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[heart thumping]
[heart monitor beeping]
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[gentle piano music]
[lady squealing]
[nurse muffled chattering]
Push, push, push.
[baby cries]
I hadn't lived in Denver very long
when Dylan was born.
It's all right.
He was precious,
he was just so precious.
I miss him.
I miss him a lot.
[Sue] I remember being in the hospital,
I was holding him and I got this strange feeling.
And the only thing I could describe it
as was a feeling of... like a shadow went over me.
It just was this strange feeling like
something was passing over me.
And at that moment, I had a sense
that the child I was holding,
there was either something wrong with him
or that he would bring me sorrow.
Very soon after that, Dylan became sick.
[baby cries]
He had a health issue, pyloric stenosis.
[baby cries]
And I remember thinking when that happened
that I must have been sensing
that he had a health problem.
After he died, I woke up remembering that day
of how this child was going to bring me sorrow.
[girl] ...we all got under the desk and,
and then they just started coming in the library
and opening fire and shooting out bombs.
So many people.
[somber music]
[engine starting]
[reporter 1] We are getting, we are getting word that
Leewood Elementary School is locked down.
[reporter 2] If you are just joining us, two young men
apparently dressed in long black
trench coats opened fire about an hour and a half ago
at a high school just outside of Denver
in Littleton, Colorado.
At least three students have been injured
and possibly as many as eight.
We know that victims have been taken to area hospitals.
One student has apparently been critically injured,
and we know that one of the victims
may be an adult woman.
[fading] There is a huge presence of...
I was getting ready for a meeting, uh,
I had to go from our downtown office to one of the colleges,
and I was getting ready to go, and I got back
to my desk, and I saw the message light
flashing on my phone.
[telephone ringing]
[suspenseful music]
[reporter playing in TV] Two young men apparently
dressed in long black trench coats
opened fire in a school shooting
of what we believe to be up to eight people.
Now there have also been reports
of explosions in the school.
[Sue] He said, "But listen to the television,"
and he put the phone apparently by the TV.
And I thought, "What the heck is on television?"
[reporter] Something like that. We're still getting
information in constantly.
[Sue] And I just said, "I'm coming home.
I'm coming home right now."
[dramatic music]
And I could tell from the tone of his voice
that something had happened to one of our kids.
[elevator beeping]
[gentle elevator music]
[dramatic music resumes]
[dramatic music abruptly stops]
And this is a journal that Dylan gave me,
and it's a... a strange irony
that it's Edvard Munch's The Scream.
But he knew I loved art and he saw this book,
and he got it for me.
And this is, uh, April, 21st, 1999.
"Yesterday my life entered the most abhorrent
nightmare anyone could imagine.
I can't even write about it."
And then three days later was the next thing I wrote.
[reporter] Witnesses we talked to on the telephone described
them as members of the trench coat mafia.
These are kids they claim routinely dress
in black trench coats,
and have issued threats before to seek revenge
on any other students that may have made
fun of them along the way.
And there was an exchange of gunfire
a little over 25 minutes ago from the inside out.
We believe that some 1800 students
attend that school right now.
The deputy sheriffs are saying that they believe
there is a good possibility that hostages
are trapped inside. Police are
seriously looking at a theory
right now that the suspects
may actually be students of the school.
[ominous music]
[man] Sir, we're with the police department.
-Are you Tom Klebold? -Yes.
We're in the middle of an active investigation.
Mrs. Klebold, we need you to both exit
the house immediately.
[fading] Step this way...
[Sue] "I was in a major panic.
I was in total disbelief that Dylan
could do such a horrible thing.
I was numb, tears came intermittently.
But I was mostly in shock.
During the siege as we learned of more and more deaths,
I prayed that Dylan would die.
I wanted someone to stop him before anyone else was hurt.
I knew if he were brought out alive,
I could not face the years of imprisonment,
and possibly execution.
I prayed that God would take...
one of my two precious boys and end his life
as quickly as possible."
So.
Yeah.
[somber music]
[Sue] That morning I heard him
bounding down the stairs heavily,
like he was in a hurry.
And I ran to my bedroom door,
I could hear him go past my door,
I opened the door, and I said, "Dyl?"
And at that point, he had gotten to the front door.
When he sort of slammed the door and said, "Goodbye,"
I had no idea that I had just heard his voice
for the last time.
I thought something is bothering him,
whatever it is.
I had no concept of the magnitude
of what was about to happen.
[police officer] Jefferson County 911.
Yes, I'm a teacher at Columbine High School.
There is a student here with a gun.
He has shot out a window.
[police officer] Okay, has any been injured, ma'am?
-[teacher] Yes. -[police officer] Okay.
[teacher] And the school is in a panic,
and I'm in the library.
Down under the tables, kids!
Kids, under the tables!
[Peter] So, the binders are where I keep important articles,
documents, court records, journals,
everything related to a particular shooter.
And for some shooters,
there's a massive binder, or even two binders.
Others have multiple shooters within one
if there's not a lot of information on them.
Nine of these are relating to Columbine.
You know, at the time that Columbine happened,
I was working in a... psychiatric facility,
a hospital for children and adolescents.
Columbine was April 20th, 1999.
April 30th, just ten days later,
a 16-year-old boy was admitted to the hospital
because he was seen as a Columbine-type risk,
and I was assigned the case to evaluate him.
And not long after that, there was another one,
and then another one.
And I saw a steady trickle
of potential school shooters
coming through the hospital,
and that's how I got into doing this research.
Dylan was one of the most challenging shooters
I've studied to try to understand.
Well, there were people who spoke about Dylan
as like the sweetest, cutest little boy
you could ever meet.
And one of his own friends described him as,
"The least violent person I ever knew."
