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

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ON DECEMBER 1, 2001, as he completes basic training, Steve is notified he’ll be stationed at Fort Bliss, Texas, in the Sixth Air Defense Artillery Brigade. Fine with him. It doesn’t matter where.

And then something happens.

It’s unclear exactly what triggers it — maybe Steve loses his temper. Maybe the Army was just late in processing his full background check. But the medical examiner finds out that Steve has been hospitalized in the past for psychotic episodes and suicide attempts. Steve is flagged.

On February 1, they pull him in for a psych exam. He’s worried. What do they know? Is this normal, to be tested like this? He tries to get the doctor to tell him what’s up, but he won’t say anything.

Three days later, February 4, 2002, they cart him off to William Beaumont Army Medical Center, throw him in the Army nuthouse as a precaution against any suicide attempt. They tell him he’s possibly a danger to himself or others. He asks them what all this is about, and they don’t tell him until the next day. They’ve discovered he lied on his application, concealed his mental health history, his suicide attempts and his psychotic episodes, including hearing voices and hallucinations. He’s going to be kicked out.

He tells them they can’t do this. He’s a good soldier, he’s fine now, but they tell him it’s a fraudulent enlistment, because he did it for monetary gain, for the cash bonus and the Army College Fund. He worries that he’s going to get a dishonorable discharge, but they give him an uncharacterized discharge, an entry-level status separation.

On February 13, 2002, they dump him in his hometown, Elk Grove Village. No notifications to anyone that he might be a danger to himself or others, just dump him, as the Army does.

Steve is crushed about being kicked out. He could have spent his life in the military. It was home, finally. Everything was right. But he does understand that a kind of minor miracle has happened. After all the years of mental health treatment, he was headed straight into the shitter, but the Army has turned his life around. He’s been off the meds for a year now, he’s in good shape, his head is clear, and finally he can make something of himself. He applies to NIU, gets in, enrolls in the fall.

August 2002. Strange Steve, that’s what they call him in the dorm. He knows they call him this, and it’s because of his roommate, Ahron Mack. Ahron tells everyone Steve’s a psycho.

They’re in a double suite with three other guys in Stevenson Towers on campus. Steve takes his food from Stevenson Dining Hall, goes up to the room, sits at his desk and eats alone. Watches the news on CNN, but all he can think about is goddamn Sallie Mae. He’s not going to have the money in time to pay his tuition.

He’s busting his ass, every single day. He knows if he doesn’t make it now, it’s straight back to the SRO in Chicago. This is his one chance. No meds. No more Suicide Steve. But everyone’s against him. Even Sallie Mae.

Ahron comes back from dinner, so Steve fires up the Xbox, puts in the earphones, plays Halo. He likes the sniper rifle best. Zoom in 5×, or 10×, one shot, one kill, clear across the canyon. You can see the vapor trail from the bullet. He’s one of the marines.

Ahron tries to get Steve off Xbox, tries to get him out, but he refuses. Steve doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, won’t leave the room except to eat, Ahron tells the police later.

At midnight, Steve takes a shower. He wears long sleeves every day, even when it’s muggy and hot. He doesn’t want anyone to see his tattoos, the homemade sword on his forearm. He showers when no one will see, keeps the light turned off, likes the darkness.

Steve can’t sleep. Ahron snores. Everything about him is loud. But Steve can’t sleep because he’s thinking about Sallie Mae and thinking about everything that’s due in his classes. Not tomorrow, not even next week, but for the entire semester. He goes over everything in his head, every midterm, every final coming up, every paper. It all has weight, heft, a physical presence pressing in on him, his mind a flatland still but the horizon building up, coming closer.

He feels hollow, also. He remembers beautiful dark brown skin, wants to touch it, wants to feel her again. He remembers her, jacks off and then feels lost. It was impossible, just from the way everyone looked at them when they went out. And they were right. It was an abomination. Phillip Schroeder, one of his suitemates, will tell police later that Steve “was struggling to recover from a former relationship. Apparently he had been involved in an interracial relationship with an African-American woman. However, the racial differences between them had created too much stress and strain on both of them.” Another part of Steve’s racism, to be drawn to what he said he hated? Another denial from a man who wanted not to be gay? Who was this woman, and how long were they together?

Ahron’s alarm goes off, and Ahron doesn’t wake up. He has some sort of condition where he doesn’t wake up from sleeping. You can yell at him or even shake him, and he won’t wake up. But he still sets the alarm, a little gift for Steve.

