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

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THE MILITARY HAS TRAINED most of our mass murderers, including Charles Whitman, the Texas tower shooter who killed fourteen and wounded thirty-one in 1966, the year I was born. He invented the school shooting, really, though he also murdered his mother and wife first, not limiting himself to school.

The military trains all its troops to kill without feeling anything, and so we should fear every American who has served in the military. But they aren’t the only ones we have to fear, unfortunately. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Columbine were high school killers bred from a gun culture that comes at least partly from hunting.

My own earliest memories are of guns and hunting. This was Ketchikan, Alaska, 1970, timber wolves slung across the bow of my father’s boat, trapped and shot. Antlers I found in the rain forest behind our house, moose and mountain goat and Dall’s rams that my father felt were too small to keep. Running through that rain forest at four years old, I imagined I was being chased by bear or wolf, sometimes falling through the false second floor of branches and ferns and decay, disappearing completely, climbing back out in panic. Always holding a toy gun or even just a piece of wood shaped like a gun.

At six or seven, in Northern California, my father finally gave me a Sheridan Bluestreak pellet rifle, powerful enough to kill squirrels if I hit them behind the shoulder. The giving of the gun was a ritual, my father’s pride and pleasure as he showed me how to pump the gun, how to pull back the bolt. He even read a poem from Sturm, Ruger & Co. about a father and son, used it to teach me safety: never point a gun at anyone, always assume a gun is loaded but never leave a gun loaded, always keep the barrel pointed down. This was very soon after he and my mother had divorced, and we had only the weekends now. Roaming his ninety-acre ranch near Lakeport, California, one of those weekends, I didn’t realize the rifle was pumped and loaded, and it fired as I walked. Luckily the barrel was pointed at the ground. But my father turned around, the disappointment clear on his face, and my shame was nearly unbearable.

The next year, when I was eight, he gave me a 20-gauge shotgun for hunting dove and quail. It made the squirrels easy, too, though I had some bad moments, shot a squirrel high up in the trees once, only wounded, and it actually screamed as it leaped from branch to branch. I shot twice more, but the single-shot gun was slow and the squirrel kept getting farther away and just kept screaming, in terrible pain. For some reason, though, this didn’t turn me away from guns but felt like part of the grim reality of growing up, inevitable, as if this type of experience were a given that couldn’t be turned away from. As if we were put here to hunt and kill, and the only true form of a day was to head off with a gun and a dog, hike into the hills for ten or twelve hours, and return with meat and stories. That shotgun became an extension of my body, carried everywhere, the solid heft of it, cold metal, a sense of purpose and belonging. I gazed at it in the evenings, daydreamed of it during the week at school, looked forward to when I’d head out again.

When I was nine my father gave me a.30-.30 Winchester lever-action carbine, the rifle used in all the westerns, and he went down on one knee when he presented it to me, holding it in both hands, as if it were a ceremonial sword. “This is the rifle I learned on,” he said. “This is what we pass down through the family. The rifle I hunted with when I was a boy, the rifle I shot my first buck with, the rifle you’ll shoot your first buck with. It’s a good gun, an honest gun, with only a peep sight, no scope. You won’t be shooting long range, and you’ll need to hit the buck behind the shoulder.”

He moved back to Alaska then, and when I visited, we flew into a remote lake by float plane, camped on a glacier, and slept with our rifles loaded, a shell in the chamber, beside our sleeping bags. “If a bear comes,” he told me, “the bullet from a.30-.30 will only bounce off his skull or bury in his chest and not do anything. You’ll have to hit him in the eye or in the mouth if he roars.” There was no moon. We were the only humans for a couple hundred miles, and I lay awake imagining the bear attacking my father in the middle of the night while I tried to sight in on an eye in the darkness. This felt like the nature of our relationship: I saw him only during vacations now, and he would give me tasks that felt impossible, including making up for lost time. We were supposed to cram half a year into a week.

I shot my first buck at eleven. A rainy weekend in September 1978, on the White Ranch, our 640-acre hunting spread in Northern California. A two-hour drive from civilization, it was the entire side of a mountain, with high ridges, enormous glades, pine groves and springs, ponds and switchbacks, an old burned area, and even a “bear wallow.” Our entire male family history was stored in that place. As our Jeep pickups crawled along the fire roads, my father and uncle and grandfather would tell me the stories of past hunts. The creek where Gary Lampson stepped on a small sleeping black bear. The stand of trees where my uncle once shot a spike — a buck with only one point on each side of its antlers, too young, illegal — wounded it, and then couldn’t find it. Places of triumph and shame, places where all who had come before were remembered. All of our family, all of our family’s friends.

