Posted on 09/17/2010 4:38:57 PM PDT by re_tail20
As another school shooting rocks Littleton, Colorado, Dave Cullen reveals the secret meeting of Eric Harris' parents with his victims' kin—offering a rare glimpse into how they saw their son.
It’s been nearly 11 years since the Columbine tragedy rocked the nation, and the largest remaining questions center on the killers’ parents: Did they see it coming? Why do they think it happened? How did the tragedy affect them? Do they feel remorse? Have they expressed it to the victims?
Sue Klebold finally addressed those questions last October in an essay in O Magazine. But her son Dylan was the junior partner in the attack. Eric Harris was the mastermind, and his parents have never spoken publicly. But it turns out they secretly met with two victims’ families, who quietly but diligently pursued contact for years. The existence of those meetings—one of which is recounted in detail here—has never before been reported.
Tom and Linda Mauser’s son Daniel was shot to death by Eric in the Columbine library. Last summer, the couple finally met Eric’s parents. The meeting took years to arrange. It began in 2007, with an angry letter from Tom Mauser. He and Linda had chosen not to take part in lawsuits many of their peers leveled against the Harrises and Klebolds. But they were just as hungry for answers. Eventually, Tom's frustration boiled over. All those years and he still didn’t know how the boys got away with it. And resentment had set in: Why hadn’t the parents reached out more? So he set down some pointed questions. That approach failed. The Harrises declined to meet, though their attorney provided some answers.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
Interesting. I still remember that Susan Klebold had her HAIR DONE the next day!!!! OMG!!
I wonder if either of these boys were ever given Ritalin or any other drug like that.
Its called denial.
It’s called NARCISSTIC!
Interesting. Thanks for posting.
they were on anti-depressants.
a really good site on murders committed by young people on these drugs is www.drugawarness.org
I'm not sure what brand name drug they were on, but they were both prescribed anti-depressants at the time of the shooting. I think Klebold may also have been on anti-psychotics at some point in his medical history as well, but I'm not sure if he was at the time of the shooting.
In short, they were both medicated, and at times pretty heavily.
During the interview, it states Eric was on antidepressants
The parents sound almost as scary as the son.....they are so removed from personal responsibility, it seems....it’s frightening.......just mind blowing.
Yes
what has you thinking they weren’t responsible ?
sounds like they did just about everything possible -shrinks,therapy,appts etc
I don’t understand why the victim’ mother expected answers from them-
I’d want answers from the law enforcement and the school itself as they witnessed their behaviors.
Yeah, included some from the brave SWAT teams who huddled behind their tanks while the shootings went on, and on, and on, and on... and shot-up, still alive victims screamed for help trying to escape.
:: spit ::
It’s called psychopathy. And depression. The author of this article has a very well-researched book about the Columbine shootings, and it makes the most sense out of anything I’ve read about Columbine. Eric was a psychopath. Regardless of the what drugs he took, how involved (or uninvolved) his parents were, or what punishments were doled out, Eric as murderer was probably an eventuality. He was able to use Dylan’s depression and utter rage to create the perfect partner in crime. His parents do seem rather clueless but his parents could not have changed the fact that their son was likely a psychopath. Psychopathy cannot be treated. The Klebolds on the other hand...
The problem with psychopaths is that they lack a conscience. Healthy moral decision making requires a rational component and a visceral emotional component. Despite the claims that we should make decisions rationally rather than emotionally, if you remove the emotional component, which is what creates a person's conscience, you get decisions that would be amoral or immoral to a person with a properly functioning conscience. This is also why emotional distancing is important in convincing normal people to go along with atrocities like genocide.
This isn't something that's a matter of choice for a psychopath any more than autism is a matter of choice. Their brain lacks a conscience to keep them on moral rails and rational thought doesn't provide a replacement. It doesn't seem to predictably be a result of obviously bad parenting or schooling or influences, though head trauma and early experiences may play a role in it. And it can appear in children as young as 9 or even 6.
There is a ton of information out there on psychopaths so why don't we hear more about in the mainstream media? I think the answer can be found in the article in the second link, above:
"There's still a lot of opposition -- some criminologists, sociologists, and psychologists don't like psychopathy at all," Hare says. "I can spend the entire day going through the literature -- it's overwhelming, and unless you're semi-brain-dead you're stunned by it -- but a lot of people come out of there and say, 'So what? Psychopathy is a mythological construct.' They have political and social agendas: 'People are inherently good,' they say. 'Just give them a hug, a puppy dog, and a musical instrument and they're all going to be okay.' "
If Hare sounds a little bitter, it's because a decade ago, Correctional Service of Canada asked him to design a treatment program for psychopaths, but just after he submitted the plan in 1992, there were personnel changes at the top of CSC. The new team had a different agenda, which Hare summarizes as, "We don't believe in the badness of people." His plan sank without a trace.
I wanted to add that part of the problem is also that nobody wants to hear that we don’t know why people become psychopaths and they don’t want to hear that we can’t cure it or fix psychopaths. It makes people feel helpless. People have a lot of trouble accepting that some things just can’t be predicted or avoided and that bad things can happen without anyone actually being negligent or wrong.
Psychologically, people want to believe that bad things could have been avoided and want someone to blame. There are parents who lose children to things like birth defects that were not their fault who would rather blame themselves for doing something wrong than accept the idea that nobody did anything wrong and something bad happened. Accepting that bad things can happen even when nobody does anything wrong makes people feel vulnerable and makes the universe feel random and uncontrollable and it's a big reason why religion can help.
If you read how Harris reacted to the juvenile diversion program, it wasn’t Zoloft that made him a killer. He was a psychopath. He had contempt for everyone around him and he was a master manipulator. He didn’t only fool his parents. He also fooled the people who monitored him in the juvenile diversion program. Psychopaths learn how to say what people want to hear and how to make people like them to manipulate them. Many people are unable to imagine another human being that has no conscience. Psychopaths can look another person in the eye and lie without flinching because they have no conscience to make their lies show on their faces.
Had Klebold not fallen under the influence of a psychopath who manipulated him into going along with the killing spree, I doubt he would have ever become a killer. Humans look to other humans for moral confirmation and that's why a bad person can be a bad influence on otherwise good people and why otherwise decent people can go along with things like lynchings and genocide when other people lead them into it.
Having read quite a bit about psychopaths, I've come to believe that many of the elements of traditional society that we discarded during the 60s existed to thwart psychopaths and protect nice people from them. Things like courting, chaperones, dress codes, and so on are all things that impatient and self-centered psychopaths would have problems doing well. No psychopath is going to meet the father, go on a date with a chaperone, and get little more than a kiss out of it for date after date but sex on a first date and one night stands are right up their alley.
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