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

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MY OWN JUVENILE REPORT IS FROM 1980. Only one contact with the Santa Rosa police, and not with the.300 magnum. It was a BB gun, a hot summer’s day, at the fence in our backyard. A fifteen-foot drop-off to the neighbors’ yard below, since we were on a hill. Pine trees along the fence, shady and hidden. My mother at work.

I usually shot at birds with the BB gun and also a pellet gun, but today the neighbors’ dog was barking at me. A black Lab, like the one I’d had with my father. I’d spent weekends at his ranch in Lakeport, California, before he moved back to Alaska. That dog had greeted me every Friday evening by knocking me flat. I’d see the white diamond on his chest, then I’d hit the ground.

I don’t know why I decided to shoot at the neighbors’ dog. I have only the facts of Steve’s life to understand what he did, the details of scenes, and really that’s all I have from my own life. I can’t remember enough of what I felt or thought twenty-eight years ago. A self is not a constant thing, and a mind changes from year to year and can’t remember how it thought before. We think we remember, but that’s fiction, built on the few facts that were noted and stored away.

A beautiful dog, rich black coat, tail wagging as it barked. It was on a back porch that was only a concrete slab in front of a sliding glass door to the living room. The neighbors’ yard was large, with a lot of trees, so the dog was at least fifty feet away, maybe more, and I do remember thinking that a BB was far too slow to do any damage, especially at this range. At the most, it would feel like a swat.

I aimed a couple feet above the dog’s back to account for the fall of the BB and pulled the trigger. A light cough of air, and the brass BB arced away and fell even lower than I had thought, hitting the concrete under the dog’s belly and slapping into the sliding glass door behind. Then there was a pause. The dog wasn’t barking. I wasn’t breathing, and all was still. I could see the BB stuck in the glass, but since that was impossible, I thought I was imagining it.

The glass moved in waves. Large ripples over its entire length, become a liquid, something I had never seen, something I didn’t know was possible, and then it exploded. The entire sliding glass door shattered into thousands of fragments.

The sound was loud, and I should have been running away, but I had just witnessed the most beautiful and improbable thing.

Then the neighbors’ sons emerged from the shattered doorway and I ducked down. They were yelling, and after a few more moments, I heard them start up their VW van and roar down their street to come around the block.

I ran into the house with the BB gun, to the hallway closet, pushed it behind my mother’s coats and pulled out my old BB gun, the broken one. I ran back outside to our shed and was opening the door when I happened to see my neighbor, Ned, looking out his bedroom window at me. He was a year or two younger than I was, a small kid, and we were friends, sort of. I had shot him once with the BB gun, a really lucky shot as he ran down the sidewalk away from me. Just pointed the gun high in the air, and he was far away, running fast, but the BB somehow arced perfectly and hit him in the back. Luckiest shot of my life, and today had been the unluckiest.

I put my finger to my lips to ask Ned to keep this a secret, then ducked into the shed to place the BB gun and ran back inside the house.

The van pulled up, the neighbors pounding at our front door. Did I open the door and talk with them? I remember their yelling, and I remember what they looked like, two older boys in high school, stoners with long hair, and I remember feeling frightened, but I could have been watching through the peephole.

When my mother came home, she believed in my innocence. She wanted to clear my good name. So we drove around to the neighbors and sat in their living room next to that shattered, missing door, and she laid into them for how their sons had frightened me. She was a school counselor, an authority of sorts. But they knew I had shot at their dog, which pissed them off even more than the glass.

My mother then took me to Ned’s house. I remember sitting down with Ned’s parents. Ned had squealed on me already about hiding the BB gun, but his father said something like “we know David’s a good boy,” and Ned’s mother pursed her lips and made it clear she knew that wasn’t true. My mother looked at me then, a curious look, as if I were some new kind of monster.

Then we visited our other neighbors. They reported seeing me on the roof with a pellet gun, said they were tired of me shooting all the doves off the telephone wires. They liked doves, and no doves came here anymore.

My mother called the police. I was still maintaining my innocence, and she wanted the truth. I thought it was bad form, personally, to call the police on your own son, but she cared only about truth and justice, not distracted at all by blood.

I lucked out, though. The cop who arrived was the daughter of “Green,” our neighbor at our previous house, an older woman who became like a grandmother to me and my sister.

The three of us stood at the fence right where I had stood to fire the shot. “Can you trace the angle the BB was shot from, some sort of ballistics?” my mother asked. She seemed ready to pay for the test herself.

“It must have come from up the hill,” I said.

We went into the shed to look at the BB gun. “It’s broken,” I said. “It doesn’t even work. I thought about trying to hide it because I was scared, but then Ned saw me, so I just put it back.”

Green’s daughter tested the gun, and it was indeed broken. My mother didn’t know about the other BB gun. But she told Green’s daughter about my pellet gun stunts and everything we’d learned from the neighbors.

Green’s daughter thought for a while, then said I was a good kid, I got good grades, I shouldn’t be shooting BB guns or pellet guns, but we’d never know what happened to that sliding glass door. It wasn’t possible to figure out the angle of fire with a BB. She said we should just assume I was innocent and let it go.

So nothing happened, and I continued shooting. From Survivalist Magazine I ordered a converter kit for the.300 magnum that allowed me to shoot.32-caliber pistol shells in the rifle. They were much quieter and could be mistaken, even, for firecrackers. They were very accurate through that long barrel, and I could hit streetlights right from my own backyard.

I ordered the converter kit with my mother’s knowledge and blessing. This was the time of nuclear holocaust fears, of The Day After and The Beach, and she liked the idea of squirreling away some food and water. We had long excited talks about how I would be able to hunt and provide for the family in times of Armageddon, and this converter kit was a part of that plan, would allow me to kill small game with a rifle that could also snipe bad guys with its full.300 magnum shells. These discussions put us very close to the Michigan Militia that Steve admired, put us dangerously close to his libertarianism, to the primacy of the individual or small clan over the larger group or society, especially the federal government. It was insanity, but it wasn’t uncommon at the time.

I also tried, like Steve, to make bombs. I filled a small glass apple juice bottle with gasoline and stuffed a rag in the top, set it in the middle of a neighboring street late at night, and lit it on fire, then ran back a hundred feet. Nothing happened. I didn’t know how a Molotov cocktail was supposed to work, didn’t realize it had to be thrown and shattered, that it wasn’t technically a bomb. I couldn’t consult with anyone, because I had realized early on that if you want to commit crimes, you have to do them alone. No one else can be trusted.