So Steve hucks tennis balls at his head, hard, and this finally wakes him up. Ahron is upset, has the nerve to complain. Steve turns on CNN, loud.

Steve has class that day in Cole Hall, a big auditorium. Three sections of seats for several hundred, two aisles between. The seats go right up to the wall in the side sections, a kind of trap. The two aisles the only way out. The professor is up on a stage. Music 220—Intro to Music. Steve listens.

Back at the dorm, he runs into Phillip, the only one of his suitemates he can really talk to. Ahron isn’t around. Steve speaks quietly, but he’s hurrying, tripping over his words, telling Phillip about Ted Bundy, about Jeffrey Dahmer, about Hitler. Amazing, the things they did, how they got away with it. The planning, and can you imagine actually eating human flesh? Frying it up like a steak? “He would talk about them as if he idolized them,” Phillip wrote in his statement to police. “He was intrigued as to how they committed their murders and he would tell their stories to others over and over again.”

Phillip is good to talk to. He listens. But then he says he has homework to do, breaks off the conversation just as they’re really getting into Hitler, and then there’s dinner, and Steve is eating alone again, watching CNN. The news, always something, always some killing somewhere, some disaster. And the control. The façade of two parties, masking the real power brokers. But Steve can see. He can read between the lines. He’s going to switch his major from computer science to political science. While he watches, he reads Hunting Humans, a book that covers many of the most famous mass murderers, or one of his gun magazines. Then he’s back to studying.

The next day, he’s on the phone again with Sallie Mae, screaming at them. He needs his tuition money now. They tell him spring semester isn’t until January, months away, and he’ll have the funds before then, but he tries to make their tiny little brains understand he needs the money now. Anything could happen.

Later, he talks with Phillip again, getting back to their conversation about Hitler and the others. “I told him to stop because I had already heard him tell me their stories too many times and I was tired of hearing them,” recalls Phillip. He doesn’t want to talk about Hitler or Bundy or Dahmer anymore.

Steve must think Ahron has gotten to Phillip. “Strange Steve.” So to hell with them all. He’ll move out, get a single. This is unbearable, especially Ahron, but Phillip and Tom, too, and everyone else on the floor. He needs his own room. He’ll tell them he won’t take anything else.

It’s a long fight with housing, but he does finally get his way, before the end of the school year. He moves out.

And the next fall, 2003, things are much better. He takes Intro to Sociology in Cole Hall with Professor Jim Thomas. Thomas is an old guy, tall, with wild white hair. He asks questions. He puts them all on the spot. He makes them think. He challenges his own authority. “How can you subvert the power of the professor?” he asks. “If you’re not happy with this power relationship, what can you do to affect it?” He’s into “crim,” which is criminology, studies prisons.

Steve realizes prisons are a way into understanding America. The average stay is only a year, but the country believes they can lock people away, toss the key. Human garbage, just like how he was treated, but he’s back, he’s here, and so is nearly everyone who’s been incarcerated. And nearly everyone who’s served in the military. Thomas offers a way of understanding institutions, the history behind them, how they take shape. He’s a softy, an old lefty, wants people rehabilitated, doesn’t ask questions about Steve’s past.

Steve takes two classes with Jim, drops by his office, feels uncomfortable calling him JT as the others do, but Jim encourages him, as he does with all his students, breaking down the barriers, questioning power. A small cinderblock office, yellowish, crowded with two gray metal desks, gray chairs, servers for running WebBoard, Unix, and the department site, filing cabinets, no extra space at all, slatted windows, but it feels homey, welcoming, safe. Jim keeps strawberry Crush in a small fridge. He lets his grad students have the run of the place, and Steve wants in, but he worries about offending, always feels like he’s intruding. “In the first year or so, he was always apologetic, extremely deferential, and seemed sheepish about taking up my time,” recalls Thomas. “He always asked: ‘Is this ok if I. .??’ I’d respond with something like, ‘Steve, it’s as much your office as mine — just don’t turn off the Unix servers.’”

Thomas becomes a positive role model for Steve. Steve writes later, for a questionnaire for Mark, that Thomas “was effective because he led by example and pushed those around him to excel, whatever they did, and lived by the philosophy ‘to each to his own ability.’ He wasn’t a communist, to be sure, as the quote may imply, but he did make you feel as though you were on an equal level with him, which I feel is a powerful quality of a leader. For a leader to make their underlings feel as though they are in the proverbial trenches with them, that is a powerful and unique ability for any charismatic leader to have.”