[man 1] No, they actually were really nice people
who just liked having a good time.
[man 2] I really got to know the guys.
They were pretty nice people.
[woman] Guys, they gave us the image
of being full of cotton fuzz.
I mean, they were the sweetest guys
on the face of the Earth.
[Peter] So, the enigma was, "How does someone go
from being the least violent person
to committing mass murder?"
[Lisa] Yeah, the first thing you want to know is, "Where were the parents?
What were the parents doing,
or how did they try to prevent this?
How could your kid possibly be making a bomb
in the garage and you don't know?
How could they have access to that many guns,
-and you didn't notice?" -[woman] They are in the garage
making these things, where the hell were their parents?
[man] How do you have
a 15-year-old son
in your basement making bombs
dressed in black trench coats,
part of this subculture, and not know it?
[Lisa] You want to be able to say,
"Yes, it was your fault.
If only you had punished them that day,
not punished them that day."
"They had this philosophy of television and the internet,
or hadthat philosophy of television or the internet?"
Sir, can we help you find what you're looking for?
No, ma'am, you just got to wait here.
[Lisa] So, if no one ever again does what you did,
then it will never happen again,
and that will make me safe.
That will make my children safe.
[somber music]
[Lisa] We need to blame.
Blame makes things logical.
[Sue] And I finally turned to somebody and said,
"Is my son dead?"
And he said, "Yes."
And I said, "Can you tell me how he died?"
And he said, "No, I can't."
And I don't know if he didn't know
or if he wasn't allowed to tell me.
But that sort of... finally was confirmation
that Dylan was gone.
[dispatcher talking on radio]
...a few personal items,
[inaudible]
Just walk with me.
[somber music]
[alarm beeping]
[gentle music]
[Sue] It would take years for me
to put all this together to understand
really what happened.
I didn't even get a police report
until six months after to know what had happened.
Up until that point,
all the things I was reading in the paper,
there was so much that was false,
I was clinging to the fact that maybe they were wrong
about Dylan being there.
I was really very much in denial.
So, it began a long, long journey for me to,
one layer at a time,
to try to accept what had happened,
have that knowledge and still go on living and, um, loving,
and it just took a lot of work and a lot of time.
I started writing about this because I thought,
we all thought, that when you look back,
when you really dig in,
when you go through life in those houses
that these kids grew up in, you'll find something,
you'll find warning signs.
People blamed the Harrises and the Klebolds
because everyone believes
that... you have to recognize a monster
when it lives with you.
I think one of the things we may have learned
in the 20 years since then is that that's not true.
[Sue] One of the hardest things I still do
is visit the memorials.
[birds chirping]
[Sue] It's hard enough to cope
with the loss of your own child,
but when you think of your own child
doing as much harm,
it's... almost too much to bear sometimes.
And these children and this teacher,
they didn't die, they were killed
by my son and his friend,
and that's... that's the horrible hard part to live with.
There was always this sense of my own failure.
I was thinking, I didn't listen well enough,
I didn't teach,
but Dylan was taught right and wrong
in every conceivable way.
And Dylan was the kind of person
who helped his friends.
He'd stop and run and go get a can of gas
for a stranger.
He was a nice person.
We never had a bad teacher conference.
He was always a good student and had friends
and interests and, you know, he was just-- he was a pleasure.
He was a joy.
And a child like that makes you feel
like a fabulous parent.
I mean, I thought I was just the greatest thing
because look at this kid,
does everything right.
Yeah.
[somber music]
[thudding]
[father] Get that in the center of the table,
that'd be good.
[muffled whirring]
[father] I guess I'm the only one who wants to eat.
[laughs]
[spitting]
[water splashing]
[Sue] It's nice to remember him as a happy child,
and such a busy, productive child. He wasn't a kind of a kid that would sit
around and waste time and say, "I'm bored."
He was always doing something.
He always was building something.
He started doing origami in third grade.
As fast as he could,
he would make these little origami figures,
and they would be wrinkled and crooked,
but he would have memorized 60, 70 folds.
And he'd remember how to do them
and could do them without the book nearby.
I thought it was pretty remarkable. As usual,
I was incredibly proud of everything he did.
This was us going on a train at Georgetown,
and it's just Dylan and me sitting together.
And of course, I'm looking at him because I always was.
I thought he was so adorable.
And he was having a good time.
This is a cute picture of Dylan.
He was at his brother's birthday party.
And here you could just see what a normal,
goofy kid he was. He was
yukking it up with the kids.
[Sue] And here he is as a teenager.
He was 15 in this picture playing cards
with the family.
And that was before he let his hair grow long.
He was actually quite handsome with short hair,
I wish he'd kept it short.
Normal family stuff.
And this was the last picture that was taken
of our family, taken a few weeks before he died.
We were at a restaurant.
[Lisa] It's amazing how much people got wrong about Columbine.
The first take on a shooting is almost
never completely right.
And in this case, the things we thought we knew
had pretty much nothing to do with why these kids
went and shot up the school.
[reporter 1] Students say they were members
of a small group of outcasts
known as the Trench Coat Mafia.
[reporter 2] So-called Trench Coat Mafia.
[reporter 3] Trench Coat Mafia.
[guy] They practiced satanic rituals.
[rock music]
[reporter 1] ...say the gunmen went after classmates who had made
fun of them in the past.
[reporter 2] And in this case, we see kids
who don't have strong social ties.
[reporter 3] These gunmen were going into the school
to single out individuals.
[reporter 4] The gunmen were described as Gothic freaks.
[reporter 5] With police saying the boys may have been
part of a dark underground national phenomenon
known as the Gothic movement.
