| Sue Klebold | |
| Birth Name: | Susan Francis Yassenoff |
| Birth Date: | 25 March 1949 |
| Birth Place: | Columbus, Ohio, U.S. |
| Spouse: | [1] [2] |
| Nationality: | American |
| Children: | 2, including Dylan Bennet Klebold |
| Known For: | Mother of American mass murderer, Dylan Klebold |
| Notable Works: | A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy |
Susan Francis Klebold (; born March 25, 1949) is an American activist and author whose son, Dylan Bennet Klebold, was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine High School shooting in 1999. After the massacre, she wrote A Mother's Reckoning, a book about the signs and possible motives she missed of Dylan's mental state.[3]
Klebold was born on March 25, 1949, in Columbus, Ohio, to Charlotte (née Haugh) and Milton Yassenoff and grew up in Bexley, Ohio, along with her older sister Diane and younger brother Philip.[4] She was the granddaughter of philanthropist Leo Yassenoff.[5]
She started her post-secondary education at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and then transferred to Ohio State University in 1969, where she met Thomas Ernest Klebold, whom she would go on to marry two years later in 1971, at the age of 22.[6]
On October 23, 1978, Klebold's first child was born; Byron Jacob. Klebold developed an interest in working with people with mental disabilities and worked at a psychiatric hospital as a therapeutic arts teacher.
In 1975, she earned a master's degree in educational sciences at Cardinal Stritch College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.[7] Two years later, Klebold, her husband and their son moved to Littleton, Colorado, in the Denver Metropolitan Area where she then worked for Colorado Community College System where she helped disabled and vulnerable people to get into the social market.[8]
In September 1981, Klebold had her second son, Dylan, who attended Columbine High School from 1995 until April 20, 1999.
On April 20, 1999, Klebold's second son, Dylan, would go on to murder 13 people and injure 21 others at the Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, United States alongside Eric Harris before dying by suicide in the school library.
After the massacre, the Klebold family issued a statement through their attorney, expressing condolences to the victim's families, and in May 1999, she wrote personal letters to both the families of those killed and survivors who were injured, expressing similar sentiments.[9]
The Klebold family initially refused to believe Dylan's involvement in the massacre, but in an interview with Andrew Solomon, Klebold stated that "seeing those videos was as traumatic as the original event. Everything I had refused to believe was true. Dylan was a willing participant and the massacre was not a spontaneous impulse." Investigators later concluded that Dylan had had depression and suicidal ideation for about two years,[10] although his parents did not find these details until one year after the killings.
In April 2001, the Klebold parents, along with those of Dylan's accomplice Eric Harris, settled a lawsuit with the families of the victims for $1.6 million. After the lawsuits, Sue and Tom Klebold met with several of the victims' families.[11] In July 2003, both the Klebold and Harris families testified under oath; their testimonies are sealed until the year 2027 under the National Archives and Records Administration.[12]
On the advice of their attorney, the Klebold parents avoided the press for the five years that followed the massacre, saying they feared they would be misinterpreted, and that they had received death threats.[13] They broke their silence in 2004, speaking to The New York Times and later on for Andrew Solomon's book Far From The Tree. In the latter, she was quoted as saying, "I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born. But I believe it would not have been better for me."
In 2009, Klebold wrote for Oprah Winfrey's O Magazine, where she repeated that she had no idea that Dylan had been depressed and having suicidal thoughts.[14] Columnist Mike Littwin criticized the essay in an opinion piece in the Denver Post; Littwin said that Klebold's account, while "eloquent", revealed little about Dylan, his and Harris' victims, or the rest of the Klebold family.[15] Klebold also spoke of her connections with the family of Eric Harris, saying she contacts them "occasionally", adding that "no one should ever perceive their silence to be indifference" as it is "too difficult to make themselves public."[16] She has also stated that she understands her son's murder–suicide in a different way now, saying that "coming to understand Dylan's death as a suicide opened the door to a new way of thinking for me about everything he had done," adding that, "whatever else he had intended, Dylan had gone to the school to die."[17]
In an interview with British newspaper The Guardian, she differentiated between her son and Harris, saying that "they had different brain conditions. I believe Dylan had some kind of a mood disorder. I believe psychopathy is in a different category. ... I don't want to say someone commits crimes because they have a mental illness – that is not true – but I believe strongly that both Dylan and Eric were victims of their own pathology, just as everyone else was a victim of that pathology."[18] She also stated in her interview with Diane Sawyer that "If I had recognized that Dylan was experiencing some real mental distress he would not have been there. He would have gotten help."[19]
In 2016, she published A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, against the advice of her former husband and son Byron who both objected to the book. The memoir ranked second on the New York Times best-seller list and grossed $427,200, which was donated to organizations advocating for suicide prevention, education about violence, and investigation of mental illnesses.[20] [21]
In 2016, Sue Klebold granted her first televised interview, to Diane Sawyer in the ABC 20/20 special, "Silence Broken. A Mother's Reckoning". She told Sawyer: "I think we like to believe that our love and our understanding is protective, and that 'if anything were wrong with my kids, I would know,' but I didn't know, and I wasn't able to stop him from hurting other people. I wasn't able to stop his hurting himself and it's very hard to live with that."[22] The reactions to her interview were mixed, with Attorney General of Colorado, Cynthia Coffman, saying that Klebold's interview could inspire other would-be shooters, and labeled her as "irresponsible". Conversely, Anne Marie Hochhalter, who was paralyzed in the attack, expressed sympathy for Klebold and commended her for committing to use proceeds from the book to help people with mental illness.[23] Patrick Ireland, who was also severely injured during the attack, said that he "prefers to forget the shooters’ names and their families."[24] Anne Marie Hochhalter further stated later on a Facebook post that she shared a link with Klebold and that she considered the letter written to her in the aftermath of the tragedy by Sue and Tom Klebold as "genuine and personal" compared to what she described was the "cold and robotic" letter by the Harris parents.[25] Hochhalter's father also defended Klebold's decision to speak out, labelling the remarks by Coffman as "ignorant" and "insensitive" because he considers Klebold a "remorseful mother" who wants to raise awareness on mental health.[26]
In 2017, Klebold held a TED Talk discussing her son's involvement in the Columbine High School massacre where she explained the intersection between suicidal thoughts and homicidal tendencies, and her personal experiences both before and after the shooting.[27] As of October 2023, the video has been seen by more than 26 million people on YouTube and the official TED website. Comments and ratings for the video on YouTube were disabled, and viewer responses were very polarized on third-party news sites and online forums. While some were sympathetic to Klebold's situation and praised her approach,[28] [29] many were critical of her for ignoring numerous red flags and allegedly deflecting blame and accountability from both herself and her son, highlighting examples of what critics perceived as Sue Klebold's narcissism and violence towards her son. An example of the alleged narcissism included when, in the immediate wake of the massacre, she sent a new photo of Dylan to the press because she was dissatisfied with the one the media was using, and an example of her narcissistic violence towards Dylan included—by her own testimony in her book—when she shoved Dylan up against a refrigerator and scolded him because he'd allegedly been skipping his chores and forgot it was Mother's Day.[30]
In July 2021, Klebold appeared on BBC's Storyville, along with other American parents whose children had committed school shootings.[31]
In 2001, Sue Klebold was diagnosed with breast cancer, which was in remission as of 2016. Later on, she described herself as having post-traumatic stress disorder and panic attacks.[32] In 2014, Sue and Thomas Klebold divorced after 43 years of marriage. According to Sue, "There was nothing we had in common. Except the shared tragedy. But we didn't feel the same way about it, we didn't process it the same way."