The pain and sadness of a Columbine killer's mother

The Columbine High School attack was 17 years ago, but remains etched into the consciousness both in the US and around the world. After years of silence, the mother of one of the two killers has been speaking to BBC Newsnight's Kirsty Wark."The hardest thing to understand was kids killing kids."
Columbine will forever be the shorthand for high school shootings in the US.

The Columbine attack

• 20 April 1999
• Columbine High School in Colorado
• Carried out by students Eric Harris (18) and Dylan Klebold (17)
• Both took their own lives in the library of the school after the attack
• 12 students and one teacher were killed
• 21 others were injured
• Subject of a documentary by Michael Moore in 2002, Bowling for Columbine

Sue doesn't shy away from hard questions. She takes me through the day of the massacre, and her initial reaction. For the first months she was in in a really extreme state of denial.

"I didn't know that he was a killer. What I believed, at first, was that he was involved in something that had gone terribly wrong and people were hurt and killed. But in my mind, I could not accept him as a killer… until six months later when I actually saw the police report and they were able to say yes, this really occurred."

Sue's deep-set dark brown eyes betray her profound sadness. I asked her how she could cope with knowing that her son and Eric Harris had planned to kill everyone in Columbine High school, where the roll call was almost 2,000 pupils, and to that end they had amassed an arsenal of more than 90 bombs, guns and grenades.

"When I thought of that, and thought of the magnitude… I really didn't think I was going to live through it."

In her book Sue writes that it would have been better for the world had Dylan not been born - but not for her.

"When I think about what he did to other people, the lives he took, the trauma that he caused - for even the people who lived through this event and will have trauma for the rest of their lives - or who lost siblings or friends in this incident, there is no measuring that or quantifying it."

"I know it is terribly hard for me to even talk about my love for Dylan, for them to even hear me say that. But he was my son and knowing him did enrich my life and I loved him and he brought joy to me when he was alive. And since his death I have found meaning in life in trying to find answers to understand why this happened and how this terrible thing came about."

Sue described how on the morning of the massacre when it was still dark, and the house was black, her son, usually a reluctant early riser, thundered down the stairs, past her bedroom, right to the front door.

"I couldn't see him but all I heard him say was 'bye', and then he slammed the door and left."

In her book she writes that she was startled by the harshness in his voice. She and her husband Tom decided he would talk to her son that evening to find out if something was wrong. Of course, they never saw him again.

I asked her what she wished she had done that morning.

"I wish I had just tackled him and just said: 'Sit down. You're not going anywhere. We're gonna talk.'"