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

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THE MARY HILL HOME is a narrow three-story brownstone, like the side tower on a castle with no castle attached. The street is narrow, lined with cars that have been dented up and beaten. A car parked out front has replaced panels of a different color. There’s an urban park across the street, chain-link fence and playground structures.

Before Steve moves in, he takes a tour and has a thorough evaluation:

“DESCRIPTION OF MEMBER: Steve is a 17 y.o. Caucasian male who appears his stated age. He is tall and overweight. During his tour, Steve was very quiet and did not ask many questions. His thought form appeared normal and his affect flat. He did not exhibit any bizarre or inappropriate behaviors during his tour.

“MEDICATIONS: Steve is currently taking Prozac 20 mg in the a.m., Zyprexa 10 mg at hs [hour of sleep] and Depakote 500 mg in the a.m. and 100 mg at hs. Past medications include Paxil, Cogentin, Risperdal, Lithium and Cylert.

“SYMPTOMS: Steve stated that when symptomatic he becomes anxious, depressed and unable to sleep. He reports losing interest in all leisure activities, has suicidal thoughts and feels worthless.”

They wake Steve early here. They monitor his medications so he can’t overdose. They make him keep everything clean. They make him work in the kitchen. He’s washing dishes, and they’re getting paid to make him do this. Then it’s off to therapy. Group problem-solving therapy, Mondays and Wednesdays. Vocational training on Fridays. Then all the one-on-one sessions.

Rather than getting better, his symptoms get worse. He’s oversedated, overweight, doesn’t want to take his meds. He has special powers, though, he tells his psychiatrist. He can see his old girlfriend, Missy. And he can read minds. He’s been able to do this all his life, but the power is stronger now, for some reason. He knows what they think of him here, how they underestimate him. In group sessions, you don’t need to be a mind-reader, the other residents so slow you can actually see them think, see each twitch of a thought, the forming of each word on their lips.

When I visit the Mary Hill Home, on a spring afternoon, I see one overweight young white guy in a sweatshirt ambling up to the house. I cross the street and meet him as he reaches the door.

“How do you like it here?” I ask him.

“It’s really stupid,” he says. “They don’t really help you. They just throw groups at you. I’m losing my hair because of it.” And he leans forward to show me. His red hair is in fact very thinned out, and he’s young, so maybe this is from the meds, but mostly he just sounds crazy and dumb, and I think this is what infuriated Steve most about the place. He felt he didn’t belong here.

Steve crawls through the days, through the months, the longest time of his life. Through the fall, through winter, every day unbearable, every day the same. He escapes several times, makes his way home to Elk Grove Village, to his parents’ home, begs them to take him back. Every time they drive him back to Mary Hill. Steve blames his mom, calls her a whore, a bitch, a slut.

Why won’t his parents take him back? Is his mother a monster who fattened him with horror films in his childhood then threw him away when he became frightening himself? Or is this far too simple? What was his father’s role?

Steve hates the Mary Hill Residence and is afraid of the neighborhood. When they encourage him to go out, nearly everyone he sees is African American. He rings at the front door, and there’s always a delay before someone comes to let him in. If he’s ever chased, if someone is trying to kill him, this won’t be fast enough. His racism doesn’t start here — he had a KKK card years before — but it does intensify. He’ll talk in later years about how much he hated this neighborhood, how much he hates affirmative action, the idea of helping these people. Did any of this come from his parents?

He listens to Marilyn Manson constantly now. Julie introduced him. She said it made her want to destroy stuff. It made her feel “really cool.” But to Steve it just feels like comfort, like going home. I’m just a boy, playing the suicide king. Your world was killing me. Nothing heals. Nothing grows. We used to love ourselves. We used to love one another. My prescription’s low. The world is so ugly now. I want to disappear. Our skin is glass. Yesterday was a million years ago. I know it’s the last day on earth.

Manson speaks to every part of Steve’s life, including the possibility of mass murder, asking the question, What If Suicide Kills?

