Friday, February 15, 2008
Gunman kills seven in university shooting
Former Northern Illinois U. student opens fire in campus lecture hall
From eSchool News staff and wire service reports

The shooting at Northern Illinois University is the latest in a string of school violence.
A gunman opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University on Thursday, Feb. 14, killing six students and injuring others before committing suicide, authorities said.
The gunman started shooting in a "brief, rapid-fire assault" that sent terrified students running for cover, university President John Peters said. Four of the seven total dead, including the gunman, died at the scene, and the other three died in hospitals, he said.

On Feb. 15, Florida authorities and a university official familiar with the investigation identified the shooter as 27-year-old former student Steven Kazmierczak.

Polk County, Fla., sheriff's officials said they were asked to notify the suspect's father -- Robert Kazmierczak of Lakeland, Fla. -- of his son's death.

"His son, Steven, was the shooting suspect at Northern Illinois University," said Carrie Rodgers, spokeswoman for the sheriff's office.

Illinois authorities have not confirmed the suspect's identity, but a university official revealed his identity to The Associated Press. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the identity has not been officially released.

The shooter had been a graduate student in sociology at Northern Illinois as recently as spring 2007, but was not currently enrolled at the 25,000-student campus, Peters said. He also said the gunman had no record of police contact or an arrest record while attending the university, about 65 miles west of Chicago.

He was currently enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said NIU spokeswoman Melanie Magara.

DeKalb County Coroner Dennis J. Miller released the identities of the four victims who died in his county: Daniel Parmenter, 20, of Westchester; Catalina Garcia, 20, of Cicero; Ryanne Mace, 19, of Carpentersville; and Julianna Gehant, 32, of Meridan.

Two other victims died after being transferred to hospitals in other counties, Miller said. Winnebago County Coroner Sue Fiduccia said a female victim died in her jurisdiction but has not been identified pending notification of family.

The university posted a warning of a possible gunman on campus on its web site at 3:20 p.m., adding regular updates throughout the afternoon and evening. The university issued a statement on its site about an hour after the 3 p.m. shooting that "the immediate danger has passed. The gunman is no longer a threat."

Witnesses in the geology class in Cole Hall said "someone dressed in black came out from behind a screen in front of the classroom and opened fire with a shotgun," Peters said.

Lauren Carr said she was sitting in the third row of the lecture hall around 3 p.m. when she saw the shooter walk through a door on the right-hand side of the stage, pointing a gun straight ahead.

"I personally Army-crawled halfway up the aisle," said Carr, a 20-year-old sophomore. "I said I could get up and run or I could die here."

She said a student in front of her was bleeding, "but he just kept running."

"I heard this girl scream, 'Run, he's reloading the gun.'"

University Police Chief Donald Grady said police had no apparent motive for the shooting.

George Gaynor, a senior geography student, who was in Cole Hall when the shooting happened, told the student newspaper the Northern Star that the shooter was "a skinny white guy with a stocking cap on."

He described the scene immediately following the incident as terrifying and chaotic.

"Some girl got hit in the eye, a guy got hit in the leg," Gaynor said outside just minutes after the shooting occurred. "It was like five minutes before class ended too."

Witnesses said the young man carried a shotgun and a pistol. Student Edward Robinson told WLS that the gunman appeared to target students in one part of the lecture hall.

"It was almost like he knew who he wanted to shoot," Robinson said. "He knew who and where he wanted to be firing at."

Jillian Martinez, a freshman, told the Chicago Tribune she was in the auditorium when the gunman entered through a door to the right of the lectern and opened fire about 3 p.m. "He just started shooting at all the kids," she said. "He just started shooting at people, and I ran out of there as fast as I could. I ran all the way to the student center; when I got there I could still hear shooting [from the classroom].

Agents with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were assisting local authorities at the scene, spokesman Thomas Ahern told the Chicago Tribune.

"We will be urgently tracing the firearms and learning the history of the weapons," Ahern said.

All classes were canceled Thursday night and the campus was closed on Friday. Students were urged to call their parents "as soon as possible" and were offered counseling at any residence hall, according to the school web site.

The school was closed for one day during final exam week in December after campus police found threats, including racial slurs and references to shootings earlier in the year at Virginia Tech, scrawled on a bathroom wall in a dormitory. Police determined after an investigation that there was no imminent threat and the campus was reopened. Peters said he knew of no connection between that incident and Thursday's attack.

At a press conference held on NIU's campus Thursday evening, Peters said, "Our hearts and prayers go out to the victims and their families. We thank the community for the outpouring of sympathy during this terrible time of tragedy."

