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LOS ANGELES - The mother of one of the two teenagers responsible for the 1999 Columbine school massacre has spoken out about the tragedy for the first time after a decade of silence.
Susan Klebold, whose son Dylan rampaged through the Colorado high school with Eric Harris in a shooting spree that left 13 innocents dead, told O Magazine that she remained haunted by her son's role in the tragedy.
Dylan Klebold, 17, and Harris, 18, killed themselves after their rampage claimed the lives of 12 classmates and a teacher and wounded 21 others.
"For the rest of my life, I will be haunted by the horror and anguish Dylan caused," Susan Klebold writes in the November issue of O, the Oprah Winfrey-run magazine.
"I cannot look at a child in a grocery store or on the street without thinking about how my son's schoolmates spent the last moments of their lives.
"Dylan changed everything I believed about myself, about God, about family and about love."
Klebold recalled how she had no inkling that her son was soon to become one of the most notorious killers in US criminal history when she saw him for the last time on the morning of April 20, 1999.
"I was getting dressed for work when I heard Dylan bound down the stairs and open the front door ... I poked my head out of the bedroom.
'Dyl? ' All he said was 'Bye.'
The front door slammed, and his car sped down the driveway.
"His voice had sounded sharp. I figured he was mad because he'd had to get up early to give someone a lift to class. I had no idea that I had just heard his voice for the last time."
Klebold said she had been unable to accept her son's role in the massacre until she saw his journals, where the teenager vented his self-loathing and plans to commit suicide.
"It was clear to me that Dylan entered the school with the intention of dying there," Klebold writes.
"From the writings Dylan left behind, criminal psychologists have concluded that he was depressed and suicidal. When I first saw copied pages of these writings, they broke my heart.
"I'd had no inkling of the battle Dylan was waging in his mind." - AFP/vm
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