Steve is only marking time. But then something beautiful happens. Columbine, April 20, 1999. Steve reads books on the occult, obsessively, but this is better. They can’t hide the news from him. Columbine is everywhere, on every newsstand, on the TV. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold just like Steve and his friends a year ago in high school, in trench coats, in the cafeteria, making the jocks pay. A brilliant idea, the propane tanks. If only they had exploded. Like watching himself. A triumph. Going out with dignity, not rotting here.

Eric and Dylan planned their killings and suicides in advance, like Steve. And there was no limit, really, to how many people they were willing to kill. They set a small firebomb in a field half a mile away that was supposed to go off at 11:14 a.m. to distract and divert police and fire crews. Then the two propane tanks were supposed to explode in the cafeteria a few minutes later, at 11:17. The tanks had enough explosive power to destroy the cafeteria, killing everyone inside, and could even have made the library above collapse into the cafeteria. Eric and Dylan waited outside in two different vantage points at their cars, armed to shoot students as they fled. If the bombs had gone off and the school had evacuated toward the parking lot, they could have killed hundreds.

The propane bombs didn’t go off, though, and nothing went as planned. Eric and Dylan missed most of the students they shot at, and Dylan didn’t shoot much at all. One teacher thought they were just horsing around and went to tell them to knock it off. Students were told to hide under their desks, and Eric mocked this, said “peekaboo” to Cassie Bernall before shooting her in the head. He bent down so close to her that the recoil from his shotgun broke his nose. He and Dylan were as putzy as shooters could possibly be, the entire event a comedy of ridiculous errors if it weren’t a tragedy, and it continued on for seventeen minutes of killing and another half hour of roaming aimlessly before suicide only because the police were even more pitiful, hiding outside, afraid to go in, protecting themselves. The one teacher who died, hours later, bled out because he wasn’t evacuated in time. It was the worst possible emergency response.

But in Steve’s mind, Eric and Dylan were somehow heroes. They took control, and ten days after the Columbine shooting, Steve decides he’ll take control, too. He goes off his meds, and he scores some pot. On Sunday, he smokes a lot of pot. But then he feels so paranoid. He’s outside, in the neighborhood, and he’s panicking. He runs back to Mary Hill, pounds on the door, and tells them he has to go to the hospital. They tell him to calm down, but he insists on being taken to the hospital. He needs to feel safe.

Steve needs structure. He’s not right. He’s broken. They’ve broken him from all the meds, and he’s just smart enough to know. He weeps about it. His life is tragic. His friends thought he was brilliant, but he just worked hard on his homework. His IQ is 100, just normal. Just smart enough to know how screwed up he is.

He pulls it together over time, the rigid daily routine, the long march. They place him in a job at Things Remembered, October 27, 1999, but it becomes the Christmas season, everyone shopping. It’s too stressful. The pressure, all the people, all these little things they want to buy. Gnomes and cottages and angels. Kitties and puppies. He needs to do things in threes to make sure they’re done, checks his apron is tied, checks it again, but he can’t do that here. He has to do each thing just once, and everyone he works with is a moron. He argues, and it’s his fault, of course, then they fire him, just three days before Christmas. Merry Christmas to you too.

By February 1, 2000, though, Thresholds decides somehow that Steve has things together enough to transition out of the residence day program into an SRO, a single room occupancy. He has his own room in a crappy building, and they all share a bathroom.

This is an even worse neighborhood. “His first night in the SRO was rough,” says Jessica Baty, the person who will come to know him best in later years, his girlfriend and confessor. “I remember him telling me about how he heard gunshots and someone was pounding on his door, thinking that Steven was the previous occupant. Steven said that he put furniture in front of the door.” He doesn’t sleep. He hides in a corner and fears for his life.