The first assumption was Goth and,
and that led to, "And how could their parents
not have noticed?" Because all these things
that, that everyone thought
was happening to them and led to the shooting
were things that should have been visual and obvious,
and so, "How could the parents not have known?"
Parents started suing each other.
The parents of the victims in places
like Columbine and Paducah and Jonesboro,
all started bringing lawsuits against the parents
of the shooters.
Michael Carneal was accused of shooting
at Paducah high school,
and his parents and he both walked lawyers
through almost every minute of every day
before the shooting.
And it was so banal.
It was so mundane.
You saw what the parents saw,
and they thought they were having Thanksgiving.
And then you saw it from Michael's point of view.
And when the parents thought he was off riding
his bike around the neighborhood,
he was off stealing guns and hiding them.
But there was nothing that a parent
would have seen or might have done,
and that was terrifying.
If it were something you could identify
about bad parenting, then yes,
suing the parents and holding them responsible
would keep other parents from doing it.
But there wasn't anything that you could hold
parents accountable for and make sure
that no other parent ever did it.
Yes, there are always questions for the parents,
but sometimes there are also answers,
and as a society, we, we can't handle them.
We don't want to hear them. We don't want to hear that
yes, your kid actually can make a bomb in the garage,
and you might not notice.
We don't want that to be true.
[TV playing]
[commentator] Injured Bronco on the play.
Watch Jamal Anderson here.
In fact, watch his left knee.
[fading] It's very important...
[somber music]
Whoa!
Woo!
[muffled TV playing]
[commentator] John Elway could play another ten years.
Rod Smith being replaced by Eugene Robinson.
[Lisa] You can be the best parent and your kid
can still go off the rails,
your kid can do terrible things.
And you can't always predict them or prevent them,
and that is a really, really scary thing as a parent,
that you can do the best you can,
and it could still go so completely wrong.
[Sue] Dylan had a cluster of trouble in his junior year.
There was some vandalism at school,
he scratched a locker.
Now years later,
I read that he had written a swear word.
I didn't know that at the time,
we thought it was just a scratch.
Another thing that occurred at about the same time
was he and his friends hacked into the computer
school system and figured out how to get
to the locker combinations.
And then at about that same time,
he and Eric, his friend, ended up stealing
some equipment from a van that was parked
on a country road down near where our house was.
All those things happened in a cluster.
And I was trying to keep the ship steered,
figure out what was going wrong.
I remember talking with other friends,
family members, parents, and they said,
"Oh, you should have seen the stuff I did
when I was in high school,"
and, "Dylan's a good kid,
he would never do anything wrong."
And we talked about it, and at the time,
I said, "Dylan, I'm worried, I don't know what this means.
I think maybe you need to see a counselor."
He said, "I don't want to go to a counselor,
and I will prove to you that I'm okay."
And I said, "Well, okay, you know, you prove to me,
that sounds good." And he did.
He didn't get in trouble anymore
for the remaining 14 months of his life.
People would say, "How could you not know,
how could you not see this?"
The behavior that I saw three days before his death
was him going to a prom,
six couples in a limousine going out to dinner,
dancing, coming home and telling me
he'd had the best time of his life,
thanking me for making it possible.
That was what I saw.
And when he did what he did,
everyone had the expectation that, that he would have
been showing these behaviors to us as parents, but he wasn't.
And I don't think there are people, to this day,
who still really accept that.
[Liza] Sue Klebold's experience with her son,
if there were signs there, and we could say, "Oh,
you know, in hindsight, in the post-mortem analysis,
we can see all of these things."
That's not the life that parents are living, right?
That's not your day-to-day with your child.
I see the same thing with Nancy Lanza.
People say, "Well, how on earth could she have
gone out and shot guns with him?"
But Nancy's son hadn't shown violent behavior,
and so how are you supposed to guess, right?
You're not supposed to guess that your child
is going to do something unspeakably violent.
That's not what being a parent is.
I was constantly aware that people were judging me,
and I was afraid, I was afraid of facing the media,
I was afraid of being attacked, I was afraid,
I was afraid every day for years.
[gentle music]
[Sue] I stopped counting.
[sniffs] It's 3600 letters.
And letters were coming to me from all over the world,
and have come to me from all over the world.
I gave permission to anybody and everybody
who knew me to protect me,
"Please, if you don't mind opening these letters,
I don't mind, please take out anything
that is hateful because I can't bear
to hear it anymore."
[somber music]
[Sue] And I won't even talk about what they said
or what they sent,
but they were so hurtful and destructive.
But I kept them for many years.
And when the time came to destroy them,
I shredded them all.
[whirring]
I think the worst day I had post-Columbine
was the day... that I finally got to see
the Columbine police report.
I had progressed in my grief up to a point,
it's six months, where I was trying to manage
just putting one foot in front of the other,
try to get through each day, try to breathe,
try to eat, try to sleep.
And I had some kind of a construct
for what had really happened.
"Dylan was coerced into this, he was tricked,"
you know, "He was brainwashed," all these things,
I had all these questions about that,
and I remember, uh, one of the investigators just saying,
"Hold your questions, let us do our presentation."
That was the day where I saw the basement tapes
and learned what really happened.
That was the day when I had to face the fact
that Dylan was not there accidentally.
And when I saw Dylan on tape,
I had to really face the decadence,
the destruction,
the hatred.
It was so horrible to think of my son,
to envision him really doing those things and saying those things.
And an explosion had gone off and I'd been blown back
into the past to have to re-grieve,
reinvent my son,
my relationship, myself.
It was just horrible.
And I was angry at Dylan after I saw those tapes.
I was angry. I thought, you little, so-and-so, to--
after the life you have had and the love that you had
to be so ungrateful and so cruel,
so hateful, and so racist, and all these things.
I was angry.
But it was after that that I saw his writings.
