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

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STEVE SPENDS ALMOST NO TIME AT HOME. He lives at his friends’ houses the fall of eleventh grade. He’s better friends now with Julie Creamer, a big girl who’s on lithium for bipolar, same as Steve. His parents put him on it. It helps a bit. You’d never know Julie was on it; she’s light and fun and chatty. Her mother asks for help moving the furniture, and Steve handles it himself, tells her to relax, he’ll take care of it. Home away from home. He feels safe here.

At school, in the parking lot where all the Goths hang out, Julie gets Steve to try pot for the first time. He’s resisted before, even with Pete, but she gets him to try pot she’s bought from Pete, and he’s skipping around afterward, like a new bird. She’s laughing and trying to get him to stop. “Lancaster will bust us,” she tells him.

The other hangout is at The Tubes. A short walk to the forest preserve, hop a fence, slog though mud and wet grass past the federal nursery, rows of trees. In the next field, a dozen leftover concrete sewer pipes six feet in diameter, tall enough to stand inside. Shelter from rain and snow, the constant wind. He tries to get Julie to give him head here, but when they kiss, it’s awkward. She feels like she’s kissing her brother, and she wonders whether he’s really attracted to her. They date for two days, then decide to just be friends.

Most the time, at least half a dozen of their friends are here. They light chemicals on fire, blow shit up, shoot pellet guns, make out, smoke pot, sneak away to the porno stash in the trees. Whenever they shoot, Steve brags he has a membership with the NRA. His godfather, Richard Grafer, bought it for him.

“We know,” Adam says. “Like you haven’t told us a million times.” Adam and Steve are friends again, sort of, and they bring white spray paint one day for tagging. Steve tags a white swastika on the front of one of the pipes. “You’re doing your swastika wrong,” Adam says.

“No I’m not,” Steve says.

“Remember how you used to put ‘Hi Ho Hitler’ instead of ‘Heil Hitler’?”

“Shut up. I’ll show you what’s real.” And Steve gives Adam a business card from the KKK. Then he tags “blows” under “Metallica,” even though he loves Metallica.

On colder nights, they hang out in one of the bathrooms. Steve’s godfather, Grafer, works for the forest service, for Cook County, so Steve has access to the keys. The bathrooms are cinderblock stand-alone huts in the wilderness. Their own concrete chalets. They’re used, also, by gay cruisers. If you back into a parking space here, you’re asking for a visit.

Steve has been with a man before, but his friends don’t know this. Secret sex, like his summer with Nicole.

Steve hangs out a lot with Pete Rachowsky. They get arrested September 22, 1996, for trespassing on railroad tracks and the Pepsi lot, planning to go through some dumpsters. By the end of the semester, as it gets colder, Steve has become odd, even for him, and antisocial.

“Is something going on at home?” Julie asks him.

“Nothing,” he says. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Steve decides to commit suicide, plans it ahead of time, holds a sale first to get rid of all his stuff. His friend Jason gets his guitar. His friend Lee gets his video games. “He sold all his shit,” Adam says.

December 14, 1996, Steve overdoses on Tylenol and calls Missy. His parents throw him into Rush, a hospital, for a week, but something becomes unstoppable about these suicide attempts. Steve is anxious all the time, depressed, unable to sleep. He blows up on the meds, goes from skinny to obese, 300 pounds, in just a couple months. Rich can’t understand what’s happened. Steve is like a zombie, with a faraway stare, “like the personality was just sucked out of him.” Julie tries to talk with him, and most the time he’s just glassy-eyed, so out of it he won’t even look at her.

In one clear moment, he stands at the mirror with her, at her house. He has terrible acne, one of the side effects. “You don’t need makeup,” he tells her. “You look beautiful. I look like shit. Look at me. This is horrible.”

People talk about him at school that winter. He’s sitting in the cafeteria, an enormous and exposed room right off the main hall, a place where you can’t hide. He’s with Julie, and a couple of jocks come up to him. They know his sister, Susan, and they know Joe Russo’s older brother and sister. They know everything about him. “Hey, Suicide Steve, what’s up?” one of them asks. “Uh-oh, don’t say that, Crazy Mierczak might off himself,” the other says. Then the first one flips Steve’s tray onto the floor, all his food.

Steve walks out to the Goth lot and Julie follows him. “Who cares about them,” she says.

“Just back off,” he says, and he won’t say anything more the rest of the day.

The next day, though, he tells her, “I love school because I love working. But I hate school because of everyone in my classes. I hate everyone.”

“You can’t hate everyone,” she tells him. “You don’t hate me.”

“No.”

“So the others?”

“I do. Some people I wanna hurt.”