Sue Klebold to break TV silence over Columbine high school massacre

THE mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two teens behind the Columbine high school massacre, will be interviewed on US TV for the first time.

Eric Harris, left and Dylan Klebold, right, are shown in a still photo taken from a videotape made by a cafeteria surveillance camera during the April 20, 1999 shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. The Jefferson County Sheriff's Dept. released the surveillance tape as well as the tapes the two students made during the days leading up to the massacre. (AP Photo/Jefferson County Sheriff's Dept via The Denver Post) p/ /robbery

THE mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two teens behind the Columbine high school massacre, has written a memoir and will be interviewed on US TV.

Sue Klebold has never appeared on TV to talk about the killings 16 years ago.

She will talk to veteran US interviewer Diane Sawyer about her memoir, A Mother’s Reckoning, set to be published in February. The prime-time interview will take place around the same time.

Mrs Klebold’s publisher, Crown Publishers, said profits from the book will go towards mental health charities and research.

Victims of violence ... This 1999 photo shows a woman standing among 15 crosses posted on a hill above Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Picture: Eric Gay/AP

She is said to have been inspired to write the memoir following the Sandy Hook shootings of 2012, when loner Adam Lanza killed 20 small children and six teaching staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

In 1999, Dylan Klebold and fellow senior student Eric Harris killed 12 students and one teacher at the Colorado high school before taking their own lives. Before Sandy Hook, it was the worst school massacre in US history.

Although she has never spoken about the killings on TV Mrs Klebold was interviewed for a book by the author Andrew Solomon, called Far from the Tree.

Lost child ... Video footage of Dylan Klebold. Picture: Supplied

Mrs Klebold told Mr Solomon: “I can never decide whether it’s worse to think your child was hardwired to be like this and that you couldn’t have done anything, or to think he was a good person and something set this off in him.”

In an essay for Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine in 2009 she said that while she perceived herself to be “a victim of the tragedy” she “was widely viewed as a perpetrator or at least an accomplice since I was the person who had raised a ‘monster’.”

The interview comes at a time when mass shootings in the US are at an all-time high.

Only this week a lone gunman opened fire in a Louisiana cinema screening of the comedy movie Trainwreck, killing three people.

Nightmare scenario ... Aerial view of students being led from Columbine High School on the day of the massacre. Picture: Supplied

While last month nine black parishioners at a South Carolina church died at the hands of a white supremacist.

In an interview with the BBC this week US President Barack Obama said his failure to pass “common sense gun safety laws” in the US is the greatest frustration of his presidency.

He said it was “distressing” not to have made progress on the issue “even in the face of repeated mass killings”.

His efforts have been hampered by the powerful US gun lobby, headed by the National Rifle Association.