I knew I was going to be talking to Sue Klebold.
The call was arranged through a, a third party.
And it was a very difficult question to answer,
because her first question to me was,
"What happened to Dylan?"
And I was very aware that here I was,
someone who had never met Dylan,
talking to the woman who gave birth to him
and raised him and saw him every day,
and she was asking me to explain her own son.
And then when I talked to Sue, I talked about Dylan
seeming to lose touch with reality.
And I also phrased it in terms of, you know,
when he did what he did,
he was not really in his right mind.
He was not the Dylan that she had known and raised.
In Dylan's journal, he wrote about...
having the worst existence in history,
like suffering more than anyone has ever suffered.
And he wrote about death as being
some sort of a freeing experience,
like he would break free,
and that would be a good thing to escape
this earthly existence.
So, in this passage,
you see some of Dylan's...
um, anguish and sense of being isolated from others.
He writes, "Everyone," underlined,
"Knows everyone, I swear.
Like I'm an outcast, and everyone
is conspiring against me."
So, he's not only feeling like an outcast,
but there's a paranoid flavor to what he says.
He was not always easy to make sense of.
Up here he originally wrote, "Dylan Klebold."
Then he crossed it out, wrote,
"Fuck that," and wrote, "Me,"
underneath where he had written Dylan Klebold.
So, it's one of those places where
it's as if he's saying he's not Dylan,
that Dylan is somebody else.
He's me, but he's not Dylan Klebold anymore.
I went through this journal for months.
There's an intersection between suicide and homicide.
Now most people who are suicidal are not homicidal,
but a fairly high percentage of those who are homicidal
are also suicidal.
People who are willing to kill others
are often willing and desire to die themselves.
And when I saw his writings and I saw his longing,
his talking about his agony and his pain,
that's when things started to feel more
like... a suicide picture
than just a murderer.
I came to the conclusion in my own mind
that Dylan's wish to die was very much
why he was taking part in this shooting
in the first place.
I'm sure there are some who would disagree with that,
and who would just say Dylan was evil.
But I, having known Dylan all of his life,
from the time he was a little lad,
no, I believe that something was operating
that impaired his ability to access those tools
that he had of empathy and judgment and hope,
and all the things that, that we would rely on
to get us out of a suicidal crisis.
But he ended up there.
[somber music]
[priest muffled] I want you to feel the power of his love...
[Lisa] I don't know how to fix it.
I know that as a reporter,
I've now been covering these things
for 20-some odd years and...
[sighs]
...there's a certain kind of grief that comes
with covering it for 20-some odd years.
It had gotten to the point for a while
where it was like, "Oh, yeah, another one."
Parkland's shook us out of that.
[crowd murmuring and protesting]
We immediately go to one of two things,
we go to guns, we go to mental illness.
We need to understand
that you need to go to both.
That... it might be
one or the other in some cases,
but I imagine we all agree that in order to take a gun
and shoot up a school,
you have to have something that's, that's gone wrong
in your wiring.
[Liza] Whatever lessons we should have learned from Columbine,
I would say unfortunately we did not.
And that's why we keep repeating
this very uniquely American tragedy.
I'm so opposed to violence,
I can't stand violent movies,
we never had guns in our home.
I, I thought, what-- you know, what else could I have done?
I began to have a real desire
to do something about murder-suicide
to try to educate people, to try to speak,
to try to share what I'd learned.
[ominous music]
[Liza] 437 children died in 2013 from childhood leukemia.
That's tragic.
We wouldn't want a single child to die.
And yet in that same year, 2013,
4600 children died by suicide.
Well, if we're looking at the National Institute
of Mental Health for prevalence, their statistics,
we're really talking about one in five children
who will have a severe and debilitating
mental disorder before the age of 18.
So, that's one in five kids.
I always tell this to parents,
I say, "Even if it's not your child,
it's definitely five children in your kid's class."
So, this is an issue for you.
This is an issue for all of us.
And we're seeing those numbers actually
kind of scarily rise.
[woman] ...numbers showing that one
in ten of us is on an antidepressant.
[man] Girls are depressed ever earlier,
are actively attempting suicide
at much higher rates than a decade ago.
[reporter] The CDC put out an alarming
report today on suicide.
fading] Nearly 45,000 Americans took their lives in...
[Liza] My situation is really different from Sue Klebold's.
I have to make that really clear. I had a child
who I knew had a very serious
brain issue from very, very young.
December 14th, 2012 was a day that changed my life.
[police officer] Newtown 911, what's the location of your emergency?
[woman] Sandy Hook School. I think there's somebody
that's shooting in here
at Sandy Hook School.
[Liza] And my first thought was,
"What if that's my son someday?"
So, I wrote that truth, I sent it out into the internet.
I thought I was the only mother in America
who felt that way, who wondered,
"What if that's my son someday?"
Even while it was anonymous, it started
circulating virally, and people were saying,
"Wow, I'm Adam Lanza's mother too.
I'm his father, I'm his sister, I'm his brother,
I'm his school bus driver, I'm his psychiatrist
trying to get this child help, no services."
I was overwhelmed by the response.
For a blog posting by a mother
in Boise, Idaho went viral.
[reporter] But what she wrote about her experience
on her blog reverberated around the country.
Was seen by millions around the world.
[Liza] I wish that I could say things
are improving since Newtown.
I know after Newtown when we talked
about the state of mental health care, we thought,
"Finally, people are going to pay attention.
Finally we may have a chance to improve things for children
and families because of the magnitude of that tragedy."
Uh, so we had hope. We had this great hope.
And now it's been so many years after Newtown,
and we're seeing the same exact stories in the news.
[reporter] Nikolas Cruz confessed to police
that he was the gunman who shot up
Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School here
killing 17 people.
