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

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I MEET JIM THOMAS FOR THE FIRST TIME on April 9, 2008, at his house in DeKalb. It’s an older section of town, a small two-story. I talk with his wife Barbara, who is an artist. She’s friendly and smart and interesting, but I can tell she’s also worried about my coming here, wants to protect her husband after all he’s been through with the media. Media trucks were on the lawn that first evening, and Jim finally interviewed with someone from the Associated Press, then appeared on CNN, but without showing his face.

Jim has agreed to meet with me partly because I’m a professor and memoirist, writing about suicide, not a reporter. And my intention at this point is to write about Steve primarily as a suicide, not as a murderer. I’m hoping to write something more sympathetic than other media. I don’t yet know, of course, about his juvenile record or really anything else of his earlier story. I believe the accounts that he was a sweet grad student who snapped.

Jim drives me to campus and we park in the lot right next to Cole Hall. I’m surprised by this. I wasn’t expecting something so direct right away. Jim was Steve’s friend as well as mentor.

“He was very methodical, very careful,” Jim tells me. “He would have parked as close as possible.”

This is the first time Jim has been to Cole Hall since the shootings almost two months ago. There’s no snow now, and that circular drive in front has a small pond in the middle, with lovely bridges. We peer in the windows (the building has remained closed as a crime scene), and I can see bloodstains on the floor, though no broken windows now. Flowers have been set outside.

I didn’t ask for this tour, but Jim walks me through the scene, including Steve’s earlier preparations. He took the sim card out of his phone, the hard drive out of his computer. Jim speculates that he might have been paying for meals with cash. The shooting was on Thursday, in a class that met Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Jim believes Steve must have come to check on Tuesday. “He would have taken a risk in doing that,” Jim says. “He could have been recognized. He still knew a lot of people here.”

It’s cold out, Jim’s breath steaming as he talks. He’s tall and doesn’t wear a hat, used to the weather here, but he looks fragile anyway because of this event and its effect on his life. What I admire is his courage to examine it head-on, trying to find out the truth despite how that feels.

“Jokes,” he tells me. “That’s a lot of how we’ve gotten through.” And he shares some of these jokes. “People say I was his mentor, so I trained him to do this, but I tell them I must not have done a very good job, because if I had, a lot more people would be dead.”

Everyone who knew Steve has been accused by media for almost two months now of missing warning signs. So their jokes reflect that.

We walk around the building to the back doors.

“I think he came in these back doors,” Jim tells me, “and checked both auditoriums. One has a sound booth, but the other has a screening room, and that has a door onto the stage.”

We both peer into the windows. We can’t go inside, because Chief Grady of the NIU police has locked everything down. He won’t meet to talk with me. His secretary slipped and told me that he’s let other people tour the hall, but since then she hasn’t even returned my calls.

Jim has rehearsed Steve’s last actions over and over, and he talks about them sometimes in first person. “It makes perfect sense to remove the sim card. I would do that, too. And I would lock the bag in the hotel not to throw off police — because they could just cut through a bag — but because I know I’ll be out during the day and don’t want someone from the hotel finding all the ammunition.”

“Why did he come back here?” I ask.

“He was returning here to Cole Hall because this is where it all began, his struggle to make something of himself through academic achievement after the group home.” Jim tells me Steve always felt he wasn’t worthy, and what he did with his final act was to annihilate all that achievement, giving in to that dim view of himself, making it true.

“The media hasn’t caught on yet to the significance of the first-person shooter games Steve played,” Jim says. “He would have checked out the auditorium ahead of time to make sure he staged his ‘game’ correctly. He was very methodical. He wouldn’t have left anything to chance.”

We walk to the student union next, very close by, and I grab a sandwich at Subway. Jim says he doesn’t ever eat lunch. Then we walk to his office, where Steve often sat and worked and helped other students.

Jim says I’ll get to meet Josh and other friends of Steve’s from the American Correctional Association student group on Friday, when we tour a community corrections center in Chicago. He tells me that he and Josh used to joke, even in front of Steve, that “Steve must be a mass murderer, because he’s so nice.”

“He was so deferential and polite, respectful,” Jim continues. “He was deferential to a fault, really. Josh and I tried to get him to relax, and he did open up and come out of his shell. He could be funny, and we got him to have a few drinks now and then.”

The media reported that a paper on self-mutilation in prisons was coauthored by Jim, Josh, and Steve, because it seemed like one of those warning signs, but Jim tells me it was actually started by another author, Margaret Leaf. She and Jim were really the authors of the paper, Josh did the research, and Steve did a bit of research but was mostly the editor. “He’d admonish us with ‘who wrote this?’ and it was fun. He was good at putting everything together, all of our messy writing.”

Then Jim sighs, shakes his head. “I would try to praise him and his work,” he says, “but he always felt his work wasn’t good enough. I tried to get him to submit a paper for a prize, but he wouldn’t submit it. ‘I don’t want to embarrass myself,’ Steve said, but it was a great paper. It could have won the prize.”

“Where do you think his insecurity came from?” I ask.

“That doesn’t necessarily come up directly in conversation,” Jim says. “You can talk with someone for years and still not know some things.”