Anne Marie dropped out of school. She had no job. She was miserable. Doctors kept trying fresh approaches on her spine. Nothing worked. She wallowed in it for a while, then she had enough.
She went back to school—a four-year college, majoring in business. She bought a house with donations and equipped it for her wheelchair. Life began to feel good.
“I wish I could tell you I had an epiphany, but it was gradual,” she said. The turnaround came when she let go of the dream of walking again. “I finally accepted that I was confined to a wheelchair. Once I did that, I was free to move on with my life. It was very liberating.”
Her dad remarried and Anne Marie forgave her mother. She had struggled so long, and mental illness was so debilitating. “In her mind, she thought it was the best thing she could have done,” she said.
Anne Marie let go of her anger at the killers, too. “That’s counterproductive,” she said. “If you don’t forgive, you can’t move on.”
On the fifth anniversary, she returned to Columbine to share her hope.
Funding for the Clement Park memorial met unforeseen resistance. It was budgeted at $2.5 million, less than the library project, which the families had raised in four months. This one looked easy.
But by the time they started fund-raising in 2000, goodwill had been tapped out. They scaled back the project by a million in 2005. Still, they were not even close.
Bill Clinton had taken a personal interest in the massacre as president. He returned to Jeffco in July 2004 to rev up support. He brought in $300,000. That was a big boost, but momentum fizzled again.
Before he retired, Supervisory Special Agent Fuselier requested permission from the head of his branch to share his analysis. His boss agreed. Other experts brought in by the FBI cooperated as well, including Dr. Hare, Dr. Frank Ochberg, and others who spoke off the record. On the fifth anniversary of the massacre, a summary of their analysis was published.
New York Times columnist David Brooks devoted an op-ed piece to the team’s conclusions. Tom Klebold read it. He didn’t like it. He sent David Brooks an e-mail saying so. Brooks was struck by how loyal Tom still felt toward Dylan. After several exchanges, Tom and Sue agreed to sit down with Brooks to discuss their boy and his tragedy—the first and only media interview any of the four parents has ever given.
It turned out that they were kind of angry, too. Sue recounted an incident where she was offered absolution. “I forgive you for what you’ve done,” the person said. That infuriated Sue. “I haven’t done anything for which I need forgiveness,” she told Brooks.
But mostly Tom and Sue were bewildered. They were convinced that jocks and bullying had been behind it, but jocks and bullies are everywhere and few kids are trying to blow up their high school. They were bright people, and they knew they weren’t qualified to offer an explanation for their son’s crimes. “I’m a quantitative person,” Tom said. He was a scientist and a businessman. “We’re not qualified to sort this out,” he said.
They had run it over and over in their heads; they had tried to be objective, and they could honestly say they could rule one cause out. “Dylan did not do this because of the way he was raised,” Susan said. They were emphatic about that. “He did it in contradiction to the way he was raised.”
They were aware the public had reached a different verdict: the primary culprits were them. When Brooks met them, Tom had a stack of news stories documenting their poll numbers: 83 percent blamed the two of them and Eric’s parents. In five years, the figure had barely budged. For the Klebolds, judgment was the price of silence. And it stung.
The public condemned them, but those close to the family did not. “Most people have been good-hearted,” Tom said.
He and Sue accepted responsibility for one tragic mistake. Dylan was in agony; they’d thought he would be just fine. “He was hopeless,” Tom said now. “We didn’t realize it until after the end.” They had not induced Dylan’s homicide, they believed, but failed to prevent his suicide. They failed to see it coming. “I think he suffered horribly before he died,” Sue said. “For not seeing that, I will never forgive myself.”
Tom and Sue preferred to talk about Columbine as a suicide. “They acknowledge but do not emphasize the murders their son committed,” Brooks wrote. What they really yearned for was an authoritative study that would explain why Eric and Dylan did it. Yet they had just read the analysis by some of the top experts in North America; they had dismissed it for providing the wrong explanation. They complained that Dr. Fuselier had assessed their son without interviewing them. Fuselier was dying to.
Mostly, the four parents remain a mystery. They have chosen that path. But David Brooks spent enough time with the Klebolds to form a distinct impression, and he has proven himself a good judge of character. He concluded his column with this assessment: Dylan left Tom and Sue to face terrible consequences. “I’d say they are facing them bravely and honorably.”
The Klebolds wanted to understand what happened. They wanted to help other parents like them. They did not feel safe talking to the press, but they talked to a pair of child psychologists, under the condition that they not cite them directly. They were writing a book about teen violence. The problem was that at the time they published, the authors had no access to the crucial evidence.
Patrick Ireland slips his right foot into a hard plastic brace every morning as he gets dressed. He twists open a prescription bottle and swallows a dose of antiseizure meds. He walks with a limp. His mind is sharp, but he hesitates occasionally to find the words. His friends don’t notice. He knows. It’s not quite like before.
Patrick rarely thinks about before. Life is different than he imagined before. Better. Shoes are an issue, because of the brace. And his big toe is crooked inward, scrunches the others over. The little toe on his right foot sticks way out—nobody makes a shoe that wide. The doctors never set his foot right. “My dad’s pretty pissed off,” he said.
He still hangs out with many of his high school buddies. They don’t talk about the massacre much, which is what many of the survivors report. It isn’t emotional anymore, just boring. They’re done.
He is tired of interviews, too. Occasionally he agrees to one. Reporters generally approach the library ordeal gingerly, but Patrick just plunges in, describing it unemotionally, as if recapping a movie. When he did Oprah’s show, she played a clip of him going out the window.
“Whoa!” she said. “So is it difficult for you to see that video?”
“No.”
“It’s not? OK.”
He felt good watching it, actually. He felt a sense of accomplishment.
Patrick got a perplexing voice mail one morning in the spring of 2005. It was an old friend he hadn’t heard from in a while, wishing him well “today,” hoping he was all right. Huh. Now, what could that mean?
That afternoon, Patrick dated a document at work: April 20. Was it anniversary time already again?
Linda Sanders felt every anniversary. Her mood began to sour each April; she got jittery, she could feel it coming.
She tried dating; that was impossible. Dave lingered, and men resented his presence. He was a national hero—who could compete with that?
“It’s, like, Top Dave Sanders,” she said. “It’s not fair to another man to be compared to the man I’ve built. He’s so high on a pedestal he’s in heaven.”
She knew Dave would have wanted her to find someone. She pictured him up there saying, “Linda, I want somebody to hug you.”