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

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STEVE’S WINNING OF THE DEANS’ AWARD is a triumph after all he’s been through. His life is good now. He’s in love with Jessica, graduating and looking forward to grad school, and he also wins a two-year paid internship in public administration with the village of Buffalo Grove, about sixty miles from DeKalb. “It was my first choice and I am ecstatic!” he writes to his friend Ashley Dorsey, who has been awarded a similar internship. “All the people that I’ve talked to from Buffalo have been wonderful!” He’s just as enthusiastic about the graduate program, a master of public administration: “As Dr. Clarke said at the beginning of the fair on Friday, it’s the first day of the rest of our lives and will be a fantastic two years+!”

Something doesn’t work out at the Buffalo Grove job, though. The internship fits perfectly into Steve’s job aspirations to become a city manager, and the annual salary of $27,000 will certainly help him through grad school, but in his first week, spent shadowing all the city’s departments (fire, police, public works, etc.), his supervisor, Ghida Neukirch, writes that Steve is “extremely shy and appeared to have the deer in the headlights look.” He’s always nervous about new social environments, and he’s not fitting in. He’s drinking a lot of Red Bull. He’s upset, also, that he’s not doing more important policy work. And then, on June 2, 2006, he abruptly leaves, after less than two weeks. He quits the master in public administration program, also, and switches to a master in sociology.

These changes are abrupt, and looking back, they seem tremendously important. Public administration was something Steve was truly interested in, not just the influence of a good teacher. The fact that this road ended so quickly must have created a lot of anxiety about who he was and what he was going to do with his life.

But at the time, everything seems to work out, perhaps because sociology is easy for him. He has a good fall semester, 2006. He’s tutoring students, working as a teaching assistant in statistics. He’s good at this, and the students seek him out. One of them is Anne Marrin, who was given his internship at Buffalo Grove after he left. He’s upset to learn that she’s been assigned an important project there, something not offered to him. But otherwise everything is working out well. He’s co-authoring the paper with Jim Thomas, Margaret Leaf, and Josh Stone on self-injury in women’s prisons. Steve a cutter, but now he’s writing about this from a distance, using his past for his future career. All is being transformed. Sociology is a safe haven.

Steve hangs out with Josh Stone in Jim Thomas’s office. Josh and Jim try to get Steve to chill out. “Meet our friend Steve,” they tell new folks, and then they give some variation on that mass-murderer line. “He must be a mass murderer, he’s such a nice guy,” or “he’s too nice, he must be an axe murderer.” Steve polite to a fault, apologetic always, but he starts to relax with Jim and Josh. They introduce him to a new world. Those stories of a poker chip on a bull’s forehead, monkeys strapped to dogs. Josh’s funny stories about Disney World, his confessions about his brother’s time in juvie. Steve still doesn’t reveal much about himself, but he feels at home with Jim and Josh. They get him to have a beer, get him to hang out and take some time off. He’s happy, or as close to happy as he can be.

Then Steve’s mother dies. A battle with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, a battle he didn’t see much of. He hasn’t been close to her in years. Thinks she hated him, was afraid of him. So he hated her, and now this. No time to make anything up.

He doesn’t tell people about his mother’s death, or show emotion. He doesn’t take time off school and won’t let Jessica go to the wake, but he calls her and tells her he wishes she was here.

Then more change. He’s just started classes and now it looks like he isn’t going to be able to stay at NIU for grad school. The university has lost faculty from its sociology department through attrition and stripped the advanced courses, especially in criminology. So Jim writes a recommendation letter for him again, and Steve and Jessica apply to the grad program in social work at the University of Illinois, three hours south in Champaign. A smart move academically, a necessary move, but why does he have to make this change now, when things are just starting to work out? He hates the idea of having to move to a new place, having to make new friends. He doesn’t want to start over. He doesn’t think he can.

Things are falling apart with Jessica, too. On again. Off again. Messy breakups for everyone to see. The most recent one, she came teary-eyed to Professor Myers’s class, embarrassed him. It’s his fault, but he doesn’t want everyone to see. During one of the worst breakups, he tells her, “I’m going to buy a gun.” She takes it as a suicide threat, but she doesn’t know how close he really is. This is always the roughest time of year for him anyway, the holidays, because of his family, but especially this year.