They place him in a job at Walgreens, but he’s fired after a month, on April 17, 2000, for poor attendance. He’s hired at Osco, a pharmacy, in June, but he’s self-conscious, decides to go off his meds to lose weight. He starts having hallucinations of his ex-girlfriend again. At noon on June 13, he overdoses on twenty Effexor. A social worker wakes him at 1:30 p.m., drives him to work, but by 6:00 p.m., his break time, he feels so bad he goes to the hospital. They keep him on for another month at Osco, then fire him.

Steve is angry all the time, and paranoid. He isn’t hearing voices anymore, but he has to check doors over and over, and touch things. The physical world is a torture of meaning. Threes speak to him, almost prophetically, tell him what to do.

In August, he goes on vacation with his family to Wisconsin. He gets angry, is impatient, impulsive, and he’s too sedated. He and his mother meet with a psychiatrist at the end of August, and they talk about the meds. He’s not actively psychotic anymore, so they adjust the meds a bit, though he’s still on Prozac, Depakote, Seroquel, and Clozaril. He becomes a bit less sleepy.

Steve starts work at K-Mart in September. He thinks people are following him, that they’re against him, ganging up. He gets in arguments with his coworkers, anxious and emotional. He’s working a night job at UPS, too, but he quits that because it’s too physically demanding. He’s feeling sleepy during the daytime but getting used to it.

He wakes up one morning and he’s wet the bed. This freaks him out, but he tries to hide it. It happens again, and again, six or seven times. He’s a bed wetter now, on top of everything else. They reduce the Clozaril, and that helps. He chooses more Seroquel and less Clozaril, even though it will make him sleepier. He can’t be a bed wetter. He’d rather be a zombie.

He visits his sister in October at the University of Illinois, and he’s determined to enroll there next fall. In the meantime, he’ll enroll at Truman College and get a couple courses under his belt. Maybe it’s seeing people his age who are happy. People his age who aren’t drugged out all the time. But at this point something seems to click in Steve. He’s going to get out of here and do something with his life. He’s not as drowsy anymore, but he uses three alarm clocks just to make sure he wakes up each day.

Steve loses his K-Mart job in November when he breaks his hand. It’s in a group session, on November 6, 2000, and Steve feels another resident has insulted him, so he bumps him in the smoking area when the guy tries to block the door. The guy hits Steve in the face, then Steve breaks his hand hitting the guy several times in the head.

This isn’t Steve’s first fight. He reports to his therapist that he was beaten up “a lot” in high school, that he was often the subject of jokes and insults. And he pulled a knife on Adam that one time after the “wiretap.” But what is his history of violence exactly? When does it begin, and how, and with whom? And how did he feel about fighting? Did he like it? He never talks about it in later years, doesn’t write anything. But it shows a certain level of commitment to hit someone hard enough to break your hand, and hitting someone in the head shows intention clearly enough. Was he willing already to kill?

Steve looks forward to Thanksgiving with his family, four days at home, but it goes terribly. His sister tells him she hates him. His mother sends him away early. Then, when he tries to just pick up his money and cigarettes from the therapist, he gets blamed for everything. He tells them to fuck off, he’ll leave the program and doesn’t need therapy.

A few days later, though, he’s contrite. He wants back in, sets up a therapy appointment. And he follows through with his plans for school, enrolls at Truman, a two-year community college, for several classes in January.

Steve charges ahead with school. He wants to succeed, wants to leave his psycho years behind. His therapists warn him that getting overinvolved in school and ignoring his mental health issues will lead to a “hard crash” that will undo everything he’s accomplished. But Steve wants out of the system, finds ways to end this period of his life. He weans himself off his meds at the end of January 2001, and he hides this fact for five months in order to still collect his money. They believe he’s still taking the pills. He reports nonexistent side-effects, begins living a double life. They think they still have him, but he’s on his way out. He gets them annoyed enough they won’t even want him. He humiliates a woman on the staff by playing music with sexually explicit lyrics. He quits seeing his therapist, shaves his head. He tattoos FTW, “Fuck The World,” on his own skin. He complains about noise and sleeping, so they have to move him around.