Peters urged students to remain calm and seek counseling. "We've asked them to reach out to each other during this difficult time, and they've done that, and I'm proud of them."

NIU's Open House scheduled for Feb. 18 is cancelled. All NIU athletic events, home and away, are canceled through Sunday, Feb. 17.

The shooting was the fifth at a U.S. school in recent weeks.

In early February, a teacher was shot and stabbed by her husband at a school in Ohio. She survived, and her husband was later found dead. On Feb. 8, a woman shot two fellow students to death before committing suicide at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge.

In Memphis, Tenn., a 17-year-old is accused of shooting and critically wounding a fellow student Monday during a high school gym class, and the 15-year-old victim of a shooting at an Oxnard, Calif., junior high school has been declared brain dead, and was taken off a ventilator on Feb. 14.

Illinois gunman's deadly rampage baffles many who knew him; police had `no indications at all'
AP, 2008-02-15 17:56:01

DEKALB, Ill. (AP) - If there is such a thing as a profile of a mass murderer, Steven Kazmierczak didn't fit it: outstanding student, engaging, polite and industrious, with what looked like a bright future in the criminal justice field.

And yet on Thursday, the 27-year-old Kazmierczak, armed with three handguns and a brand-new pump-action shotgun he had carried onto campus in a guitar case, stepped from behind a screen on the stage of a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and opened fire on a geology class. He killed five students before committing suicide.

University Police Chief Donald Grady said, without giving details, that Kazmierczak had become erratic in the past two weeks after he had stopped taking his medication. But that seemed to come as news to many of those who knew him, and the attack itself was positively baffling.

"We had no indications at all this would be the type of person that would engage in such activity," Grady said. He described the gunman as a good student during his time at NIU, and by all accounts a "fairly normal" person.

Exactly what set Kazmierczak off - and why he picked his former university and that particular lecture hall - remained a mystery. Police said they found no suicide note.

Authorities were searching for a woman who police believe may have been Kazmierczak's girlfriend. According to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is still under investigation, authorities were looking into whether Kazmierczak and the woman recently broke up.

Investigators learned that a week ago, on Feb. 9, Kazmierczak walked into a Champaign, gun store and picked up two guns - the Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun. He bought the two other handguns at the same shop - a Hi-Point .380 on Dec. 30 and a Sig Sauer on Aug. 6.

All four guns were bought legally from a federally licensed firearms dealer, said Thomas Ahern, an agency spokesman. At least one criminal background check was performed. Kazmierczak (pronounced kaz-MUR-chek) had no criminal record.

Kazmierczak had a State Police-issued FOID, or firearms owners identification card, which is required in Illinois to own a gun, authorities said. Such cards are rarely issued to those with recent mental health problems. The application asks: "In the past five years have you been a patient in any medical facility or part of any medical facility used primarily for the care or treatment of persons for mental illness?"

Kazmierczak, who went by Steve, graduated from NIU in 2007 and was a graduate student in sociology there before leaving last year and moving on to the graduate school of social work at the University of Illinois in Champaign, 130 miles away.

Unlike Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui - a sullen misfit who could barely look anyone in the eye, much less carry on a conversation - Kazmierczak appeared to fit in just fine.

Chris Larrison, an assistant professor of social work, said Kazmierczak did data entry for Larrison's research grant on mental health clinics. Larrison was stunned by the shooting rampage, as was the gunman's faculty adviser, professor Jan Carter-Black.

"He was engaging, motivated, responsible. I saw nothing to suggest that there was anything troubling about his behavior," she said.

Carter-Black said Kazmierczak wanted to focus on mental health issues and enrolled in August in a course she taught about human behavior and the social environment, but withdrew in September because he had gotten a job with the prison system. He recently left the job and resumed classes full-time in January, Carter-Black said.

His University of Illinois student ID depicts a smiling, clean-cut Kazmierczak, unlike the scowling, menacing-looking images of Cho that surfaced after his rampage.

NIU President John Peters said Kazmierczak compiled "a very good academic record, no record of trouble" at the 25,000-student campus in DeKalb. He won at least two awards and served as an officer in two student groups dedicated to promoting understanding of the criminal justice system.

Exactly what sort of career he planned for himself was unclear. But he wrote papers on self-injury in prison and the role of religion in the creation of early U.S. prisons. The research paper on self-injury in prison said his interests also included political violence and peace and social justice.

Speaking Friday in Lakeland, Fla., Kazmierczak's distraught father did not immediately provide any clues to what led to the bloodshed.

