Last Day on Earth

by David Vann

  On that day, when the first call comes in, they already have nine patients, with acute influenza, pregnant hyperemesis, cephalgia, pharyngitis, fifth disease, ulnar fracture, and three other pediatric patients. They have two ED doctors on duty, with a third en route, seven nurses (one en route), two EMT’s, and one clerk. They find they don’t have to use their “call tree” to notify anyone because the entire town already knows. The first ambulance reports there will be two or three patients. The next reports eight. The next reports fifteen to twenty. They don’t know whether the shooter is still at large, or whether there is more than one shooter, or whether this might be gang related, with possible retaliation at the hospital. They have to figure out where to put their current patients, how to organize their staff, and whether to lock down the facility for security. They decide to lock down at 3:20, establish an Incident Command. They don’t have their first patient yet, but they give initial staff assignments, set up wireless phones, and even have a preset media plan. They’re moving really quickly.

  At 3:20, media helicopters are already in the air, but the hospital is having trouble getting enough helicopters for evacuation of seriously wounded victims. They’re told that only Air Angels are flying, due to the weather, so they’re trying to get more from Rockford Memorial Hospital. They’re also talking to their sister hospital, Valley West Community Hospital.

  By 3:30, they decide to use the second helicopter pad at the hospital and quickly remove the snow from it. At 3:38, half an hour after the shooting, their first patient arrives, with gunshot wounds to the head and left chest.

  Back at NIU, when Joe Peterson is taken, finally, to the student center, he says, “Oh my God, is this all that’s left?” Because only a few of his students are gathered. “There were books, bags, shoes, and blood everywhere.”

  Jerry Santoni is in a squad car, listening to the police radio. There’s some confusion, because DeKalb isn’t set up yet on the newer radio system, and the police think at first that there might be more shootings in the library. They dispatch officers to check it out. They also follow up on a report of a trail of blood that turns out to be only syrup.

  There are still a lot of students and teachers hiding in various rooms in all the surrounding buildings, still afraid the shooter might be going from room to room. Alexandra and the other students in the sociology lab will wait for two and a half hours. They’re finally able to reach the sociology office by a landline and are given the okay to go outside at 5:30 p.m.

  By 3:45 at Kishwaukee, the rooms are jammed and family and friends are arriving, taken to the conference center in the lower level. The hospital has social workers, EAP (Employee Assistance Program) staff, and volunteers available immediately to talk to the families and also to help find out who the patients are. There are numerous problems with identification. But everyone is doing their best, an impressive response. Two radiologists are doing “wet reads” of the X-rays, for instance, so there’s no time wasted calling back and forth to get radiology reports.

  The X-rays are disturbing. One nurse will say later she’s haunted by the “silhouette of bullets,” all the round shotgun pellets and larger pistol bullets transposed on the bodies. One shows two bullets inside the victim’s head. The X-rays look impossible to me, unaccountably brutal.

  Phlebotomists are on hand to collect and label blood and send it to the lab via pneumatic tubes. And as everyone at the hospital works, NIU is also working. They schedule a media briefing for 5:30. They’re putting updates on their website and have a campus alert system in place that was activated by 3:20, sending out warnings by email, telling students to stay in their rooms, telling everyone to stay away from campus, and cancelling all classes. At 4:10, they let everyone know that the immediate crisis is over. By 4:15 they’ve sent a crisis staff to the hospital to help students and families, and the chair of NIU student services is there to help identify students.

  At 4:53, the last patient arrives at Kishwaukee. The dead have not been brought to the hospital yet, though, and the family of one of these students arrives at 5:30. They’re met by a social worker. Steve’s story has ended, but for everyone affected, the story is just beginning.

  Not everything goes smoothly. Jerry Santoni, for instance, has left his keys and cell phone in Cole Hall, but he can’t get them back, and no one will give him a ride. His head injury and concussion aren’t considered severe enough. “I was told ‘the late night ride service will start up in two hours.’ I was also told, ‘people have been shot—your keys can wait.’”

