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

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NIU PROFESSOR KRISTEN MYERS talks about the “forward, together forward” campaign here, which is from the school fight song and is posted on the door of nearly every business in DeKalb. She talks also about the “new normal” approach from the administration. It sounds like something out of Orwell’s 1984. “Everyone is supposed to move forward now as if nothing happened, because now is the ‘new normal,’” Kristen says. “But I’m not willing to ‘absorb’ any more and move on in the ‘new normal.’”

Kristen’s angry now because she adored Steve as a student and helped recommend him. He went to parties at her house and met her kids. “If I had the money, I’d move away right now. I’d leave the country, I think. Maybe Canada or Mexico.” She was in Panera with her daughter and suddenly felt she had to tell her what to do if a shooter came in the door. “When I had to talk to my daughter in Panera, that was it.” She tells me that a young woman on the faculty carries a kind of popup Lexan shield now to every class, a contraption made for her by her husband. And Kristen’s husband taught at Virginia Tech before coming to NIU. His father and grandfather committed suicide. There’s a sense of doom.

Jerry Santoni is “ready and anxious to move on afterward in classes,” so he’s frustrated by the counseling sessions, some of which he feels become “just random gossip sessions.” But he can’t believe the oceanography course continues after the shooting. “The teacher [Joe Peterson] was pretty relentless, even for the final. I took the class only as an elective. The only policy change was that we’d have announced quizzes instead of pop quizzes. I thought he would react a lot more sympathetically.”

Jerry is in a bathroom on campus a few days afterward, his first day back in school, and someone bangs against a towel dispenser, which makes a loud sound. “I seriously went through three seconds of ‘Oh God, What’s happening!’ I remember the echoing of the shotgun blasts.”

“The students were the most inspiring thing,” Joe Peterson says, talking about how they forged on and completed the class. Less than 10 of his 160 or so students dropped out. “I’m not a victim of this guy,” he says. “I’m a survivor of him.”

But the damage Steve did extends to thousands of people. The funerals for the five students he killed — Catalina Garcia, Ryanne Mace, Dan Parmenter, Gayle Dubowski, and Julianna Gehant — are held the week after, from February 18 to 20, “but there are really about forty thousand victims,” Jim Thomas says. “This entire university and community.” And one could extend that farther, too, of course. The vice principal at Steve’s former high school in Elk Grove Village tells me they can’t even hold a fire drill now, students are so spooked. The effort put into emergency response plans at universities across the country mirrors the Homeland Security effort, expensive and entirely incapable of responding to a swift attack.

Steve’s godfather, Richard Grafer, is “sick to death of talking about Steven. I didn’t know him. For fifteen years we had no contact. Now my own neighbors drive by and point at my house. I’ve shut down my entire life because of Steven. I can’t go to a grocery store without people saying, hey, I saw you on TV, your godson killed a bunch of people.”

Josh Stone hits a setback around Easter, when someone burns Steve’s cross. There have been other attempts to take away or vandalize the sixth cross, but this one hits Josh hard, and he’s struggling again.

“I understand it’s tough for the people who knew him,” Joe Peterson says. “It’s true there aren’t a lot of memorials to him. And I’m glad.”

Three months after the shootings, Jessica still cries every time we talk. “I feel this need to protect him,” she says. “He was such a private person.” We were supposed to meet for dinner, but instead we’re standing in a Barnes and Noble in Champaign, thumbing through books on the tables near the front door. Her friend Josh is with her again. He’s her moral support each time we talk. He doesn’t say anything, and I don’t know anything about him.

She shows me her new tattoo, six stars on her left forearm. Steve’s is red and black, NIU’s colors, but I don’t think she realizes these are also the colors of Jigsaw, Marilyn Manson, Nazis, and Steve’s “Terrorist” T-shirt. She touches one of the other stars. “I don’t know the other names yet,” she says, and cries much harder. “I’m not ready yet for the other names, for what he did.”

After the shootings, Jessica received all those painful and confusing gifts from Steve, including the platinum wedding band, and even Fight Club seems to have a message for her: “You shot yourself,” the protagonist’s girlfriend says at the end, and he answers her, “Yes. But I’m okay. Marla, look at me. Trust me. Everything’s going to be fine. You met me at a very strange time in my life.”

