[The parents] talked to a lawyer that night. He related a sobering thought. "Dylan isn't here anymore for people to hate," he said. "So people are going to hate you."
Just imagine. Imagine being at your office going through your daily work routine, and getting a phone call telling you that there has been a massive school shooting at your child's high school. Immediately, you're going to do two things. One, you'll worry to death about your child. Are they ok? Are they still in the school? Is the shooter still out there? Will my kid be emotionally ok? Secondly, you're going to drive to the school to see if you can muster up what exactly happened. On April 20th, 1999 that is story of what thousands of parents in Littleton, Colorado went through that morning. But the story was a bit different for two pairs of parents. Mr. and Mrs. Harris and Mr. and Mrs. Klebold both received phone calls from the school or friends about the school shooting. Their world was flipped upside down however, when they started being notified that their sons may be the ones performing the massacre. Mr. Klebold was at home that morning when his son Eric's friend, Nate Dykeman, called up and asked whether or not Dylan's trenchcoat was in his closet. Nate had heard several reports that the shooters were wearing trench coats. After Mr. Klebold looked in his son's closet, he came back to the receiver and barely muttered, "Oh my God. It's not here." Mr. Klebold did the correct thing and called 911 to tell them his son might be involved with the murder.
Is this what you would have done? It's very hard to imagine yourself in this situation, but it's possible that you aren't all that different from the Klebolds yourself. Although both parents worked, they had fairly good relationships with their son and could never in a million years see something like this coming. Many parents might react to differently to the situation Mr. Klebold was put in. Some might deny it completely and say it's just a coincidence the trench coat is gone. Others might panic and do absolutely nothing and sit in complete fear. More radical ones might even flee from their home in attempt to hide from authority. If it were me in that situation, I hope I'd call the police like Mr. K did.
Being only 100 pages into the book, I don't yet know what happened to the shooters' parents after the slaughtering. If I were to guess, they probably moved very far away, perhaps even to another country, in order to try to start a new life where they aren't labeled as, "The parents of the murderers." People are naturally going to blame the parents for raising their kids incorrectly, but there are thousands and thousands of parents who raise their kids either the same or worse, and their kids don't grow up to be mass murderers. I don't know if our society will ever truly get a grasp of why these events occur. If you think of the recent Sandy Hook shooting, the shooter clearly had some mental struggles, but that still doesn't give a concrete answer as to why he would retaliate his struggles with his mother onto small children. I pray that someday these answers become more clear so we can learn how to prevent such drastic events from occurring.
No comments:
Post a Comment