  The shooting is so impossible and disturbing for the victims, none of them can remember it entirely clearly, even that day at the hospital as they’re interviewed by police. Joe Peterson was on stage with Steve, for instance, and he remembers white and red on a black T-shirt, but he doesn’t put together that the red graphic was of an assault rifle, and his mind transposes “Terrorist” to “Anarchy.” He also tells police that he thinks at least ten shots were fired by the shotgun, and that the pistol was silver. He hasn’t had time to lose memory. Rather, his mind changed things from the moment they happened, and this is true for everyone in the room.

  “I was there and I can still barely imagine what it was like,” Joe says. “It wasn’t real.”

  “I remember it, but it’s like it was a dream or something,” Brian Karpes says.

  Not one of the witnesses interviewed by police correctly identifies Steve’s shirt. Several think he was wearing a hoodie (a sweatshirt with a hood), though most recognize that he was wearing a separate black stocking cap. The clearest description of Steve in the police interviews comes from Jamika Edwards, and I believe she remembers him most clearly because at first she thought it was just a joke. She wasn’t as panicked initially, so she was able to see. But even her description is transposed, thinking he may have had red hair, for instance, picking up the red graphic on the T-shirt. She says “he had a ‘stoned’ look on his face” and “his clothing was typical of someone you would see on TV that would do this.”

  As Joe Peterson is being treated for the minor wound to his arm from that one pistol bullet, he feels tremendous survivor guilt. “I thought Brian was dead. I asked the hospital if Brian was okay but they told me, ‘We can’t release that information.’ I didn’t know for forty hours. We call Brian ‘Superman’ now, because the bullets just bounce off of him.”

  At 6:00 p.m., three hours after the shooting, the hospital makes contact with the DeKalb County coroner regarding the victims who have died in Cole Hall. This is the first time, really, that the hospital finds out what has happened. They’ve been responding and treating victims but without context. Within an hour after that, at 7:00, their emergency department operations return to “normal,” according to their PowerPoint, including restocking supplies and cleaning. The immediate crisis has passed.

  An hour later, the coroner and state police arrive at the hospital, and the hospital is still talking with families of victims until 11:00 p.m., including having to tell some families that their loved one has died. It’s not until midnight that the dead bodies arrive. They’re X-rayed, cleaned, and prepared for viewing. The PowerPoint slide asks, “Who is going to help with this?”

  The next day, the focus is on the media, titled “Fast and Relentless” in the PowerPoint presentation. “Be prepared for the amount of media presence during a disaster.” The hospital, after their experience, recommends prepared statements by only a few designated speakers: “Think before you speak.”

  The media is certainly invasive, insensitive, and sloppy, with almost no fact checking. “It was weird reading news reports that I was dead or Brian was dead,” Joe says. “I read that my head was blown off. I still read that I was the first one shot, but I wasn’t. I read I was chased around in the auditorium, but that wasn’t true. Why didn’t the media fact-check? I read that a student saw me on a gurney with half my face missing. My sister’s watching the news hearing that the instructor was the first one killed. The media has the attitude
of ‘It’s the truth now, and tomorrow the truth may be different.’”

  “There were reports that the TA passed on in the night,” Brian says. “My aunt and advisor both thought I was dead. And my aunt couldn’t get through to my mom because of a dead cell phone, so for a day and a half, my aunt thought I was dead.”

  “The Today Show offered tickets to New York with Broadway tickets, etc., for my sister’s whole family if she could get me to appear on the show the next day,” Joe says.

  The problem is that everyone wants to know who the shooter really was and how this could have happened. Especially since Steve was a Deans’ Award winner, a top grad student, someone “revered” by faculty, students, and administration. That’s why the media is so invasive. They know they’re not getting the full story. Even the nurses working at Kishwaukee sneak up to look at Steve’s body. We just want to know. Joe himself will become obsessed with the event. He’ll look up everything on Columbine and Virginia Tech, days online, but at some point, he says, “I realized I can’t do this anymore. And I went through all of that for nothing. I didn’t learn anything.”

