A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(95)

“One cigarette won’t give you lung cancer, and some people smoke their whole lives without getting lung cancer. That doesn’t mean there’s no correlation. Entertainment violence may not be sufficient cause for a rampage, but it is a toxic factor. A small number of the most vulnerable people will get lung cancer after smoking when other factors and predispositions come into play. The same thing can be said about violent entertainment and acts of violence: the most vulnerable are at special risk.” But Tom and I did not perceive Dylan as vulnerable. Nor did anyone else.

Dylan’s vulnerabilities were probably the same ones that had made him so susceptible to Eric, another toxic influence. I was blind to it because I never perceived Dylan to be a follower. He was agreeable by nature; a typical younger sibling, he’d go along with Byron’s games when the boys were young, and Tom and I could generally get him to do what we needed him to do without pushback. But I had plenty of opportunity to observe Dylan with his friends, and those relationships were equally negotiated. I never felt Zack or Nate had the upper hand with him. If Nate had a hankering for pizza while Dylan was craving McDonald’s, they worked it out.

I still resist the idea that Dylan was nothing more than a passive follower. Eric’s charm and charisma were undeniable, and he was adroitly fooling adults, some of them mental health professionals, including a counselor and a psychiatrist. And yet I cannot easily explain how Dylan turned his back on seventeen years of empathy and conscience. Eric may have been the one who was single-mindedly focused on homicide, but Dylan went along. He did not say no. He did not tell us about the plan, or tell a teacher or one of his other friends. Instead he said yes, and entered into a plot so diabolical it defies description.

I will never know why Dylan latched on to the violence Eric suggested. His journals make clear that Dylan was profoundly insecure, and felt hopelessly inadequate. Eric probably made him feel validated and accepted and powerful in a way nobody else did—and then offered him the chance to show the world just how powerful the two of them really were.

Dr. Adam Lankford cites “a desire for fame, glory or attention as a motive” for mass shooters. Ralph Larkin calls it “killing for notoriety.” Mark Juergensmeyer, who writes about religious terrorism, calls it “the public performance of violence” and argues that acts like these have symbolic, as well as strategic, goals. Sociologist Dr. Katherine Newman, author of Rampage, ties it directly to image rehabilitation when she says school shooters are “searching for a way to retire their public image as dweebs and misfits, exchanging it for something more alluring: the dangerous, violent antihero.”

I was surprised not to be asked in the depositions the details of how we’d handled discipline, movies, video games, Dylan’s friendships, drugs and alcohol, clothing, firecrackers. But an in-depth look at the root causes of the catastrophe was outside the purview of the proceedings. The depositions were not a place to talk about bullying, or gun safety, or school climate, or the immaturity of the adolescent brain. I had not yet begun to talk to experts myself. Even at that early stage, though, I was clear on one point: I did not—and do not—believe I made Dylan a killer.

If I had thought there was something seriously wrong with him, I would have moved mountains to fix it. If I had known about Eric’s website or the guns, or about Dylan’s depression, I would have parented differently. As it was, I parented the best way I knew to parent the child I knew—not the one he had become without my knowledge.

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Unsurprisingly, the news reports after the depositions were highly inflammatory, as so much of the coverage had been. The sealed transcripts of the proceedings gave the impression we were hiding something—again.

I wanted to share the transcripts with the public. Why not? I was tired of fielding the implication I had something to hide when I spent my days hunting for answers. Perhaps naively, I still hoped releasing the transcripts might finally put to bed the idea there was a single reason the tragedy had happened. And, unlike the Basement Tapes, there was no danger of contagion from releasing them.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t my decision. All four parents of the shooters had been deposed, and the attorneys never reached consensus on everyone’s best interests. Eventually the judge decided to seal the depositions for twenty years.

I hadn’t said everything I wanted to say when I was deposed, but I thought if the families could see and hear me, they’d understand that whatever the engine for Dylan’s crimes had been, it had not started in our home. The papers the next morning showed me my folly. There it was again: conscientious parents would have known what their sons were planning; our failure to know meant we were responsible. Nothing would ever change how people perceived us.

I shredded the newspaper in my hands and pounded the bed with my fists until my wailing subsided. Hurt as I was, I also understood. I too had believed a good parent should know what her kids were thinking. If the situations had been reversed, if someone else’s son had murdered Dylan while he was catching up on his homework in the school library, I would have blamed that family too.

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I continued to experience high levels of stress, loss of sleep, and poor concentration after the depositions. Ten days afterward, we heard that the plaintiffs were ready to settle. The lawyers acted as if this was a great relief, but I didn’t feel the least bit uplifted. No legal resolution would alleviate the dread that sat in the center of my chest, the hopeless feeling that I had reached the end of my ability to cope.