Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

And I'm Laura Owens.

Nearly 20 years ago, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold armed themselves with guns and explosives

and walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

They killed 12 students at a teacher and wounded 24 other people before taking their own lives.

And joining us on this episode is Dylan Klebold's mother, Sue, who has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day and tried to

understand how her son's life could have escalated into such a disaster on her watch.

Sue has written about her quest to comprehend what happened in her book, A Mother's Reckoning,

living in the aftermath of tragedy.

Sue, we thank you so much for joining us.

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me on the show. You've written that you would give

your own life to reverse what happened that day in 1999 at Columbine High School. And I'm

wondering if you still find your mind playing and replaying that day over and over in an effort to make

some kind of sense of it?

Well, it has been about 20 years since this happened, and I think the way that I think about it

over time has changed, certainly in the beginning for many, many years, for most of this 20 years,

there was a replaying, a constant replaying, thinking about all the victims of this tragedy

and how horrible it was. As the years have gone by and as I've tried to learn more about some of the factors involved in this process of doing a mass shooting such as this, I'm slightly more intellectualizing about it now.

I mean, I find myself looking more at trying hard to understand the process by which someone

gets to this desperate state, the complexity of it, and all the factors involved.

That's not to say that I still don't have horrible days still of sorrow and remembering,

but much of my attention now is focused on trying to make a difference. Did Dylan have a medically diagnosed mental illness at the time,

...