My father flew down from Alaska every fall for this hunt. He was in his late thirties then, a dentist like his father, in years of despair leading toward his suicide. Grim-mouthed, hair receding, thin and strong, impatient. Everything in his life had somehow gone wrong, and his depression was something I had no way of understanding at my age. But he hadn’t always been like this. He’d hunted here since he was a boy, and he was known then for being light-hearted, a joker. Whenever he came back, he could see each year recorded in the place, wonder at who he had become.

At eleven, though, I could think only of who I would become. Shooting my first buck was an initiation. California law said I wasn’t allowed to kill a buck until I was twelve, but the same family law that gave me a pellet gun at seven, a 20-gauge shotgun at eight, and a.30-.30 carbine at nine said I was ready now.

I imagined sneaking up through pine trees or brush to make my first kill, but the weekend was rainy, so we hunted directly from the pickup. It felt unfair, even at eleven. The deer would be standing under the trees in the rain, flushed out from the brush. They didn’t like to get wet. I stood in the back of the pickup with my father, holding on for the ruts and bumps. And when I saw the buck, hidden mostly by a stand of half a dozen thin trunks, I immediately felt pounding at my temples. Buck fever. Heart going like a hammer, no breath. The moment of killing something large, another mammal, something that can feel individual, that moment is not like any other. You could call it many things — brutal, wrong, irresistible, natural, unnatural — but what it felt like to me was straight out of Faulkner, the rush of blood and belonging, of love for my father. This was the largest moment of my life so far, the moment of being tested.

I saw two points on one side of the buck’s horns, making it legal to shoot. I levered a shell in the chamber and raised the rifle, but my father put his hand on my shoulder.

“You have time,” he told me. “Rest an elbow.”

So I knelt in the bed, rested my left elbow on the side of the pickup, much more stable, and looked through the peep sight, lined it up with the deer’s neck. I couldn’t shoot the deer behind the shoulder because its body was hidden by the trees. I had only the neck, long and slim. And the sight was wavering back and forth.

I exhaled and slowly squeezed. The rifle fired, and the neck and head whipped down. I didn’t even notice the hard kick or the explosion. I could smell sulfur, and I was leaping over the side of the pickup and running toward the buck. My father let out a whoop that was only for killing bucks, and it was for me this time, and then my uncle did it, and my grandfather, and I was yelping myself as I ran over ferns and fallen wood and rock. I charged through the stand and then I saw it.

Its eyes were still open, large brown eyes. A hole in its neck, red blood against soft white and brown hide. I wanted to be excited still, wanted to feel proud, wanted to belong, but seeing the deer lying there dead before me in the ferns seemed only terribly sad. This was the other side of Faulkner, conscience against the pull of blood. My father was there the next moment, his arm around me, praising me, and so I had to hide what I felt, and I told the tale of how I had aimed for the neck, beginning the story, the first of what would become dozens of tellings. I slit the deer with my Buck knife, a gift from my father, slit the length of its stomach, but not deep, not puncturing innards. It seemed a monstrous task. I had both hands up to my elbows in the blood and entrails, not the overpowering foul bile of a deer that’s been gut shot but foul nonetheless, ripping out the heart and liver that I would have to eat to finish the kill, though luckily they could be fried up with a few onions first, not eaten raw. I pulled out everything and scraped blood, cut off testicles, then my father helped me drag it to the truck. He was grinning, impossibly happy and proud, all his despair gone, all his impatience. This was his moment even more than mine.

Back at camp, we hung the buck upside down from a pole and I skinned it, punching down between meat and hide with a fist. My uncle fried up the heart and liver, and then I was sitting at a wooden bench under a tin roof with a slice of heart on my plate. Two holes in the slice, one big, one smaller, two chambers. It was tough and tasted awful, but I was able to get it down. The liver was not so easy. Mushy and strong. I forced several swallows but managed to feed most of it to the dog under the table.

The next day, in the lower glades — wide expanses of dry yellow grass on an open hillside, fringed by sugar pines — I saw another buck. It was in short brush off to the side, a three-pointer this time, bigger. I aimed for the neck again but hit it in the spine, in the middle of its back. It fell down instantly. Head still up, looking around at us, but it couldn’t move the rest of its body. So my father told me to walk up from behind and finish it off execution-style, one shot to the head from five feet away.