  What amazes Joe most is that more people weren’t hurt. “Six with the shotgun and forty-eight with the pistols,” he says. “And he hit less than thirty people. Thank God he was a piss-poor shot.”

  “WHEN THE SHOOTING HAPPENED,” Mark says, “I called Steve around 4:00 that day, or 3:30, and I was like, ‘I’ve been shot!’ I left a message like that, because I thought there was just a school shooting. So I was laughing, ‘I’ve been shot! Give me a call back.’”

  This is their sense of humor, after all. “He had a shirt—well, you’ve seen the picture of the one shirt, the one with the American flag with the gun. I don’t think it’s a big deal, right? But the media posted it up, okay, here’s the gunman. But he also had a shirt that I thought was funny that just said ‘Terrorist’ on it. That’s all it was. So the joke was, you should show up with this at an airport and try and see what happens . . . He also had another shirt that was funny that had a picture of a rifleman—it was the whole JFK thing, right?—and it said ‘I love a parade,’ something like that. I thought it was the funniest shirt, and it was one of those things where he had that shirt and loved it but wouldn’t wear it out because someone might take it the wrong way, right? That’s unfortunately the state of affairs we’re in.”

  Mark tries Steve again and again. Straight to voicemail each time.

  At 10:00 that night, after details on the news make it seem that Steve is likely the shooter, he sends a text message to Jessica. “Is Steve okay?” Then a detective calls him at two in the morning, and Mark says, “Oh, it’s Steve.” There’s no denying anymore what he already knows.

  When Jessica arrives home that evening, police officers are waiting for her. They won’t tell her what’s wrong, and she isn’t allowed to enter her apartment. Instead she’s taken away in a patrol car. She starts to cry, asks if something has happened to Steve. She hasn’t been able to reach him all day, and he didn’t show up for their class at U of I. The police won’t tell her anything, though. A long interview at the police station, and she consents to a search of her apartment, so after midnight it’s back in the patrol car. “Did Steve kill himself?”

  Yes, they tell her finally, and they search all of Steve’s things, all of her things, their life together. In photos of the search, she stands despondent in the middle of their living room, wearing a white T-shirt with a red, long-sleeved shirt underneath. The police go through everything, take things from her, Valentine gifts from Steve. The gifts are still wrapped. She was saving them for when Steve would arrive, planning to spend Valentine’s Day together. She opens them now in front of the police. And they don’t tell her about the $3,250 in cash they take, another gift from Steve. They take his copy of Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, other books and documents that might help her understand. They tell her they’re going to take his car.

  Her mother and brother arrive to help her. She escapes to a hotel room. But the media’s already here, a news truck out front, everyone asking for warning signs.

  A TV news team shows up at Alexandra Chapman’s front door by 9:00 p.m. They ask if they can film her watching the news. She doesn’t know yet that Steve was the shooter. They tell her it was Steve, garbling his last name, and then ask again if they can film her while she cries.

  Josh Stone knows right away that it must have been Steve. “I used to joke that he could be a mass murderer, he was so uptight.” In the evening, he starts getting calls from the press, and the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times both drive out to his house, even though he’s an hour from DeKalb.

  Several news teams show up at Jim Thomas’s house. He talks to Michael Tarm from the Associated Press, who seems “a cut above” the rest, and also agrees, finally, to do a short spot on CNN, shot from behind, not showing his face.

  What the press don’t know, though, is that none of these people at NIU know the full story. Steve hid his life from them. So the goose chase goes on, through the night and into the morning, the demand for warning signs that, for these people, mostly didn’t exist.

  Kelly knows things. She breaks down when she hears the news. She has to have psychiatric help, goes into the hospital but is out after about a day, according to DeKalb police. “She thought she was in trouble” because of her emails with Steve about wanting to commit mass murder.

  In the early morning hours, Detective Redel calls Susan Kazmierczak, who’s out of town. He tells her that Steve was killed in the incident at NIU. She says she knows about the incident from the news. She asks whether Steve was the shooter. Redel says yes, and now Susan breaks down. She can no longer speak. After all the years of fear, of hatred, it’s finally happened. For her more than for any other person alive, what’s happened can feel inevitable, her brother a demonic force out of control for at least fifteen years.