And now questions are swirling...
[fading] about whether warning signs were missed.
[Liza] Numerous well-documented chances
for the system to intervene in that young man's life,
what looks like a pretty clear-cut case
of some serious emotional and behavioral disturbance,
right? That everyone knew about.
The system fails.
Even children who are
identified, who have privilege,
who have access, the system still fails our kids.
And this is the state of mental health care
in America today, it's, uh, failing all of us.
It's failing our communities, our children, our families.
[Tom] I come at this from having spent 13 years
as the director of the National Institute of Mental Health,
which is the federal agency for research
on mental illness.
And the whole mission of that agency
is to improve diagnosis and therapeutics
and to reduce the burden of mental illness.
I would say that in the 13 years I was there,
I spent about $20 billion of taxpayer money
to try to deliver on that mission,
and I think we failed.
[Anthony] We spend more than $3 trillion a year
on health care in this country.
Seventeen percent of our GDP is spent on health care.
And we have about 95% of that money
is spent treating problems.
There's very little spend on prevention.
And most of the problems that we're treating
could have been prevented.
[Peter] And when it comes to prevention,
there's a lot more we can do.
All over the country for years now,
schools have had things in place
like lockdown drills, active shooter drills,
how to survive an active shooter,
run, hide, fight training and all of those things,
and all of those things might save lives,
but none of them are prevention.
All of them are the things you do
after there's an armed intruder in the building.
The reduction in heart attacks and heart disease,
we didn't do that by just training more doctors and,
and more efficient heart surgery methods,
or getting more people trained in CPR.
We reduced heart disease and heart attacks
by focusing on health, by focusing
on jump rope for heart,
and healthy diets, and eat less burgers and get outside.
We focused on health.
But we need to do the same
thing in mental health.
And I think a lot of times when we talk
about that and we say, "Yeah, we need to get upstream,"
people will move upstream from here to here,
but they are still just talking about risk factors and warning signs.
And it's not that we shouldn't talk
about risk factors and warning signs,
but we have to have a bigger vision.
One of the ways to think about this is
if every 7th grader learned mindfulness
and some aspects of, uh, reframing and cognitive
behavioral therapy for managing mood
in the same way that they learned soccer
and football and basketball,
I mean, is that something that we should just
build into a fitness campaign?
Now there is an attempt to do this in Australia.
They are planning to do this literally
with 7th graders at population scale.
If you do this for 100,000 7th graders,
what's the long-term impact?
[woman] All children need to be educated about
good mental health practices
and how to maintain them throughout life,
but this requires a willingness
to embrace great social change.
[Tom] I think there's a greater tolerance for this
and a greater understanding of the importance
of this in some other countries.
It's been difficult for us in this country
to understand the importance of mental fitness.
We're very focused on physical fitness still.
[reporter 1] But in America today,
many normally healthy children cannot pass
a simple fitness test.
[reporter 2] Get into a good all-round sports program.
-...right arm up. -Shake.
One, two, three.
[reporter] Speaking of the president and first lady,
Beyoncé is now helping out with their Let's Move
campaign that battles childhood obesity.
♪ Do, shuffle couple to the right ♪
♪ To the left, let's move
♪ Hey
[commentator] A showdown on stage four,
and that's how you become an American Ninja Warrior.
Just this is just a piece of our health
that is kind of an unexplored territory.
We have not really begun... to, uh, dig in
to what it means to be mentally fit,
and I think that's what we're really talking about here.
So, I was on a local board with Dave Slater
um, a number of years ago,
and, uh, he works at the Dawson School now.
We've been given permission to visit
because they are incorporating a mindfulness program
into their educational classrooms.
And they even go down to the very young grades,
and I'm curious to see how that's handled
at the kindergarten level.
We do mindfulness K-12,
and, you know, we get kids as soon as we can,
but there are huge benefits to doing it
starting it from a young age.
I think it's hard for a lot of people
to recognize the need
to attend to mental health until there's a crisis.
I mean, that was my experience.
Until I landed in the hospital,
I don't think I really accepted
that there was a problem.
But we do this with everything else.
We take our car to the shop for an oil change
before the engine blows up, right?
We rake the leaves in the fall so that,
you know, we don't muck up our flowers or whatever.
Preventative maintenance is an obvious part
of every other part of our lives,
so it should be part of our mental health.
-Amy Criswell. -Hi, Sue Klebold.
-Welcome to Dawson. -Thank you.
[children chattering]
[woman talking over speakers]
Please join me in our Pledge of Allegiance.
I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
and to the Republic for which it stands,
one nation under God, indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
Um, the first day of school, um, I was kind of scared.
[teacher] Wiggle your thumb if you agree.
[inaudible]
Yeah, friends.
When we try to help our body become calm,
we've talked about ways that we sit,
ways that we breathe.
So, Ryan, what are you doing right now?
-The starfish breathe. -[teacher] Starfish breathing.
So, how do you do starfish breathing?
When you go up, you breathe in.
When you go down, you breathe out.
Sometimes it would nice to take a deep breath and be like,
"Okay, I feel a little nervous right now,
but if I take some deep breaths,
it helps me slow down the thinking."
Does anyone else want to add to that?
Peyton?
So, Ms. Smith said one time
when you're having a monkey mind,
you can let the balloons flow out of your head.
[teacher] And what do the balloons help do?
They help to get rid of some of the thoughts
-you don't need anymore. -[teacher] Yeah.
It's like when you're having tons of thoughts
in your mind.
[teacher] Have you had tons of thoughts in your minds before?
[all] Yeah.
I would-- uh,
somebody says monkey mind, I just get it.
[teacher] You just get it?
