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Mother of Columbine shooter: 'I had all those illusions that everything was OK'

By Marilyn Malara
The mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold, Sue Klebold, revealed she never goes a day without thinking of her son's victims. "It's very hard to live with the fact that someone you loved and raised has brutally killed people," she told Diane Sawyer in her first television interview since the 1999 attack. Screen Shot by ABC News
1 of 9 | The mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold, Sue Klebold, revealed she never goes a day without thinking of her son's victims. "It's very hard to live with the fact that someone you loved and raised has brutally killed people," she told Diane Sawyer in her first television interview since the 1999 attack. Screen Shot by ABC News

WASHINGTON, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- Sue Klebold, mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold, said a day doesn't go by when she doesn't think about the victims of the 1999 high school attack.

Speaking with Diane Sawyer in her first television interview since the shooting, Klebold said she could have insisted her son was doing fine.

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Almost 17 years ago, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris opened fire at Columbine High School in Colorado, killing 12 students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves. Another 24 people were injured.

"Before Columbine happened I would have been one of those parents," the 66-year-old told Sawyer. "If I had recognized that Dylan was experiencing some real mental distress, he would not have been there. He would've gotten help."

"I just remember sitting there and reading about them, all these kids and the teacher," Klebold said in the exclusive 20/20 interview.

"And I keep thinking, constantly thought, how I would feel if it were the other way around and one of their children had shot mine," she said of the parents of her son's victims. "I would feel exactly the same way they did. I know I would."

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Klebold said she always felt she was a good mom leading up to the shooting. She said she was confident at the time her son would come to her if he was in distress.

"Part of the shock of this was that learning that what I believed and how I lived and how I parented was an invention of my own mind. That is, it was a completely different world that he was living in," she said.

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