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

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BY THE FALL OF HIS JUNIOR YEAR, when Steve first attempts suicide, his life is already destroyed. And then it gets worse, steadily, month by month.

I can understand some parts of that life, including being an outcast. I finally left all my friends the fall of tenth grade. We were all in band, like Steve and his friend Adam, and we went on a field trip down to an amusement park in Southern California. I hated Ian VanTuyl by that point, had fantasies of killing him, shooting him with one of my rifles. He deserved it, in my opinion, and I hated all my other friends about half as much for going along with him. They were brutal to me, every day, constant humiliation. So on this trip, I finally got off the bus they were on and got on the other bus. This one was for all the cheerleaders and baton twirlers, so I wasn’t exactly welcome there, either, but I knew a couple of them, and they invited me over to help me get away from my friends.

So that was it. I wandered school friendless for the next two weeks. At lunch and snack break, when everyone huddled into their groups, I felt exposed and awkward, like I had a target on me that said loser. And I felt my life sliding away, a sense of doom that I was destined to repeat what my father had done, as if his suicide had a kind of magnetic force. I didn’t imagine it happening soon. I imagined growing old enough to get married and have kids, and then watching my life fall apart as my father’s had, with infidelity and divorce, guilt and depression that would make me finally pull the trigger, fulfilling my fate. Doom is the only word that fits, and that feeling would last, waiting always in the background, for twenty years.

But after wandering friendless for those two weeks, I started hanging out with a new friend I’d met on the wrestling team, Galen Palmer, and he turned my life around for the better. He introduced me to his friends in drama, and I tried out to be in the after-school drama workshop, an unusual program run by a teacher who had studied with the Polish Laboratory Theatre. Instead of pretending to feel emotion or planning out gestures, the focus was on improvisation, on working indirectly through associations, such as making your voice sound like dry grass if the part called for sadness.

I wanted into this group badly. I wanted friends, and I wanted to belong. So at the auditions, I told the truth about my father for the first time. For three years, I had told everyone that he had died of cancer. His suicide just felt too shameful, a personal shame, something dirty. But to this group, I told the story of the day we found out, and they let me in. What it meant for the shape of my life was that instead of continuing to spiral down into a double life, things began to improve for me, and this is what never happened for Steve in high school. His life spiraled into drugs, medications, suicide attempts, sexual shame, bitter fights with his mother, threats of violence. It’s hard to know how exactly it all happened. Who handed him a KKK card? Who was the man he first had sex with, and was it consensual? How was he able to plan his own suicide in advance and even sell his things? I’ve visited all the places he went during those times, I’ve talked with his friends and spent time with them, gone to their houses, but I just don’t have the experience to really understand. I haven’t been on those medications, for instance.

Prozac is the one antidepressant approved for use in teens, and it’s famous for causing or heightening suicidal thoughts. Depakote may have been the drug that puffed Steve up and sent him to 300 pounds, though Lithium can have that effect, too. The main problem may have been that he was on cocktails, combinations of drugs, so who knows what all the effects were. Of all his symptoms over the years — psychotic episodes, hallucinations, paranoia, anxiety, violent rage, insomnia, checking behaviors, despair, etc. — which ones were his and which ones belonged to the medications? It’s partly because of the drugs that Steve goes off the chart and I can no longer connect his life to my own. Terence wrote, “Nothing human is foreign to me,” but a person on drugs becomes something different than human.