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

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe enormous thanks to my editor Tyler Cabot at Esquire. He assigned this story to me, then worked tirelessly, every day, for months, through the entire grueling process of interviews, writing, editing, and fact-checking. The two of us were equally familiar with more than a thousand pages of information from the police files in addition to all the interviews, and it was an amazing conversation, the closest collaboration I’ll ever have with anyone. This is his book as much as mine.

I also must thank Terry Noland at Men’s Journal, who assigned an essay, “My Father’s Guns,” which became an important part of this book, and the National Endowment for the Arts for generous support while I was writing. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs has now plucked two of my books from oblivion and given them a life, so I can’t say thank you enough to them, or to the contest judge, Lee Gutkind, and it’s been wonderful to work with the University of Georgia Press, just as it was wonderful to work with the University of Massachusetts Press.

I greatly admire Jim Thomas for his generosity, intelligence, and strength to pursue the truth even when it’s uncomfortable, and I was surprised that so many people would talk to me about such an upsetting story. Julie Creamer, Adam Holzer, and Rich Johnson, for instance, and many of Steve’s friends at NIU, including Aimie Rucinski and Kathryn Chiplis, and another of his professors, Kristen Myers. This is a community of generous, smart, warm people dedicating their lives to helping others, and so it’s terrible that this event happened to them.

Jessica and “Mark” will probably not be happy with some of the judgments and comments I’ve made, but I want to thank them for talking openly with me, and they certainly have my full sympathies in their bereavement, as do the members of Steve’s family.

The book is dedicated to those traumatized by Steve’s shooting, and I do believe that discovering and printing the full story is worthwhile. Joe Peterson and Brian Karpes, the teacher and teaching assistant in the classroom, have told me as much. They’ve said that not knowing was worse than knowing, even though the truth is ugly.