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

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VALENTINE’S DAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2008. I imagine Steve sitting on the end of his bed in the broken-down Travelodge. Smoking a Newport. Stale smell of old cigarettes, of all the lives that have passed through this room. I know he’s dressed in black shoes, black pants, his black T-shirt with “Terrorist” in white letters above a red AK-47 assault rifle. Black stocking cap above dark eyes, narrow face. Small mouth, almost no chin. His eyebrows are plucked. He’s shaved his pubic hair.

Across his lap, the Remington 12-gauge shotgun, the barrel sawed off. One hand on the stock, one on the barrel. He can’t sit still, though. Always fidgeting.

Beside him, laid out carefully across the bedspread, all pointing the same way, three pistols. Glock 9 mm. Sig-Sauer.380. Hi-Point.380. He picks up the Glock, checks the clip, makes sure it’s full. Checks it again. Checks it again. Threes have always spoken to him, shown him what to do. Three pistols. Three shells in the shotgun. He could take out the duck plug, make it five shells. But then it wouldn’t be three.

The Glock doesn’t seem real. Heavy, but looks like plastic, feels like plastic. A toy gun, almost.

He sets the pistol down. Picks up the next, and the next, checks each clip three times. Checks the extra clips. A bullet is so small, so heavy for its size.

Waiting. Takes another drink of Red Bull. Pushes up the sleeve on his right forearm, looks at his tattoo again, Jigsaw riding a tricycle through a pool of blood. Cut marks in the background.

He lays the shotgun in its guitar case. Closes the latches, tucks all three pistols into his holsters, along with extra clips in their pouches, everything hidden by his coat. Kenneth Cole. Not a trench coat exactly. Nicer. Checks himself in the mirror, walks to the door, then has to go back to check again, just to make sure. Always checking.

He turns right out of the motel lot, just a white Honda Civic, nothing you’d notice. Left on Carroll Ave. Left into the guest parking lot.

He parks a couple hundred feet from Cole Hall. A cold, overcast day. Snow. Listens to a CD the police will find in his stereo. He’s titled it “Final CD.” Waits for the last song, Manson’s “Last Day On Earth.”

Class will be over soon. He must know that. Has he hesitated? Has he sat there in his car listening to music and considered not going through with it? He’s almost too late. A few more minutes, only a few more, and everyone will be gone. Does it occur to him that what he’s about to do is not inevitable, even for a life like his, so perfectly shaped for mass murder?

One last song. I know it’s the last day on earth. . say goodbye. Then he gets out of the car, grabs the guitar case, puts on a small black backpack to make it look like he’s carrying books for classes, and walks the short distance to the back of Cole Hall. It’s all brick, and there’s a walkway here between the two auditoriums. He’s close to the door that will take him backstage. He drops the backpack, opens the guitar case, picks up the shotgun, checks his pistols.

Joe Peterson is at the end of a lecture on ocean sedimentology. A lot of his 160 students are missing because it’s Valentine’s Day and they just had a test two days before, on Tuesday. Students at the top of the auditorium are getting antsy. Behind them, students arriving early for the next class keep opening the doors and peeking in.

Joe clicks to the second-to-last slide. He glances at his cell phone on the podium, 3:04 p.m., and steps from his podium toward center stage to give the last part of his lecture.

The door behind the screen bursts open. Steve walks abruptly onto the stage. He stands for a moment just looking at the class.

Jerry Santoni, a sociology major with an emphasis in criminology, a member of ACA, the group Steve helped found, has a first thought that “this guy’s lost,” coming in the stage door. But then Steve raises the shotgun.

He fires into the front row of students. Chaos. Multiple students hit, everyone rising to run. Unnum Rahman hears the shot and feels something dripping on her face. She has a shotgun pellet in her forehead. Steve’s using only birdshot. She gets up and runs. But some students still think it might be some kind of joke. Jamika Edwards, for instance, sitting in the fourth row. Even though she’s very close, she thinks this can’t be real. Confusion.

Jerry Santoni is near the back, so he sees only a puff of smoke and a bit of fire. Jeremy Smith, in the very back, starts running after the first shot and is the first one out the doors, the first to escape.

Joe Peterson takes a few steps back to a stage door like the one Steve entered. He pulls on the door, but it’s locked. He pulls again and again, trying to open it as Steve fires his shotgun two more times into the students. Jamika says the second shot is fired high into the back rows. She runs with other students down the aisle but ducks into another seating area after just three rows and gets on the floor.

“How quiet it was between the shots is still haunting,” Joe says.

“He’s reloading!” someone yells. And now others are running.

The auditorium has three sections of seats separated by two aisles, and these aisles are the only way out, which means everyone has to bunch in together. Most of the students happen to be on the side of the classroom Steve is on, so he has a clear shot with many targets straight down the aisle. Some of the students crawl under the seats to avoid the aisle.

Jerry dives for the floor and hits his forehead, gets a concussion. But he doesn’t even notice, and he’s able to stay conscious. His glasses have fallen down, so he takes a moment to push them back up, then he runs out, but someone trips right in the door, and there’s almost a pileup. The guy behind him is injured and bleeding. “I remember the blood drops hitting the snow and turning it red.”

Jerry is planning to be a police officer, and he thinks fast enough to take an immediate right turn to get behind a wall, then he just keeps running, all the way to the student center. But he feels guilty already. From his pizza delivery job, he knows the girl who was sitting next to him, and he didn’t help her get out of there. She’s on the floor, hiding under someone’s coat.

Joe is hiding behind his podium, up on stage with Steve. The stage is large, and he’s at the other end. “I could hear the click of the plastic shotgun shells as he was reloading,” Joe says. “I remember thinking, ‘How the hell is he reloading so fast?’”

