I’m a teacher by constitution. Everything I knew and cared about and valued, I poured into my kids. A trip to the grocery store wasn’t merely a stopover to restock the fridge, but a way to show my boys how to select the freshest apple, an invitation to think about the hardworking farmers who had grown it, and to talk about the ways fruits and vegetables make a growing body healthy and strong. It was a chance for me to introduce the vocabulary words “carmine” and “vermilion.” I showed Dylan how to be gentle putting the fruit into the basket; we let an elderly lady with one or two items slip ahead of us in line; we made eye contact and said a polite “thank you” to the cashier. Nervous about inattentive drivers, I would take his hand when we went to tuck our shopping cart back into its spot so it couldn’t roll out and dent someone else’s car.
My approach changed slightly as the boys grew, but the message never did. Driving home from Little League, I tried to counterbalance the sport’s natural message of competition with one of empathy: the kids on the other team are just like you. Dylan came to work with me whenever the opportunity arose, and though I never saw the students I worked with as “teaching moments,” he learned—better than most kids, and through exposure—that people were more than their cerebral palsy or their amputated limb. He saw, too, that even after terrible difficulty, people could create meaningful and productive lives.
Similarly, Tom had worked to help his boys become good men. Through sports, he helped them understand fair play, the importance of a heartfelt effort, and the pleasure of teamwork. Working with them on repairs, he taught them science and engineering and construction—as well as the satisfaction in solving a challenging problem, not to mention the thrift and gratification of fixing something broken instead of throwing it away. He prompted them to do their chores without complaining, and helped them to remember me on special occasions like Mother’s Day.
We had not done everything right. The research I have done has taught me better ways I might have interacted with Dylan. I wish I had listened more instead of lecturing; I wish I had sat in silence with him instead of filling the void with my own words and thoughts. I wish I had acknowledged his feelings instead of trying to talk him out of them, and that I’d never accepted his excuses to avoid conversation—I’m tired, I have homework to do—when something felt off. I wish I’d sat in the dark with him, and repeated my concerns when he dismissed them. I wish I’d dropped everything else to focus on him, probed and prodded more, and that I had been present enough to see what I did not.
Even with these regrets, there were no obvious indications he was planning something destructive. I have heard many terrible stories of good people struggling to parent seriously ill, violent kids. I have nothing but compassion for them, and feel we must rehabilitate a health care system that too often leaves them out in the cold. If you want to feel sick to your stomach, listen to a mom tell you about the day her volatile ten-year-old narrowly missed stabbing her with the kitchen shears, and how it felt to call the police on him because she was worried the lock on his younger sister’s bedroom door wouldn’t hold against his rage. Too often, parents of seriously disturbed kids are forced to get the criminal justice system involved—even though it is drastically ill-equipped to manage brain illness—simply because there is nowhere else to turn. Unless a family can afford a private clinic, the choice is often between denying the severity of the problem and calling the cops. The question of accountability is not theoretical for those mothers.
As huge as my empathy is for those mothers, my situation was very different. Dylan showed no clear and present danger, the way some children do. He was going to school, holding down a job in the evening, and applying to colleges. Days before the massacre he was eating dinner with us as usual, keeping the conversation light and carrying his dirty dishes to the sink.
He did hole up in his room, but he hadn’t withdrawn from his peers. He did not have access to weapons in our home, nor did he display any unseemly fascination with them. He was occasionally truculent and irritable, as many teenagers are, but we never saw any hint of the rage he displayed on the Basement Tapes. He did not threaten us, get into physical altercations, or allude to plans to hurt others. Neither Tom nor I had ever—not once—felt afraid of him.
We thought we saw evidence our parenting was working. Dylan was a good and loyal friend, a loving son, and he appeared to be growing into a responsible adult. In his writing, there is ample proof that he had absorbed the teachings we had worked so hard to impart; his journals are filled with his struggles with conscience. And yet, at the end of his life, something overwrote the lessons we had taught him.
Not all influence comes from within the home, and this is especially true in the case of teenagers. “Nurture” refers to all the environmental factors a person encounters. Dylan was interested in gratuitously bloodthirsty movies like Reservoir Dogs and Natural Born Killers—but so was every boy we knew. We did not buy those movies, or take him to the theater to see them. We also did not forbid them in our home after he reached the age of seventeen, figuring he would get access to them if he wanted to; he was working, and had his own money. We did talk to him about our concerns.
He also played Doom, one of the earliest first-person-shooter games. I hadn’t liked the game, but I’d mostly worried that Dylan’s computer use would isolate him, which hadn’t been the case at all. My primary complaint about video games was how dumb they were, a waste of time. As with everything, my take on video games was filtered through my primary belief in Dylan’s goodness. It would never have crossed my mind that he was capable of making the leap from shooting people on-screen to shooting them in real life.
Looking back, that was a mistake. There is good research now to show that violent games like Doom decrease empathy and increase aggressive behavior. Detractors point out that millions play these games (an estimated ten million people have played Doom), and only a tiny fraction of those go on to commit violence. But Dr. Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist—and author of more than two hundred papers on psychology and education, including studies of juvenile homicide, school safety, bullying, and threat assessment—gave me his take on entertainment violence.
“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.