"Please leave me alone. ... This is a very hard time for me," Robert Kazmierczak told reporters, throwing his arms up and weeping after emerging briefly from his house. He declined further comment about his son and went back inside his house, saying he was diabetic. A sign on the front door said: "Illini fans live here."

Neighbors in the brick apartment building in Champaign where Kazmierczak last lived were shocked to hear he was the gunman.

"It's not possible," said Maurice Darling, 80, who lives in an adjacent second-floor apartment. "He seemed to be much too nice."

He said the tall, thin and bespectacled Kazmierczak shared the apartment with a woman and neither showed any sign of anger or aggression. "They were friendly, agreeable - just like any neighbor would be," she said.

Chelsea Thrash, a 25-year-old waitress who lives with her 3-year-old daughter in the apartment directly beneath Kazmierczak's, said he was always up late and there was frequently a lot of "trampling" noise coming through the hardwood floor. She went up and knocked on the door once recently at 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. to request quiet and he said through the closed door, "Oh, I'm sorry - I dropped my weight."

"It's kind of creepy," she said. "I never thought someone in this tiny corner of southwest Champaign would ever dream of that, let alone carry it out, and have that above me and my daughter."

Kazmierczak grew up in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village, not far from O'Hare Airport. His family lived most recently in a middle-class neighborhood of mostly one-story tract homes before moving away early in this decade. His mother died in Florida in 2006 at age 58.

He was a B student at Elk Grove High School, where school district spokeswoman Venetia Miles said he was active in band and took Japanese before graduating in 1998. He was also in the chess club.

At NIU, six white crosses were placed on a snow-covered hill around the center of campus, which was closed Friday. They included the names of four victims - Daniel Parnmenter, Ryanne Mace, Julianna Gehant, Catalina Garcia. The two other crosses were blank, though officials have identified Kazmierczak's final victim as Gayle Dubowski.

Allyse Jerome, 19, a sophomore from Schaumburg, recalled how the gunman, dressed in black and a stocking cap, burst through a stage door in 200-seat Cole Hall just before class was about to let out. He squeezed off more than 50 shots as screaming students ran and crawled for cover.

"Honestly, at first everyone thought it was a joke," Jerome said. Everyone hit the floor, she said. Then she got up and ran, but tripped. She said she felt like "an open target."

"He could've decided to get me," Jerome said. "I thought for sure he was going to get me."

Associated Press writers Don Babwin, Caryn Rousseau, Ashley M. Heher, Dave Carpenter, Carla K. Johnson, Lindsey Tanner, David Mercer, Nguyen Huy Vu, Michael Tarm, Mike Robinson, Anthony McCartney in Lakeland, Fla., and Matt Apuzzo in Washington contributed to this report, along with the AP News Research Center in New York.

Humanitarian Resource Institute
Arts Integration into Education: Bridging the Gap

The graduate student who massacred students in Northern Illinois University lecture hall bought three of his four guns on Saturday - indicating that he had been planning his assault for at least six days, ABC News has learned..... University sources identified the gunman as Steve Kazmierczak, 27, a onetime undergraduate and award winning sociology graduate student at NIU. -- Gunman Planned Campus Shooting For At Least Six Days, ABC News, 15 February 2008.

-- List of recent fatal shootings at US colleges or universities, International Herald Tribune, 15 February 2008.

Now, we are slammed in the face once again, this time by an award winning sociology graduate student at NIU who snapped. As a nation, we have failed our youth, perpetuating a state of denial while depression and suicide rise to record levels.

May God help us regain our footing........

Stephen Michael Apatow
Founder, Humanitarian Resource Institute

Friday, February 15, 2008
Report: Schools should assemble 'threat assessment' teams
Sun, Jul 01, 2001
eSchool News staff and Wire Service Reports
LINK

The final report of a commission assembled to review the 1999 attack at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., recommended May 17 that every Colorado high school and middle school have special teams to evaluate threats.

Also, commission Chairman William Erickson again criticized Jefferson County authorities, including Sheriff John Stone, for failing to act on numerous indications that the shootings might occur. "There were a number of red flags," Erickson said.

Gov. Bill Owens, who accepted the Columbine Review Commission's report on the massacre, agreed improvements are needed.

"With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that the police response needs improvement," Owens said. "It's really going to be up to the schools and the law enforcement authorities in terms of how quickly they choose to address these recommendations."

Gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had told fellow students that something would happen; they recorded videotapes outlining their plan and showing off their weaponry; and Harris posted threats on a web site that had been reported to the sheriff's department, according to Erickson.

The commission's report details events leading up to and following the April 20, 1999, attack in which Harris and Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher before shooting themselves in the nation's worst school shooting.

The report recommends various steps schools and law enforcement agencies should take to help prevent such incidents and improve the response to large-scale emergencies.

Erickson, a former state Supreme Court justice, said sheriff's deputies had prepared a search warrant for Harris's home after receiving reports of threats and bomb-making activity.

"If the search warrant that was originally proposed had been issued, this probably wouldn't have occurred," Erickson said. "As a result, we had one of the greatest school shooting tragedies. We've had copycat incidents since then."

The search warrant was proposed about a year before the attack. Stone became sheriff later, in January 1999.

In addition to threat-assessment teams at every middle and high school, the report also calls for an increased emphasis on law-enforcement training in preparation for large-scale emergencies.

Owens formed the 14-member commission in January 2000 to learn from the attack and recommend ways to prevent future tragedies.

The commission met 15 times and heard from a wide range of speakers, including law enforcement officers, medical professionals, school officials, FBI agents, and victims' relatives.

The report did not attempt to blame any person or agency. From the first meeting, commissioners said they wanted to prepare a report that could help prevent such attacks in the future.

List of Recent Fatal Shootings at US Colleges and Universities

National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center

Resources For Parents

What Parents Can Do to Help Prevent Youth Violence

Illinois college shooter stopped medication: police
Fri Feb 15, 2008 4:49pm EST
By James Kelleher
LINK

DEKALB, Illinois (Reuters) - A man who killed five students and himself during a shooting spree at an Illinois college had stopped taking medication and become erratic in the last two weeks, buying two guns used in the bloodbath just six days ago, officials said on Friday.

He was identified as Stephen Kazmierczak, 27, a former student at Northern Illinois University where he returned to carry out Thursday's shootings, hiding a shotgun in a guitar case as he entered a lecture hall, police said.

His motive is not known, campus police chief Don Grady told a news conference. Nor were there indications he had any relationship with any of his victims who were mowed down as he fired more than 50 shots in a matter of seconds from a lecture hall stage, Grady said.

Local officials revised the death toll downward, saying Kazmierczak killed five students, not six as they had earlier reported, and wounded many more. In all 21 people were shot before he turned one of his four guns on himself.

"Apparently he had been taking medication" but stopped and had become "somewhat erratic" in the last two weeks, Grady said. He did not describe what kind of medication was involved.

"There were no red flags. He was an outstanding student, an awarded student" who was even "revered" by faculty and fellow students, Grady said. "A fairly normal, undistressed person."

Grady said the shooter had been enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the central part of the state, far removed from Northern, a 25,000-student school 65 miles west of Chicago.

A federal firearms agent said Kazmierczak bought a shotgun and a handgun nine days ago in Champaign, apparently legally.

The Chicago Tribune reported that he had drawn notice in academic circles, helping write papers on self-injury in prison and on the role of religion in early U.S. prisons, work that earned him a dean's award.

'A VERY GOOD STUDENT'

Kazmierczak "by all accounts that we can tell right now was a very good student that the professors thought well of," school president John Peters said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"There is nothing in our system that he has had any counseling," he added. "Motive is the one thing that we're trying to pin down at this point. I really at this point have no sense of that. There is no note or threat that I know of."

Three of the students who died were 20, one was 19 and one was 32.

Terrified and bleeding, students fled the hall before the gunman shot himself on the stage in the latest in a series of shootings at U.S. colleges and high schools.

Virginia Tech, a university in Blacksburg, Virginia, became the site of the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history in April 2007 when a gunman killed 32 people and himself.

Peters in a separate interview on CNN said the university had reviewed and improved its emergency response plans after the Virginia Tech shooting.

While universities traditionally have been "some of the most open institutions," he said, "events like this and Virginia Tech and others are forcing us to reconsider how we do things. I think that is unfortunate but necessary."

President George W Bush said he had spoken to Peters and told him "that a lot of folks today will be praying for the families of the victims and for the Northern Illinois University community. Obviously a tragic situation on that campus and I ask our citizens to offer their blessings, blessings of comfort and blessing of strength."

Illinois senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama in a statement said that beyond prayers "we must also offer ... our determination to do whatever it takes to eradicate this violence from our streets and our schools; from our neighborhoods and our cities."

(Reporting by Michael Conlon, Bill Trott and David Morgan; editing by Vicki Allen)