Last Day on Earth: A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter

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I DON’T THINK I’LL EVER ENTIRELY UNDERSTAND the year after my father’s suicide. I told everyone my father died of cancer, and I didn’t see a therapist. I didn’t have a real conversation with anyone. Instead, I shot things, the guns a terrible substitute. A year of the most basic brutality, a year I’m lucky to have escaped without hurting anyone. I was an insomniac — and would be for the next fifteen years — and as I lay wide awake in bed every night, I couldn’t help thinking over and over about the.44 magnum my father had used to kill himself. I had fired it once, at maybe eleven or twelve years old, and though I had used both hands, it flew back so hard it nearly hit me in the face. But the scariest part was that it fired with only the slightest pressure on the trigger. It was difficult to put your finger on the trigger and not have it fire. So what I kept wondering was whether my father had really intended to kill himself. What if he was just thinking about it, just testing it, or what if he had one moment of deciding but it was only a brief moment and, with the hair trigger, that was enough? I wanted to hold that pistol in my own hands, feel the possibility, feel the heft of it and know what it felt like pressed against my head. And I’m glad now I didn’t have that opportunity.

I finally sold my father’s other guns when I was in graduate school. I needed the money, but I also just didn’t want them in my life anymore. What I really wanted was for them never to have existed. But once I sold them, I was surprised by this terrible feeling that I had sold off a part of my father, because I have so little of him left. He vanished with his suicide. We sold our land, also, that hunting ranch, for peanuts, stupidly, and it was mostly the land that held our family’s history and that connected all of us every year, scattered now.

I still love my father, even twenty-nine years after his suicide. The feeling hasn’t diminished at all, hasn’t faded over time, but I have nothing left to attach it to. If I could hold his.300 magnum now, would he come back to me, some closer memory, some echo of hiking with him through live oak and manzanita, watching him raise that rifle high over his head as we pushed through brush? If I remember that rifle, really focus on it, I can remember the sunlight on my father’s light-brown curly hair, receding, his lopsided grin as he looked down at me. But more than that, I can almost remember how the moment felt, what it was like to be there with him, to hunt with him, what it was like to belong. My father was what attached me to the world.

It turns out I don’t really have that many similarities with Steve. I certainly don’t share his racism, libertarianism, love of horror, fascination with killers, military training, ambivalent sexuality and sprees online and with prostitutes, medication and mental health history, drug-dealer friends, tattoos, disturbing mother, interest in corrections, etc. But I did inherit all my father’s guns at thirteen, when I was most hyped up on hormones, and the world meant nothing to me after he put that pistol to his head. I had nothing to lose. And I had witnessed a lot of brutality.

I watched my father gut shoot two deer once. It was on the upper glade of our ranch. We spotted a group of deer, including two bucks. We were so far away, they couldn’t possibly sense us. My father sighted in with his.300 magnum. I watched through the binoculars.

A great boom like artillery, my father recoiling, and I saw the buck hit in the stomach, gut-shot. It fell over and began tumbling down the steep slope, gathering speed in the dry grass. It was screaming, just like a human being. The voice really the same.

The second boom and the second buck was hit the same way, terrible luck. My father would be upset. A gut shot spoils the meat. He was a very good marksman, so this was unheard of, that he would gut shoot two in a row. This buck fell and rolled the same as the other, screaming also.

The two of them tumbled together down that long glade as we watched, and I’ll never forget their voices. I’ll never be able to erase them, though I’d like to.

I think we can be damaged, and I think Steve’s life was already destroyed before he left high school. He had an incredible drive, though, to make something of himself, and I think that must have made his final act all the more bitter to him.