I remember that scene clearly. The big buck and its beautiful antlers, its gray-brown hide, the late-afternoon light casting long shadows. After all the rain, the air was clear and cool, distances compressed, even in close, as if through a View-Master. As if I were looking at this deer through a magnifying glass. I remember staring at the back of his head, the gray hide between his antlers, the individual hairs, white-tipped.

“Be careful not to hit the horns,” my father told me.

I walked up very close behind that deer, leaned forward with my rifle raised, the barrel only a few feet from the back of his head, and he was waiting for it, terrified but unable to escape. I could smell him. He’d turn his head around far enough to see me with a big brown eye, then turn away again to look at my father. I sighted in and pulled the trigger.

After that, I began missing deer, closing my eyes when I shot. And I also made up imaginary deer. The next fall, when we split up to hike down through brush, I imagined a deer leaping out in front of me. The blood came to my ears, my breath gone, and it was the same as a real buck. I levered a shell in and fired, imagined the buck leaped at just that moment, arcing over the bullet, and I fired again.

My father came running, arrived breathless. “Did you get it?”

“It got away,” I said.

“Did you wound it?”

“I don’t think so. It was leaping. It leaped right over the bullet.”

My father and uncle and I spent an hour searching everywhere for blood as I retold the story several times, how the light looked on its hide, a big three-pointer.

My father would finally catch on, though. We were on an outcropping of rocks over the big burn, an area consumed by fire years before, with only shorter growth now. A buck leaped out from a draw and bounded across the hillside opposite us.

My father was hunting with his.300 magnum, and he was an excellent shot, but this deer was far away and moving fast and erratically, dodging bushes and rocks. I was firing, too, but only pointing the gun in the general direction, closing my eyes, and pulling the trigger. I opened my eyes in time to see one of my bullets lift a puff of dirt about fifty feet from the buck, and my father saw this, too. He paused, looked over at me, then fired again.

This was the last time we hunted, and we never talked about what happened.

I turned thirteen that fall, after the hunt, and I saw very little of my father. At Christmas, he was having troubles I didn’t understand, crying himself to sleep at night. He wrote a strange letter to me about regret and the worthlessness of making money. At the beginning of March is when he asked whether I would come live with him in Fairbanks, Alaska, for the next school year, eighth grade.

Not long after I said no, my father called my stepmother. He was alone in Fairbanks in his new house, with no furniture, the ides of March, cold, sitting at a folding card table in the kitchen at the end of a day. He had broken up this second marriage the same way he had the first, by cheating with other women. And now my stepmother was moving on. She’d found another man and was thinking of marrying him. My father had other problems I would learn about later, including the IRS going after him for tax dodges in South American countries, failed investments in gold and a hardware store, unbearable sinus headaches that painkillers couldn’t reach, in addition to all the guilt and despair and loneliness, and he told my stepmother, “I love you but I’m not going to live without you.” She was working in a dentist’s office in California, where she had moved after their divorce, and couldn’t hear well. She had to duck behind the door with the phone and ask him to repeat what he had said. So he had to say again, “I love you but I’m not going to live without you.” Then he put his.44 magnum handgun to his head, a caliber bought, like the.300 magnum, for grizzlies, capable of bringing a bear down at close range, and he pulled the trigger. She heard the dripping sounds as pieces of his head came off the ceiling and landed on the card table.

I stopped hunting after my father’s suicide, but I inherited all his guns. Everything except the pistol. My uncle wanted to get rid of that, sold it right away. But that still left me with my father’s.300 magnum rifle, the.30-.30 rifle, his 12-gauge shotgun, the 20-gauge shotgun, the pellet gun, and various odds and ends I had picked up, such as a pellet pistol and a pistol crossbow.

In my eighth-grade year of shooting out streetlights and living a double life, I tried to be the boy my father had wanted me to be. I joined the wrestling team, which he had always wanted me to do, and I was unflinching with his rifle. I sighted in on neighbors at night from the hills, but I also sighted in on them from my own room, from my bedroom windows in the afternoon, watched the man across the street swirl a glass of scotch in his living room. I could see every detail of his face through the scope, even a few dark hairs in his nostrils. Shell in the chamber, finger near the trigger, trained for execution.