The first call to 911 comes in at 53 seconds after 3:04. Two seconds later, more calls, and officers Besler and Burke gather info, pinpoint the location and basic description of the shooter. It will take them more than a minute and a half to do this, though, until 34 seconds after 3:06, when they dispatch an officer to Cole Hall. A minute and a half is not a long time, but in a shooting, it’s an eternity. The police aren’t going to make the mistakes of Columbine or Virginia Tech. They’re moving as fast as they can, and the first officer who arrives is supposed to immediately go in, without backup. But Steve knows this new plan, too, and has planned his shooting to take only a couple of minutes. So despite best intentions, the police aren’t really responding to the event. It’s not possible to respond to this event. They’re going to respond to an aftermath.

Steve fires the shotgun three more times, shooting students in the back as they bunch up in the aisle, trying to escape. At this distance, the tiny bird shot pellets are spraying wide, hitting many with each shot, wounding and not killing. That eerie quiet again between each round.

“I had two thoughts during his second reloading,” Joe says. “I remembered that girl at Columbine hiding under her desk who got shot at point blank range. I also thought, ‘I just got married. I’m not going to do this to my wife.’

“So I took off. I jumped down from the stage and ran down the aisle, except there were students everywhere, so it was more like spider-walking, using my hands, too. I was keeping my eyes on him as I went. I knew not to turn my back on him. I was halfway up the aisle when he turned and looked right at me. He had just reloaded the shotgun, but he dropped it. I didn’t see him reach for the Glock. It was so fast, he just suddenly had it, and he fired at me. There was no change of expression, not even excitement. It was like if you’re repainting a room at home, painting the walls, and you realize you missed a few spots, it was that mechanical.”

This is Steve’s first of forty-eight shots with his pistols, after six with the shotgun.

“I felt something like a strong flick on my left shoulder. I was wearing three layers, so the bullet snagged. I felt something hot and round fall out of my sweater and hit my knuckle. I looked down and saw two white holes from my white shirt underneath my black sweater, and I touched it quick with my other hand. It felt hot, and the sweater was cauterized, felt like plastic. I just thought, ‘I’m really lucky.’ And I also thought, ‘I’m going to get out of here.’”

Brian Karpes is Joe Peterson’s teaching assistant, sitting in the front row, in front of Joe’s podium. He remembers Joe trying to open that stage door. “He pulls on the door like three times, and it’s locked. It was the most crushing feeling. Your only way out, and it’s locked.”

When Joe takes off running during the second reloading, Brian runs after him. “I ended up at the back of a large group, though, blocked, and I knew I’d be the first to get shot.” Brian’s a big guy. So he dives behind the podium, onto the stage, on his knees.

“I tried to peer around the podium to get a look at him, but the minute I saw him, he turned and saw me. He turned and fired, and he pulled the trigger of the Glock multiple times. He just kept shooting me. I got hit right in the head. It felt like getting hit with a bat. As I fell to the floor face-first, all I could think was, ‘I got shot and I’m dead.’ I hit the floor with my eyes closed and a ringing sound in my ear, and I thought this was literally the sound of my dying, going into the darkness.”

Bullets that miss are exploding against the concrete and tearing up Brian’s side with shrapnel.

“After a while, though, he moved on to others and I realized I was still breathing and not dead, and I realized I should just play dead.”

Steve jumps off the stage. Dan Parmenter is sitting next to his girlfriend, Lauren DeBrauwere. Media will report later that he was visiting the class just to be with her on Valentine’s Day, but he’s actually enrolled. He’s a jock, a good-looking guy. His family considers him their “miracle baby,” because he was born with a heart defect and survived surgery as a toddler. He’s in the front row, tries to shield Lauren, and Steve shoots him five times — twice in the head, twice in the back, once in the side — and kills him. Then Steve shoots Lauren, twice, in the abdomen and hip. One of the bullets travels up and narrowly misses her heart. Then Steve shoots the girl next to her. “It was almost like he went down a line,” Lauren’s father says.

Steve walks calmly up the aisle, shooting students with his pistols as he goes. Lieutenant Henert of the NIU police believes he used the Glock predominantly and tried one of the other pistols but had a problem with it.

“It would be quiet for a few moments,” Brian says, “All I remember is just unbelievable quiet — then a few more shots. Every time he’d shoot, I’d jump, and every time I’d jolt like this, I was yelling to myself, ‘You’ve gotta lay still.’”

It’s only a couple minutes, but it seems to stretch on forever.

Ivan Gamez is hiding in the right side seating section with his friends Sara Crooke and Angela Brocato. When Steve gets to their aisle, though, he isn’t looking at them. He’s looking only at the center section of seats, shooting students who are lying on the floor.

Gina Jaquez is lying on the floor in the fourth or fifth row with her friend Cathy — Catalina Garcia — and classmate Maria Ruiz-Santana. She hears several students scream for Steve to stop shooting. But he keeps shooting. He walks up and down the aisle, works his way along the rows. He walks closer to her. She can see his shoes under the seats, only five or ten feet away.

He keeps shooting, a few rounds at a time. Five dead. Eighteen injured. Samantha Dehner is one of the last to be injured, shot in the right arm and leg. Gina Jaquez is still right there next to Steve, hiding, terrified.

Then Steve walks away, hops back onto the stage.

One more shot. Then silence. Gina waits. Waits a bit longer. Finally, she taps her friend Cathy on the back. “Let’s go, Cathy!” she says. But then she sees blood on the floor near Cathy’s hip, and Cathy isn’t moving. She shakes her, and then she tries to get Maria off the ground. Tries to pick her up, but she won’t move, either.