[Amy] Before I helped my friend Lena
do the pledge this morning, before I keyed
the mic, she knows to... [exhales]
...and then she looks at me and gives me a little head nod, and she's a fourth grader
who's been with us since 1st grade.
[gentle xylophone music]
[Sarah] Mental illness, things like schizophrenia,
bipolar, anxiety, are not directly
correlated to violence.
Whether or not somebody has mental wellness is.
Our public health system in our schools
are investing in physical health with things
like recess and good, healthy school lunches,
but how many schools have mental wellness programs?
How many schools do things like mindfulness?
Mindfulness is like the equivalent
of eating a healthy breakfast.
Yet, when we talk about making schools
mentally healthier and mentally well
places for students to be,
there's still opposition to that.
And I think we need to, as a society, get over it.
I don't think we realize how critical mental health
is to the foundation of children's brains.
This is over the top off the scales important.
[gentle music]
[Sarah] So, there's a Nobel laureate economist
named James Heckman,
and Heckman has created something
called the Heckman Equation.
And essentially it's that if we invest a dollar
in early intervention, in early childhood,
in public health that supports young children,
we've saved $13 in both the public
and health care system later on.
In a two-year-old, in a six-month-old,
in a one-year-old, you have got like a million
neurons a second developing,
all of these m-- like millions of neural connections happening.
That's not happening later on in life,
that's not happening in my brain right now.
Early investment needs to match up
with this early brain development that's happening.
And we know that social emotional learning
when it's taught in kindergarten
has an impact on future employment,
has an impact on involvement
in the juvenile justice system,
involvement in the criminal justice system,
in future relationships, in rates of divorce.
I mean, there are so many things
that studies have now shown can go back
to mental wellness in kindergarten.
[gentle music]
[Sue] I tried everything I knew to help my children
grow up so that they could care for themselves.
We learned hygiene, and we learned
sexually transmitted diseases, and speeding,
and drinking and driving,
and snake bite where I lived.
I mean, it was everything I could think of
to keep them safe.
But I didn't think for a moment
that the number two killer of youth was suicide.
That was not on my radar screen.
I never talked about that with my, with Dylan or with my kids.
It wasn't something I thought about,
it wasn't something I knew how to ask about
or I knew how to dialogue about.
And it just was not... there yet.
It was probably the greatest threat that they had.
I remember certainly going to health fairs,
and I'd see a table, and they might have
suicide prevention materials on there.
I would walk right past it,
because I'd say, "This doesn't apply to me.
No one I love would ever die by suicide
because I love them too much,
and I wouldn't let that happen."
I see now that many other people do that too.
They look at my story and they say,
"Well, my son would never do that.
My child would never do something like this."
And they kind of dismiss anything I might have to say
because they think it doesn't apply to them.
But unfortunately, one of the lessons
I've learned was that... the rare, uh,
certainly the rare event of murder side,
and the far less rare event, rare event of suicide,
it did apply to me, but I didn't have any way of--
I didn't know that.
And so, I try to make people aware
that it could happen to you.
[muffled chattering]
-I've been on those. -Yeah,
and there's no bathroom, and the cock--
there's no door on the cockpit,
so you feel like Jimmy Stewart's flying the plane.
I met Sue in 2012 as a call went out for people
who are interested in forming an American Foundation
for Suicide Prevention Colorado Chapter,
and Sue was one of probably like
30 people that showed up.
Once we all kind of started stepping
back from the board,
kind of doing a little bit of self-care,
we said, "We just want to be with these people.
They know kind of how we feel."
Seven years ago, April 2nd, 2010,
my 19-year-old son took his life.
He said he was going to go down to the basement
and just hang out, watch television.
Next thing we heard a loud bang, and he was gone.
I was totally taken by surprise.
You don't know everything that your children are doing.
You just don't.
This could be you, this could be you--
You could be living my life.
To the ones that say it will not ever happen,
you're, you're blind.
You need to realize that it could happen to you.
I thought it couldn't happen to me, and it did.
Here, I will open mine from Christopher.
-[Christopher] You're going to love it. -I'm going to love it?
-Okay. -[man] You're going to love it.
[chattering softly]
Oh, Christopher, you're right, I do love it.
Souvenirs coloring book.
Look, it's a coloring book.
[Laurie] I loved my children.
I love them still.
I think about them every day.
I feel that if I had known more about mental health,
I could've gotten them the help that they needed.
[Lisa] If loving fiercely was all it took
to keep mental illness at bay,
then I know an awful lot of people
who would be completely immune and protected.
Just... caring enough about your kids
does not protect them from bad things happening.
Just caring about your kids doesn't keep them
from going astray.
Just caring about your kids is important to parenting,
but it's not enough to guarantee a happy ending
for everybody all the time.
Can I have a Christmas kiss?
[lips smacking]
Thanks, buddy.
[Sue] In the very last weeks of his life,
I grabbed him and, you know, held his face between my hands
and I said, "I love you so much,
and Dad and I are so proud of you."
He made a joke out of it and he went, "Oh, thank you."
And then I said, "No, I really mean it.
I love you and Dad and I are proud of you."
And then he kind of said kind of an "Aw, shucks, thanks."
I don't know how I could have shown him
any more than I did that I loved him.
It's good to know that someone loves you,
but it's not something that controls your behavior.
Knowing that you're loved isn't enough.
It takes knowing how to care,
knowing the right words to say,
knowing how to connect into resources.
I didn't have that awareness
that he was so deeply troubled,
and I didn't have the tools to use
to try to help him had I known.
[Lisa Neison] And he just had such a unique vision on things.
We didn't know, we didn't know how bad it was.
Adam called me when he was on his lunch break,
and he was at my house.
And I said, "We need to figure this out."
