The mother of Columbine killer Dylan Klebold says she thinks every day about the people her son “harmed” in the 1999 school carnage — preferring to use the word because it’s easier than saying “killed.”
“I just remember sitting there and reading about them, all these kids and the teacher,” Klebold told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer in an interview that will air on “20/20” on Friday night.
“And I keep thinking — constantly thought how I would feel if it were the other way around and one of their children had shot mine,” she continued. “I would feel exactly the way they did. I know I would. I know I would.”
On April 20, 1999, Dylan and Eric Harris opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., killing 12 students and a teacher, and wounding 24 others before taking their own lives.
The massacre shocked the nation and forever changed how school officials and law enforcement agencies handle school shootings.
“There is never a day that goes by where I don’t think of the people that Dylan harmed,” she said.
“You used the word ‘harmed,’” Sawyer noted.
“I think it’s easier for me to say harmed than killed, and it’s still hard for me after all this time,” Klebold said. “It is very hard to live with the fact that someone you loved and raised has brutally killed people in such a horrific way.”
Before the shooting, Klebold said she had believed she was the kind of parent who would have noticed if something were amiss with her son.
That belief was shattered after the deadly spree.
“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,” she said. “And — it’s very hard to live with that.”
“I felt that I was a good mom. … That he would, he could talk to me about anything,” Klebold continued. “Part of the shock of this was that learning that what I believed and how I lived and how I parented was — an invention in my own mind. That it, it was a completely different world that he was living in.”
The interview was Klebold’s first since the shooting and coincides with the release of her memoir, “A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy,” out on Feb. 15.