Family torn apart in wake of Columbine

Tuesday, June 29, 1999

By Dan Luzadder

LITTLETON, Colo. – Victor Good’s house seems uncommonly quiet as he sits at his desk near a window that looks out on Columbine High School.

Gone are the sounds he describes as those of “normal, awkward teenagers,” which, until recently, included his stepson, Nathan Dykeman, 18, Nathan’s best friend, Dylan Klebold, and Dylan’s friend, Eric Harris.

From a balcony upstairs in the tidy home, Good and his stepson watched through binoculars two months ago as SWAT teams surrounded Columbine. They saw, at that distance, wounded student Patrick Ireland’s desperate plunge out of the school library window.

It is where Good first heard Nathan’s chilling prediction: that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were the boys with the guns who killed 12 students, a teacher and themselves, and wounded about two dozen others.

Now it is where Good and his wife, Julie, Nathan’s mother, mourn a different kind of loss: They haven’t seen Nathan since three days after the shooting.

They haven’t even spoken with him since he packed his bags and left home with his biological father, Matt Dykeman, to move to Florida, Good said.

Nathan walked out on his graduation, on the funeral of his best friend and on the only family he has known for the past six years.

The images left to the Goods were from Nathan’s national television appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America” where he talked about his two friends.

And from the story that appeared about him in the supermarket weekly National Enquirer.

Both media organizations, Good said, paid Nathan thousands of dollars for his appearance – something Good and his wife warned Nathan not to take, something Good said, bitterly, has helped disrupt their family.

“His ‘Disney dad’ is responsible for that,” Good said.

Good said Nathan was paid $16,000 by ABC for an innocuous videotape he and Dylan Klebold had made. He also said an ABC producer called their home and offered them money for an appearance, and suggested they might make “$2 (million) or $3 million” from a book deal later on.

Good said they weren’t interested.

He said the media’s luck changed after Nathan left his Colorado home.

Reached at his father’s home in Florida, Nathan tells a different story.

“I was broke. I had to leave my truck in Oklahoma where it broke down,” he said. “Now my college tuition is paid for. I’ve been criticized enough for this. What was it I did wrong? I know at least a dozen people who were offered money from the media.”

Nathan says he wasn’t paid for an interview, but for the videotape that Klebold and he made of a trip to school.

He did enter into an agreement with the National Enquirer, which he now says distorted, mischaracterized and misquoted what he said.

The Goods’ trauma may seem less dramatic than the devastation that descended upon the families whose children died or were wounded by the two high school killers.

But Good said it seems as though they have lost a child.

“April 20 was the longest day of our lives,” Good said. “It’s like it took a month or more to turn the page on the calendar, to try to get on with living.”

“I suspect there will be a lot of families who will face something like this,” said John Kiekbush, chief of investigations for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department and lead investigator in the case.

“This is the kind of thing that can happen to people who go though these kinds of traumatic experiences,” he said.

“It’s very hard to understand,” said Good, his voice cracking. “Nathan was so close to his mother; he was kind of a mama’s boy. His mother sat by the phone all day on Mother’s Day. The phone never rang.”

Nathan said the fallout came over the reaction of his stepfather and mother when they learned that his friends Klebold and Harris were the killers. He said it was as if they ceased to trust him, to believe him. They were terrified, he said, that he was somehow involved.

“They tore apart my room,” he said. “They threw away my heavy metal CDs, anything that had a skull on it or something like that. I couldn’t believe the way they treated me.”