I said, "We'll talk about it when I get home."
And he said, "Okay," and I said, "I, I love you."
And he goes, "I love you too, Mom."
And that's...
[sighs] that was the last--
[sobs]
That's the last time I heard from him.
[sighs]
It was the worst thing in my life.
[somber music]
[sighs]
Adam...
[sighs]
...he was a huge gift to me.
If we had had what, what Dawson School has
for, you know, our sons at that age,
would the outcome be different?
Would they still be here?
[teacher] This will be last time, friends, okay?
-Hands at heart center. -[all] Hands at heart center.
-Reach for the sky. -[all] Reach for the sky.
-Reach for your toes. -[all] Reach for your toes.
[Lisa Neison] What I'm worried about in our society
is the increase in suicide,
and that it is an option,
and it's an option for so many people,
and that it's not being addressed
quickly enough or broadly enough.
I think we're at the point where we could show you
evidence of the effectiveness of preventive
interventions for virtually every psychological
and behavioral problem.
We can prove that prevention works,
we have tons of evidence on it.
Name a problem, depression,
we can prevent aggressive social behavior,
we can prevent anxiety,
we can prevent lots of problems.
Because if you look at the data
on effective preventive interventions,
they don't prevent just one problem.
[Scott] That it's not that we just have, "Here's the risk factors for suicide,"
and then, "Here's the risk factors for substance abuse,
and over here are the risk factors for truancy,
and over here is violence, and over here is bullying."
That these things, they have shared risk factors
and they, they also have shared protective factors.
So, if we do our job well, and we do
upstream strength-based prevention well,
we're going to have an impact on suicide, but we're also
going to see an impact on substance abuse,
and on truancy, and on violence
and on grade point average.
It's a lot easier to focus on your science
when you're not constantly in crisis.
That really at its core, at its heart,
it's a wellness model.
That what we're after is we're not just trying
to keep people alive,
but we're trying to really help people
live healthy lives and really help people
and communities thrive.
[Jess] If you fall off the rails at 11 or 15,
and you don't get the learning support you need,
or you don't get the behavioral support
or emotional support you need,
you may end up not reaching anything near your potential.
And you're unlikely to be a school shooter
or anything else, but you're very likely to be depressed,
or to feel terribly anxious,
or to not lead a happy life.
And that's something we can avoid
I think almost all the time.
No one, including myself, could possibly
have believed that we would have changed
cigarette smoking as much as we have.
And I'm a court certified expert
on the marketing practices of the tobacco industry.
Coffee, Doctor?
Oh, fine.
-Have a Camel with your coffee. -Thanks.
[businessman] Yes, folks, the pleasing mildness
of a Camel is just as enjoyable to a doctor
as it is to you or me.
♪ It's light up time
[Anthony] They spent hundreds of millions of dollars
to keep people believing, billions of dollars,
to keep people believing that smoking
was the coolest thing.
And yet we changed that, and we changed it
with a lot less than the billions they spent
marketing it.
It's possible to change society.
We can have historically lower levels
of all of the psychological behavioral
and health problems that we've been struggling
with for thousands of years.
It really can happen.
If we can all band together to work toward these things,
we can have a massively different society.
[Jess] If we can teach kids at three or four years of age
how to be calm breathers and how to slow down,
we can teach kids to start using emotional words
at a very early age.
That's when anything is possible.
[teacher] How do you feel right now, friends?
-Good. -Cool.
[teacher] Do you feel good?
Can you describe in words
how you feel right now?
Sophie, how do you feel right now?
I feel calm.
[teacher] You feel calm?
Tammy, how do you feel?
I feel calmer in class.
[teacher] You feel calmer in class?
[indistinct] how do you feel?
I feel really good.
[teacher] You feel really good?
You look like you feel really good.
[indistinct] how do you feel?
Awesome.
[teacher] Have any of you practiced
the mindful breathing at home?
-Yes. -[teacher] At home?
I practice it on Sunday.
[teacher] On Sunday?
Was there something that crossed your mind
that made you want to think about relaxing?
I, I was thinking about Christmas.
You were thinking about Christmas?
Yeah, yeah.
Anyone else practice mindfulness at home?
[indistinct]
Um, I did mindfulness with my mom.
[teacher] You did mindfulness with your mom?
What kind of mindfulness did you do with your mom?
[Tom] Do you know, if we're going to fix this problem,
it's going to be the love, caring, support
and the long-term commitment
from people who, who care about you most,
which tends to be your family.
[woman] Good job, what a big boy!
[man chuckles] Hey, I'll see you later.
[Lisa Neison] Kids younger and younger and younger
need to be introduced to mental health...
skills and resiliency and social-emotional training,
and parents need to know how to do that.
[Sue] There would have been many ways probably
to stop a tragedy such as Columbine from happening,
but my piece of this was the family system,
the mother-child relationship.
You know, when I see sunsets now,
I still kind of have flashbacks
to the summer after Dylan died, he died in April.
And that summer was the summer I began
taking walks with my friend in the evening.
And we would walk,
and I would try to get farther and farther,
because I was so weak, I couldn't walk.
But we would walk until sunset in the evening.
[Sue] I was extremely weak.
I was actually sort of depressed,
so it, it was very hard to move.
I remember times when I would just sit on a bed
and couldn't lift my foot to get a sock on,
and then I would get one sock on.
There were times where I really didn't know
if I would live through it.
It was enlightening to try to understand
that when our minds are in control,
it felt impossible to try to deal with it.
[somber music]
[cameras clicking]
[Sue] Having those experiences cemented for me.
Understanding the hell of what it is like
to live with a malfunctioning brain.
It was hell, that's all I can say.
There's no other way to describe it.
