The father of one of the boys was asked some years ago to jot down his life’s goals in the memory book for his 20th high school reunion. His answer was succinct, straightforward and, it seemed, not unrealistically ambitious: “Raise two good sons.”
The other father prided himself on being his son’s soulmate.
So, on April 20, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold stormed into Columbine High School in this Denver suburb and killed 12 classmates and a teacher, then themselves, these two men and their wives suffered more than the loss of a child. The boys’ bombs and bullets shattered their parents’ view of the world, undermining what had seemed to them and others to be 18 years of responsible child-rearing.
As the nation felt this community’s horror and sorrow, questions naturally turned to the killers’ families for clues about how and why. The authorities revealed that this was no spur-of-the-moment attack–the boys had been plotting their lethal assault for a year in a journal of hatred. And officials uncovered signposts of trouble: an arrest for breaking into a van, frightening essays read aloud in classes, an angry Web site spewing recipes for violence.
But more than two months after the massacre, the most painful question persists: How could the Harrises and Klebolds not have realized that something, everything, was seriously awry?
“Their life has been forever turned upside down and it will never heal,” said Victor Good, whose stepson considered Dylan and Eric his close friends. “They’re looking through everything–`Was that a sign? . . . Did I miss something?’ They’re second-guessing their entire lives.”
The boys’ parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles have all refused to be interviewed. Yet dozens of conversations with neighbors and colleagues, the boys’ friends and teachers, distant relatives and acquaintances indicate that there was a fundamental disconnection between the troubled world of Eric and Dylan and the lives their parents thought they were leading.
The interviews paint a portrait of the Harrises and Klebolds as caring, conscientious parents who structured their lives around supporting their children and who believed that they were on the right track.
When Wayne Harris, an Air Force pilot, retired six years ago after two decades of base-to-base hopscotch around the country, he and his wife, Kathy, returned to the Denver area, where they had grown up, to raise their two sons.
Tom and Sue Klebold, Midwesterners who followed the oil boom west in the 1970s, decided in 1990 to escape the sunken living rooms of the look-alike subdivisions for the red rocks and wild deer of the Rocky Mountain foothills. They bought a breathtaking house that they believed would be “a good influence for their kids, closer to nature and away from the hustle and bustle of the street,” said Edie Marks, their real estate agent.
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When trouble emerged the parents reacted: A year ago, the Harrises sent Eric to a psychologist and put him on anti-depressants. If Dylan talked back or stayed out late, the Klebolds grounded him or took away his computer keyboard.
One of the boys’ friends, Nathan Dykeman, said that after Wayne Harris found a pipe bomb in Eric’s closet, he grounded his son, took away his car and computer privileges, and started surprise searches of his room.
But the reins apparently were not tightened enough: Police believe the two boys continued building bombs in the garage attached to the Harris home as late as the weekend before the attack.
The most vexing question, then, may be not whether the Klebolds and Harrises were caring parents but whether caring is enough.
“A lot of us are so afraid that if parents can raise a child and this happens to the child, then they can’t possibly be good parents,” said Carolyn Payne, whose family became friends with the Harrises when they were stationed at the same Air Force bases in Michigan and upstate New York. “But they’re just like us.”
It was when the Plattsburgh, N.Y., Air Force base closed in 1993 that Harris retired as a major and the family moved home to Denver, where Eric’s two sets of grandparents live six blocks apart.
Harris, whom one acquaintance described as a “Leave it to Beaver dad,” began working at a private company that develops flight training simulators. Mrs. Harris worked at a catering company.
For awhile, Eric followed the path set by his brother Kevin, who was three years older. Kevin was a waiter at a Chili’s near Columbine, Eric a busboy. The younger boy visited the older at the University of Colorado in Boulder for football games.
Eric, gawky and 5 feet 9 inches tall, complained to a co-worker at Blackjack Pizza that he was not as tall as his brother.
“I think there was a little sibling rivalry,” said Kimberly Howe, the family’s dental hygienist.
Always saying “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am,” Eric was polite to adults but showed a scarier side at school.
“I hate everything unless I say otherwise,” Eric wrote in a yearbook message to Dykeman, Good’s stepson.
Dylan Bennet Klebold, meanwhile, grew up in a house without guns–even toy guns.
“Tom was adamant,” said Randy DeHoff, a former neighbor, who recalls Klebold saying “We don’t need guns in the house; we’re not going to play with them.”
But by grade school, Dylan was already an ace at Nintendo’s Iron Tank, “a war game all about shooting people,” recalled Kevin Hofstra, a childhood friend. Later, Dylan would make videos of explosions.
The Klebolds had tried to guard against this fascination: When Dylan and a friend brought home violent movies in 4th grade, it prompted a “big conversation,” recalled Judy Brown, the other boy’s mother.
Dylan Klebold’s mother, Susan Frances Klebold, was the granddaughter of a Columbus, Ohio, builder and philanthropist, Leo Yassenoff, whose name adorns the local Jewish Community Center. Susan, a talented artist, grew up with an older sister and younger brother in a sumptuous house in Columbus’ Bexley neighborhood.
While studying art at Ohio State University, Susan met Thomas Ernest Klebold, a sculptor from Toledo, who later became a geophysicist.
Tom and Sue married in 1971 and soon settled in the Denver suburbs, where Dylan was born. The boys attended confirmation classes at a Lutheran church and observed Jewish rituals at home.
After the shooting, Mrs. Klebold told her hairdresser that the killer depicted in news reports was not the Dylan she knew. More recently, in letters to the families of their son’s victims, the Klebolds attributed the murderous rampage to “a moment of madness.”
The week after the shooting, Tom Klebold was filled with rage.
“He was angry about being detained at his home when he wanted to go intervene at the high school,” said Edgar Berg, a former colleague. “He was angry about the availability of guns. He was angry about the access to weird images and videos. He was angry because he’d lost what he described as his best friend.”