Nobody knew when or if a shooter would ever come. But Northern Illinois University had prepared for one.
The campus police here couldn’t stop the shooter who did arrive on Thursday. The one who hid a shotgun in a guitar case and three handguns in his coat. They couldn’t keep him from opening fire on a crowded lecture hall, killing five students.
But when the shots rang out, the university instituted its emergency plans within three minutes.
“We had a plan in place for this sort of thing,” the university’s president, John G. Peters, said at a news conference Friday. “We were dealing with a disturbed individual who intended to do harm on this campus. We did everything we could to ensure safety on this campus.”
Spraying Bullets
Steven P. Kazmierczak, 27, a former student at Northern Illinois, drove onto the campus sometime before 3 p.m. on Thursday. He parked and walked to Cole Hall with the four guns. Joe Peterson, a graduate student teaching “Introduction to Ocean Science,” was wrapping up his lecture when Mr. Kazmierczak kicked open the door to the auditorium. He immediately began firing.
George Gaynor, 23, a senior from Homer Glen, Ill., was sitting in the last row of the lecture hall. But he got a fairly good look at the shooter. “I could see his face,” Mr. Gaynor told The Chronicle. “From what I could see, he did not have any expression on his face.” The shooter, Mr. Gaynor said, did not say anything as he sprayed the room with bullets.
“I didn’t know what I was seeing,” he said. “I was out of that building in 10 seconds. I never ran so fast in my life.”
Chain Reaction
Around that time, a shift commander with the DeKalb Fire Department was driving along Normal Road, a street that runs through the center of Northern Illinois’s campus, when he came upon a scene that was anything but normal.
Three students, all of them hysterical, ran up to the commander’s car, said Lanny W. Russell, the DeKalb fire chief, in an interview. “They’re shooting people in Cole Hall,” the students told the commander, as they tried to climb into his car, terrified. Cole Hall was roughly 100 yards away.
It was but one moment in a rapid chain reaction by police, fire, and university officials in DeKalb. The commander notified the dispatcher, and by the time the assistant fire chief for operations had arrived on the scene, several campus police officers were already there. The first arrived at 3:03 p.m.
Shortly after the shootings, Chief Russell said, officials began receiving calls from several different locations on the campus to which the injured students had fled: Neptune Central, a dormitory; Stevens Building, which houses classrooms; the Holmes Student Center; and the health-services building, among others.
At 3:20 the university issued a campuswide alert on its Web site: “There has been a report of a possible gunman on campus. Get to a safe area and take precautions until given the all clear.” It instructed students and employees to avoid the area of campus where the shooting had taken place.
In addition to that warning, the university also issued e-mail and voice-mail alerts, and activated its alarm system, a siren that ran for about 30 minutes, a staff member reported.
And by 4 p.m. police officers had conducted a sweep of the campus and determined that the gunman, who killed himself on the auditorium stage, had acted alone. At 4:10, another update appeared on the university’s Web site: “Campus police report that the scene is secure,” it said, telling nonessential employees to leave campus, students to report to any residence hall for counseling, and students and parents to call any of six crisis hot lines.
Between the first online alert and the all-clear, the university posted two other updates: one at 3:40 to announce that classes had been canceled through Friday, and another at 3:50 to confirm that there had been a shooting, with several victims taken away by ambulance.
A Fresh Wrinkle
Although the university had coordinated closely with the fire and police departments to craft what Chief Russell called “mass casualty planning,” that so many of the injured students were scattered about the campus “threw a wrinkle into it,” he said.
All of the university’s first responders are also trained as emergency medical technicians, which means they could immediately begin treating injured students, Chief Russell said.
The local Kishwaukee Community Hospital received 18 victims from the shooting, one of whom died there. Seven of the victims were in critical condition and have been transferred to other hospitals. Eight victims were treated and released, and another was expected to leave the hospital Friday, hospital officials said at a news conference Friday. The final victim is in stable condition.
Roger Maillefer, the hospital’s chief of staff, said that most patients had suffered wounds from buckshot.
“There were no people who came in who had been trampled or pushed around,” said Dr. Maillefer. “I think it speaks to how the students handled themselves.”
Echoes of Other Tragedies
The Northern Illinois incident occurred less than a week after a woman shot two classmates to death and then killed herself on the Baton Rouge campus of Louisiana Technical College, and it came nearly 10 months to the day after 33 people were shot dead at Virginia Tech, in the biggest mass shooting in modern American history.
But unlike the shooter at Virginia Tech, Mr. Kazmierczak appears to have shown no sign of his troubled mind to professors who knew him. Janet Carter-Black, his adviser at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he had been a graduate student since 2007, said he showed no signs of mental trouble or violence. “He was a nice person, he was a nice kid,” Ms. Carter-Black, a professor of social work, said in a conference call with reporters.
But Mr. Kazmierczak was on medicine that people close to him said he had recently stopped taking, authorities said Friday. “He was taking medication, had stopped, and had become somewhat erratic,” Donald Grady, the university’s police chief, said at a news conference.