  Detective Lekkas from the DeKalb police department calls the Polk County sheriff’s office in Florida and asks them to notify and interview Steve’s father, who lives in Lakeland. Sergeant Giampavolo and Detective Navarro from the sheriff’s homicide unit knock on Bob Kazmierczak’s door at 5:00 a.m.

  “I know why you’re here,” Bob says. “I’m the one you’re looking for.” He leads them to a table in the kitchen. On the center island, they notice a Friday edition of the Lakeland Ledger, which features the NIU shooting on the front page.

  Bob tells the detectives that he heard about the shooting on the news the day before and worried that his son might have been involved. His fear was confirmed when Susan called him. Jessica called, also, at 3:00 a.m.

  He tells them that Steve was diagnosed as bipolar at a young age and that he didn’t like taking his medications. He remembers that Steve said other students at NIU were “overprivileged” and “uppity” and looked down on him.

  Bob reveals that Jessica told him she knew Steve was planning to get a hotel room near NIU in DeKalb. This doesn’t match with what she told police in her own report, that she thought Steve was visiting his godfather. What else is Jessica hiding?

  Bob is in denial about various aspects of his own history with Steve. He says Steve was “a bit upset” at first about Thresholds but then it did not bother him and he liked it there. He says Steve was never arrested and never acted out violently toward anyone. He doesn’t mention any of the juvenile reports. The highest praise he can come up with is that his son “was a pretty good guy.” He puts most of the blame on the death of Steve’s mother. The detectives ask about guns, and he recalls that Steve and Jessica and Joe Russo visited the Saddle Creek Park Pistol Range at Thanksgiving with his neighbor and friend Joseph Lesek.

  In the afternoon, Susan meets with Detectives Redel and Stewart in her living room, and she tells them everything. His troubled youth, their poisonous relationship, her hopes that maybe things could improve when he moved here to Champaign for grad school. She tells them she’s surprised he didn’t come to her house to kill her.

 
The media are outside, but Susan refuses to talk with them. She writes a statement, “For release ONLY IF PRESS CONTACTS MEMBERS OF OUR FAMILY.” Does she believe there’s a chance the press won’t contact members of her family? The statement, on the front door of her house, reads, “Our heartfelt prayers and deepest sympathies are extended to the families, victims, and all other persons involved in the Northern Illinois University tragedy on February 14, 2008. This horrible tragedy has our family in a deeply saddened condition. In addition to the loss of those innocent lives, Steven was a member of our family and we are grieving his loss as well as the loss of life resulting from his actions. As a result of our family’s extensive grief, we will not be making any additional statements to the news media. We respectfully request that the media honor our family’s wishes and recognize our grief following this tragic event.”

  It’s a notably modern statement, asserting the primacy of grief and the individual and the lack of culpability for what anyone else in the family has done. In other times and other cultures, their houses might have been torn down and their bodies ripped to pieces, but in our time they can demand privacy to grieve, and there can even be a righteous quality to this demand.

  It’s impossible not to feel bad for the family, though, especially when you think of all the hatred Susan had to endure from Steve over all those years. Bob, too, is such a tragic figure in his one TV appearance, coming to his door to try to fend off reporters, that I decided not to try to contact him. “Please,” he says. “Leave me alone. I have no statement to make, and no comment. OK? I’d appreciate that. This is a very hard time for me. I’m a diabetic, and I don’t want to be going through a relapse.” According to newspaper reports, “he throws up his arms and weeps.” And his arms do go up in an ancient and impossible attempt to capture the enormity of the loss, his voice breaking. He’s living something as extreme as Greek tragedy, his life suddenly on stage. The chorus is outside and will remain there. Only death will end his part, and this will come in October, but eight months is a long time. Steve’s mother, the most culpable in the tragedy—the one who loved horror movies, who feared her son and perhaps could be blamed for pumping him full of meds, keeping him at Thresholds, and returning him there each time he ran home, begging to be let in—was spared this.