Steve moves out and gets his own apartment on June 21. He breaks the news of the five-month lie to his case manager the next day. With pleasure. On June 29 they meet again, and Steve says he did fine without the meds. His case manager points out that over the last five and a half months, Steve has “held one job for three and a half weeks, quit school without earning credit, tattooed himself, continued to have no friends, and quit therapy, the job club, and the college support program.” But he also says something else: he suggests they expedite Steve’s discharge, since he’s not willing to work with them anymore. Steve wants out of Thresholds, and now they want him to go.

Steve becomes the Chicago Department of Public Health’s problem. They do an extensive evaluation, which isn’t easy to do. “Client is a poor reporter of his past/current situation,” they write, and indeed he is. He lies and hides constantly. Of his suicide attempts by cutting and overdose, “client states he did these for attention, that he learned this from peers in residential placements.” But they know he was making the attempts in high school, before Mary Hill. “Client has not taken psych meds for six months, says he learned to wean himself off, feels better, stable now.” They don’t trust this, either, and they generally just don’t like his low motivation for seeking help. “Every time I have a therapist, it ends up bad,” he says. He finds therapists annoying. “Same old questions. . how are you feeling, etc.”

They do get Steve to talk about his past and his family. He says his sister, Susan, “wants to repress men,” admits his grandfather’s alcoholism, and admits he had a difficult childhood, was the “butt of jokes” and “beat up a lot in school.” Still, though, the Chicago Department of Public Health decides they just can’t handle him, and they determine that his family can afford private services. But Steve fixes the problem. He applies to the Army on September 5, 2001.

Steve needs this. So he checks “no” on his application for suicide attempts. No, also, for “evaluated or treated for a mental condition,” “used illegal drugs or abused prescription drugs,” “depression or excessive worry,” “received counseling of any type,” “frequent trouble sleeping,” and “anxiety or panic attacks.” They give him a $4,000 cash bonus and sign him up for the Army College Fund.

Steve will have to wait two weeks to enlist, and he hates waiting, but then 9-11 happens, so this keeps him busy. Better than Columbine, in a way, everyone talking about it. The camera angle for the Pentagon plane is odd. It seems staged. And where is all the wreckage, all the debris? It’s an 80-ton plane. What are they hiding?

He’s officially enlisted September 20, shipped off to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for basic. This will become the happiest time of his life so far.

Steve doesn’t get along with his bunkmate, but he loves everything else about the Army. All this structure, all the order. You can imagine how great a relief it must be from his OCD. No more insomnia. No more struggle to get up. No more worry about what to do with the day. Every minute is planned for him. He runs and runs and runs.

Every one of them a maggot, every one of them the same. No more worry about what others will think. No one is thinking anything about him. No minds to read because their minds are beaten flat. He keeps his locker neat, checks everything three times, wins praise for this. Obsessive compulsive disorders are a good thing here.

They train him how to shoot, how to kill without feeling anything. No emotional or psychological response, that’s what they’re looking for, and he can do this. He tells Jessica and his best friend “Mark” about it, even years later. A point of pride. “He did say that the military does desensitize for killing,” Mark says. “He did say that. We talked about it a couple different times. It probably came up in our conversations about Columbine and whatnot. But he just said that the military desensitized. He’s like, ‘I’ve been trained to kill someone and not have the psychological effect. Don’t think of them as a person.’ So it does tie in directly. He did tell me that.”

In the Army, Steve’s not supposed to question anything. If you think about right or wrong, if you worry about morality or ethics or who you are or who they are, this could slow your trigger finger. It could break the chain of command. It could get your buddies killed, and it’s mutiny, treason, traitorous. Don’t think. Just kill when you’re ordered to kill. He loves this, can’t wait to kill some “ragheads.”

The land is flat here, endless in all directions, and the inside of his mind feels like this for the first time, open, stretching on and on, a kind of wind that’s blown all the anxiety away.