He’s eligible now to buy a gun. September marked five years out of the mental health system, so it won’t show up anymore. He applies for his FOID card in December, gets it January 19, 2007.

He’s anxious about his future, about what he’s going to do for work. On Valentine’s Day 2007, he lets Jim know he’s passed his correctional officer testing. He bombed the LSAT in the fall, taking it too soon after his mother’s death. The thing about grad school in social work, or an academic future in criminology, or a position as a correctional officer, is that these were never his fields. They’re Jim’s influence, the influence of a good teacher. Steve wanted to go into political science, so he’s thinking again about public administration, still thinking he might try to run a city someday. Or law school if he retakes the LSAT and does better. But really, he has no idea.

He stops going to his classes. He doesn’t need them anyway, since he’ll be transferring to the new grad program at U of I and the course-work won’t transfer over. He buys a Glock.45 caliber handgun on February 19, a powerful weapon. He buys a shotgun and another handgun the next month. Goes to the shooting range instead of school. He’ll get Fs in his classes, but who cares.

Then Seung-Hui Cho kills thirty-two at Virginia Tech. April 16, 2007. Steve’s excited. He’s firing off emails. “Crazy,” he tells Jessica, and sends her Cho’s writings. He’s all over this with Mark, studying everything. The writings, where Cho bought his guns, his mental health history, the photos, the planning, the timing, even his favorite song, “Shine” by Collective Soul, and “Mr. Brownstone” by Guns N’ Roses, which Cho writes a short play about. Steve’s been reading other books on mass murderers, serial killers, terrorists, and he and Mark have been discussing all of it, but Cho takes front and center.

“I think it was mostly a sociological interest,” Mark says. “He was interested in what was going on in the mind of Cho, and why it was so successful, and how someone could do it, how they could pull it off.” Steve tells Mark that Cho “obviously planned it out well,” admires how he thought to chain the doors. All the careful planning, like Columbine. Just thrilling, all of it.

The truth is that Cho’s actions could not have been planned. He shot and killed his first two victims in a coed residence hall on the Virginia Tech campus at about 7:15 a.m. Then he walked back to his dorm room next door. At this point, he must have been surprised that no one was after him yet. He spent the next two hours changing out of his clothes, putting together a media package for NBC news (mailed at 9:01 a.m.), and arming himself for another round. This was not a plan. It was an improvisation after there were no consequences from the first round. No one killed him, he wasn’t trapped into suicide, and he was mentally ill, ready to continue killing, but this is not the same as “planning” or “success.” The fact that Steve could find this scene exciting rather than pathetic and tragic shows that he was mentally ill. The fact that Mark still thinks in terms of “success” and still describes a killer’s actions as “methodology” shows that he’s mentally ill as well. That’s one problem with the concept of “warning signs.” What if all of a mass murderer’s closest friends are a little bit crazy too? Steve had two email addresses that contained the word “Glock,” but his friends thought that was normal.

Cho’s next round starts with chaining the three main entrance doors to Norris Hall, then he peeks in a classroom twice, which is a myth that will be told later about Steve, transferred over from Cho’s story. Then Cho just shoots people. Two semiautomatic handguns, firing 174 rounds in nine minutes. Everyone trapped at close range in classrooms, like shooting fish in a barrel. He was allowed to buy nineteen clips to fill with ammo ahead of time, 10 or 15 rounds each, buying from the same online supplier Steve will use, so reloading takes only an instant. Steve will choose one of the same guns, too, the Glock 19, and in both shootings, this will be the most deadly weapon (used also in the 2011 Giffords shooting and others).

How much have things really changed since Charles Whitman, the Texas tower sniper, bought an arsenal one day in 1966 and lugged it up the tower in a metal footlocker? While I was in DeKalb, the Illinois state legislature tried to pass a law that would have limited handgun purchases to one handgun per person per month, meaning a person could still buy a dozen pistols a year, just not all at once, but that effort was struck down, voted against by DeKalb’s own representative.

Cho killed thirty-two people, wounded another twenty-three, then killed himself before police arrived. The deadliest rampage by a single gunman in U.S. history, and the whole thing was just stupid. There’s nothing cool or interesting about Cho’s “methodology.” Buy a Glock 19, buy some extra clips, walk up to a classroom and shoot people. We still have nothing in place to stop anyone from doing this. It’s an American right.