“I’m worried about who you’re talking with,” Jessica tells me, and she makes me name Julie, Rich, and Adam again, Steve’s high school friends. “I talked with Susan,” she says, “and she couldn’t remember them.” So I mention the “wiretap” arranged by Adam, the Tubes, and now she remembers the stories. “Oh no,” she says.

But the worst two, for her, are sex with his dog and Craigslist. “You can’t write about those,” she says. “Steve was such a private person.”

“I have to make sense of his life,” I tell her. “And sexual shame is part of why he hated himself so much, which is part of why he was able to do this. If I leave out the secret summer of sex with Nicole, or all the people from Craigslist, he doesn’t make any sense.”

Jessica is crying again, and I feel terrible.

“I’m really sorry,” I say. “I’ve never done this before, and I don’t think I’m ever going to do it again.” And this is true. This story has been grueling, and I have no desire to investigate anything like it ever again.

“On the way over here,” she says, “I was freaking out about talking with you. I was asking Josh, why can’t I just tell him what to write and what not to write?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “And we don’t have to talk anymore. We can stop.”

She takes me up on that offer. “I need to go home and cry,” she says. Afterward, she posts on her Facebook page that “Jessica is thinking that if Steve knew the consequences of what he was doing, I think he would have thought twice,” and by this I think she means not only the deaths and injuries and effect on her, but also the exposure, Steve’s private past laid bare.

Steve’s memorial service, with his family and friends, is not held until June 28. They have to wait that long, four and a half months. Jim Thomas isn’t able to go, it turns out, which he finds terribly disappointing. He’s just returned from California, has a touch of the flu, and finds out a second cat is diabetic and needs insulin shots twice a day, but the main problem is that something really scary is going on with one of his eyes, so he doesn’t trust himself to drive on the expressway. “I wanted to be there, if for nothing else than to support Jess. Both bummed and guilt-laden, but there’s really no way I could have made it.”

Mark goes and says it’s good to find some closure. “Obviously it was a tragedy,” Mark says, “and in any kind of tragedy, you have to feel bad for the victims, but Steve himself was a victim. And a lot of people didn’t identify that, and mental illness. Steve was a victim of himself. I don’t see that it was really planned. I remember back in fall of 2006 that Steve enjoyed the guns and the shooting range. In DeKalb, he went to the shooting range. He wasn’t a gun nut, though. He owned a couple guns, but no big deal. The media, they’ll put a spin on it and say he’s a gun nut and then blame it on guns and all that stuff.”

Jessica writes, “I don’t think that the memorial helped me all that much. I just kept thinking how it was exactly not what Steven would have wanted. I keep forgetting that the memorial wasn’t for Steven, but for everyone else. Jim was disappointed that he couldn’t make it. I was devastated when he said that he couldn’t come. There were a few NIU people there and that was comforting to me. Some UI people were there too, but they were there more for Susan than for Steven.”

Memorials are important, and one issue still to be decided is the future of Cole Hall. The governor of Illinois and NIU’s president proposed demolition, leaving the site as a memorial, and building a new “Memorial Hall” nearby for $40 million. But after more discussion and an online survey of students and faculty, the plan shifted to a remodeling for $7.7 million, no longer using it as a classroom, and building a new auditorium elsewhere. In January 2011, limited renovation work finally began.

Put into perspective, though, six gun deaths is nothing for the United States, and this discussion of Cole Hall misses the point, if I may be forgiven for saying such things. One weekend while I was in DeKalb investigating, April 19 to 20, 2008, there were thirty-six separate shootings in Chicago, with nine homicides. Is it “media spin” to mention this? Weapons included an AK-47 assault rifle, which is becoming more readily available in the United States. We average over ten thousand handgun deaths a year in this country, and the Supreme Court upheld, in June 2008, an individual’s right to bear arms, striking down a gun ban in Washington, D.C., and threatening such bans in Chicago and elsewhere. After the NIU shootings, the Illinois state legislature tried to pass that bill that would have limited handgun purchases to one pistol per month per person, meaning anyone could still have gone out and bought a dozen handguns per year, and even that couldn’t pass. DeKalb’s own representative voted against it. Every time I drive into Champaign to interview Jessica, I see signs by the side of the road that claim “Guns Save Lives.” If that’s not spin, then what is spin?