Mr. Grady reiterated that there was no apparent relationship between the shooter and any of the victims. And he said the police had no idea what Mr. Kazmierczak’s motive might have been.
He had purchased two of the guns used in the shooting on February 9 at a dealership in Urbana-Champaign, Mr. Grady said. The police are still studying the origin of the other two guns used in the shooting. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and state, local, and campus police officials are examining the crime scene at Northern Illinois.
Practice Run
Murder is a rare occurance in DeKalb, Ill., a city of 40,000 about an hour west of Chicago. And there have been no murders on the Northern Illinois campus for at least four years, according to campus crime statistics. Jim Killam, the adviser to the university’s student newspaper, the Northern Star, said that about 10 years ago there was an apartment shooting on homecoming weekend, but nobody was killed and it was never solved.
Still, university officials had a recent practice run for violence on the campus. Mr. Peters, the president, shuttered the campus in the midst of finals week in December, less than 48 hours after an anonymous threat was found scrawled in a dormitory bathroom.
The threat was discovered on the night of Saturday, December 8, on the wall of a woman’s bathroom in the Grant Towers North dormitory. It used a racial slur for black students, who were told to “go home.” The graffiti also referred to December 10 and the Holmes Student Center. Then, in what appeared to be different handwriting, it read: “What time? The VA Tech shooters messed up w/ having only one shooter.”
University officials met through the weekend to discuss the threat. In an e-mail message sent on Monday morning, they told all students that the campus was closed, citing security concerns as well as icy weather.
Mr. Peters explained his decision to close the university in a campuswide e-mail message, which he sent when classes resumed the next day. “The graffiti consisted of a message that, because of its specificity, was deemed to be a credible threat against the Northern Illinois University community,” he said.
During the closure, the university also promoted five different telephone hotlines on which students, parents, employees, and others could reach staff members for more information. Those same numbers were posted again yesterday on the university’s Web site.
‘Our Gentle Giant’
Today the sun shone brightly all day on the university’s campus. Steam rose in columns from the tops of many buildings, and the banks of snow that lined sidewalks showed no signs of melting in the frigid temperatures.
Northern Illinois is a regional university of about 25,000 students, many of them commuters from the Chicago suburbs or the Rockford area. Because classes were canceled, the campus was quiet but for the presence of law-enforcement officials and reporters, some of whom came from as far away as Norway. Even the campus bus service, the red Huskie Line, motored by silently, its destination “Out of Service.”
Most students who were on the campus today, were holed up inside the student newspaper’s office. One student was crying. Another student, who showed up for her first day as a Northern Star reporter, was told by a colleague: “You picked a great day to start.” Everyone seemed sleep-deprived and alternately energized and exhausted.
One student who died in the shooting, Daniel Parmenter, had worked in the Northern Star‘s advertising department. The sophomore sold ads to 25 or so standing clients and had worked five days a week since April 2007.
“He was our gentle giant,” said Maria Krull, the business adviser to the Northern Star. “Dan was the most respectful, kind, soft-spoken of our entire crew. He was always very helpful to everybody.”
Just yesterday morning, Daniel was in the Northern Star’s business office, sprawled on the couch with his shoes on. Ms. Krull said she wanted to scold him for having his feet on the furniture. “But I just didn’t,” she said. “I normally do,” she said, but yesterday “I didn’t.”
Memorials Spring Up
As the afternoon wore on, the temperature dropped, the wind picked up, and makeshift memorials to those who had died popped up around the campus.
In the interior of the campus, five crosses bearing the names of the victims stood atop a small hill. They were just yards away from Cole Hall, the scene of the slayings, a four-story, low-slung brick building cordoned off by yellow police tape. Small clusters of students stood silently in front of the crosses, hands jammed in their pockets and hoods drawn tight over their faces. Many wore red Northern Illinois garb.
Up the road, at the corner of Normal Road and Lucinda Avenue, a large embankment of plowed snow held signs and letters to the victims, as well as a frozen cup of coffee, a can of Red Bull, and many red roses, relics of a Valentine’s Day memorable for its poignance. One candle of the many placed there continued to flicker in the afternoon wind, even when the corner had disappeared into cold shade.
Matt Minuth, 27, a first-year doctoral student in education leadership at the university, was hammering a sign into the cold, hard snow. “There’s a lot of bewilderment,” he said after pounding the sign, which read “Love One Another,” into the ground. “There are a lot of people who are confused, with good reason.”
Mr. Minuth, who like many students lives nearby, was just returning from his job at a nearby school when he came upon the emergency vehicles at the scene of the shooting yesterday. He said he had spent much time thinking today about what he sees as an “exponential” growth in the number of school shootings in recent years.
“It’s a trend that’s been going on now at least eight or nine years,” he said. “I have to wonder what the catalyst is.”
Paul Fain, Elizabeth F. Farrell, Sara Lipka, and Beckie Supiano contributed to this article.
