold, Dylan Klebold s mother, decided to break her silence and sit down for an intimate interview with Diane Sawyer   her first television appearance ever regarding her son s devastating crimes.Mrs. Klebold talked about the guilt she has lived with over what her son did, and about the many things that she missed that, in hindsight, may have prevented this travesty, saying: I had all those illusions that everything was OK because, and more than anything else, because my love for him was so strong. Klebold then acknowledges that she understands why some parents blame her, why they believe that she and her husband should have seen that something was not right with their son long before he took it upon himself to commit any such atrocity. Before Columbine happened I would have been one of those parents. If I had recognized that Dylan was experiencing some real mental distress, he would not have been there. He would ve gotten help. I don t ever, for a moment, mean to imply that I m not conscious of the fact that he was a killer, because I am. Klebold hopes to help parents who might be unknowingly missing the signs that they might be raising killers by speaking out, both in this interview, and the book she has written, entitled A Mother s Reckoning, which will come out next week. Klebold says what we all know: that hindsight is always 20/20. I wish I had known then what I know now: that it was possible for everything to seem fine with him when it was not, and that behaviors I mistook as normal for a moody teenager were actually subtle signs of psychological deterioration. Perhaps the most powerful lesson comes from an essay Sue Klebold wrote for O Magazine, which is that you try to protect your kids from outside dangers, and can often fail to recognize the internal ones. She says in the essay:  I taught him how to protect himself from a host of dangers: lightning, snake bites, head injuries, skin cancer, smoking, drinking, sexually transmitted diseases, drug addiction, reckless driving, even carbon monoxide poisoning. It never occurred to me that the gravest danger   to him and, as it turned out, to so many others   might come from within. Most of us do not see suicidal thinking as the health threat that it is. We are not trained to identify it in others, to help others appropriately, or to respond in a healthy way if we have these feelings ourselves. Hopefully, this brave mother accomplishes her goal of saving lives through telling her own story, and hopefully she can one day find some kind of peace with what her son did.You can watch Sue Klebold tell her story in the clips below, courtesy of ABC News: ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos ABC Breaking News | Latest News VideosFeatured image from video screen capture via ABC News