And to some degree, that helped me understand
what Dylan might have gone through.
I think he had an awful lot going on inside
that he was really struggling with,
and he was hurting and he was confused,
and I wish I had known that suffering
inner child that was there.
But I did ask him, "Are you okay?"
I remember asking him, "You seem so tired,
you seem so distant, are you okay?"
And he said, "Yeah, I'm fine, I'm fine."
And he'd get up and he'd say, "I've got a lot of homework to do."
And I remember having those conversations,
but it wasn't enough.
It wasn't enough.
[somber music]
[Sue] When I speak to Dylan in my mind and in my heart,
the most frequent thing I say to him is, "I'm sorry.
I am sorry I didn't understand this,
I didn't get it, I didn't know how to help you.
I'm sorry that you had to go through this alone
without any help because I didn't have the knowledge
or the skills to help you."
-Dyl. -What's up?
Dyl! What's the matter with you?
[Sue] In the year before Dylan died on Mother's Day,
this was at a period of time
when he was having all those troubles.
That was when he got arrested,
and he had the trouble at school,
and my husband had had surgery,
and Dylan forgot to feed the cat
when he was home alone, and he would--
and he slept one day and missed school,
and these things were piling up.
And as a mother, I finally lost it
on Mother's Day when he forgot Mother's Day,
and he didn't even get me a card
or a flower or anything.
And I remember getting angry at him,
and I pushed him against the refrigerator,
really pushed him, and I was lecturing him.
And I went through, "You are so selfish,
you're only thinking of yourself.
Why aren't you thinking of your family?
We need you to help us,"
and just going on and on.
And if I have any regrets of any moments
I had with Dylan, it was that moment
when I was pushing and lecturing.
And my wish is at that moment that I had shut up
and just hugged him and pulled him close to me
and said, "Sit down with me, what is happening?
Tell me what's going on."
And that's the thing I regret so terribly.
[Sue] It's been over 18 years, almost 19 years.
There is still a large piece of me
that will never forgive myself
for not doing those things.
But my way of dealing with that lack of forgiveness
is to try to teach others and to share with others,
"This is what I wish I had done differently."
I'm always going to feel some sense of responsibility,
and I can't help that.
I see things changing, and I believe that things
are getting better, and we're getting more and more
aware of how to make a difference.
But every time we get a step further in that direction,
there's always a great sorrow
that I couldn't make that available for my son.
"I think often of watching Dylan do origami.
I loved to make a cup of tea and sit quietly beside him,
watching his hands moving as quickly as hummingbirds,
delighted to see Dylan turn a square of paper
into a frog or a bear or a lobster.
I'd always marvel at how something
as straightforward as a piece of paper
can be completely transformed with only a few creases
to become suddenly replete with new significance.
Then I'd marvel at the finished form,
the complex folds hidden and unknowable to me.
In many ways, that experience mirrored
the one I would have after Columbine.
I would have to turn what I thought I knew
about myself, my son, and my family
inside out and around watching as a boy
became a monster, and then a boy again.
Origami is not magic.
Even the most complex patterns are knowable,
something that can be mapped and understood.
So it is too with brain illness and violence,
and this mapping is the work we must now do.
Depression and other types of brain disorders
do not strip someone of a moral compass,
and yet these are potentially life threatening
diseases that can impair judgment
and distort a person's sense of reality.
We must turn our attention to researching
and raising awareness about these diseases.
and to dispelling the myths that prevent us
from helping those who need it most.
We must do so not only for the sake of the afflicted,
but also for the innocence who will continue
to register as their casualties if we do not.
One thing is certain,
when we can do a better job with helping people
before their lives are in crisis,
the world will become safer for all of us."
[solemn music]
[solemn music fading]
[somber music]
I knew that I had a responsibility
as, as a state senator,
and that's why I, I for one, am demanding
that we continue to work to reform
our system and our processes.
I want to create a system that I think
other states will want to emulate.
This time this year,
uh, I'm going to try to do a little something different.
Uh, I'm going to try to incorporate into my class,
uh, some wellness, stress coping strategies.
This idea that mental health only applies
to people who are sick,
that it's other people's issue,
that is a notion and a narrative that we need to let go.
Back in the day, because I've been in education,
you know, for 20-plus years,
we call them kind of soft skills.
But now there's so much research and data
to back up that when you address
their social-emotional needs,
then their academic scores go up,
their behavior issues in the classroom go down,
which is more time on task for the teachers.
And so why not teach these skills to everybody?
And, you know what, we all assume things that aren't true.
So, learning early to stop assuming
and stop believing our brains all the time.
It's not enough for kids to just learn it.
If they don't have opportunities to actually
practice it real time, then they are not going to integrate it,
and it's not going to become a part of who they are.
And so in order for that to happen,
it needs to be a partnership
across, you know, from the school
to families to community.
We really love our school system
and the teachers, and they are really great,
but he's one kid to them, you know, of 30.
We're the ones who have the greatest say in his life.
It has to start with us as parents.
These are all simple things that we can start doing
from the moment we bring our children
into this world, and they are all common things.
It doesn't take years and a degree to learn.
I've never met a parent, ever,
that didn't want to give their child the best.
Not even the parents I worked with, um, in Las Vegas
who were incarcerated.
My parents that worked three jobs,
that have latchkey kids,
all they want is to provide what's best for their kids.
And so I don't think our parents don't want to do this.
They need support,
training, and access to information
in a way in which is accessible to all of them,
languages, culture,
whatever it is, socioeconomic status,
and we would see this take off.
I would love to see some sort of national campaign.
[Jenette] We want to learn tools and options,
a way of thinking and looking at the world
at an early age so it becomes natural.
We become a coping and adjusting
and adaptive, resilient people.
[somber music]