by David Vann
There’s a chance someone else was more culpable, an older male in the family or a family friend who sexually abused Steve when he was young, because most of Steve’s problems and a few of his conversations with his friends point to this, but there’s no solid evidence, and it’s wrong even to suggest this against any individual without evidence, since an accusation in any sexual crime acts almost the same as a conviction. We may never know exactly why sexual shame drove Steve so mercilessly from at least as early as junior high until the very end. It’s impossible to say, also, whether he targeted women, minorities, and jocks in the shootings. It seems he did, especially women, but it’s hard to prove. It’s hard to say, also, why exactly he chose Valentine’s Day.
And I have to be careful. Some in my own family blamed my stepmother, for instance, for my father’s suicide, because he wanted to be with her in the end, somehow felt “shafted” (his word) after he had been the one to cheat and break up two marriages. Blaming women for men’s sexual shame and despair is inaccurate and dangerous. Homosexuality shouldn’t be blamed, either. Denial and shame were problems for Steve, but not his sexual orientation itself.
Culpability, blame, warning signs. The NIU sociology department and all who knew Steve are caught squarely and undeservedly in the crosshairs. By the afternoon of February 15 at NIU, the day after the shooting, there’s already a strong culture of media distrust and silence developing. The department holds a large group counseling session with about forty people, guided by a therapist, and Kay Forest, the chair, tells everyone that she’s not going to be talking to media. This generates a false police lead that she’s telling students not to talk to police, but that gets sorted out.
The department has been hit hard. One of the students killed, Ryanne Mace, was a sociology major. Several injured, including Jerry Santoni, were in sociology. And most in the department knew Steve well, remember him fondly. “I don’t want people to think of him as a monster,” Alexandra Chapman says, and her sentiment is echoed by many others.
At this counseling session, they go three times around the circle, the first time saying how they met Steve and how they knew him, the second time how they’re feeling now, and the third time what they want to take from this meeting. It’s a really long meeting, three hours, and emotionally draining for Alexandra. “It was odd to see my professors crying.”
Jerry Santoni is surprised to find out that the session for the victims of Cole Hall includes all who were enrolled in the oceanography course, not just those who were present for the shooting. But soon enough, he sees the reason for this. One of the girls who wasn’t present finds out that the girls sitting in front and behind her were both killed, which means she likely would have been killed. Another girl who wasn’t there for the shooting tells everyone, “My dad’s in the army, and he was upset at me for not doing anything.” She wasn’t even there. She’s tremendously upset now, crying. “And then my brother was making fun of me, because he’s stationed in Iraq and I’ve seen more action than he did.” Her family’s response is just unbelievable, on a par with groups who will push afterward for legislation to allow students to carry handguns in the classroom. The gun dealer who sold to Cho and Steve will give a lecture at Virginia Tech supporting “student conceal carry” two months after the NIU shooting.
NIU gives a press briefing on February 15 with a range of speakers, including the FBI, ATF, state police, local DeKalb and Sycamore police and fire, campus officials, and NIU’s own Police Chief Grady. But “dealing with the media” is what Grady says he finds most frustrating, and much of the NIU and DeKalb community will become frustrated with Grady simply because he won’t release a report of what happened in Cole Hall for more than two years. “He’s just sitting on it, apparently with a ‘there’s nothing else to be learned’ attitude,” Jim Thomas writes months later. “Grady has pissed off a lot of folks here by stonewalling the info. Grady is an ass for not releasing the report.”
At a vigil that night, Friday, February 15, there are six crosses, for Steve and the five he killed. This is when Alexandra Chapman sees that someone has draped and stapled a black Columbine shirt over Steve’s cross, so she tries to remove it, and then a TV camera crew spots her. “It’s like we’re not allowed to grieve because of what he did. The entire world met him that day, and they all hated him.” The person she and others in sociology knew and loved is being erased. They don’t yet know the tremendous gap between who they thought Steve was and who he really was, so nothing about the event or the world’s response can quite make sense to them.
The vigil is a large one, with about two thousand people gathered in candlelight. Jesse Jackson speaks. “Jesse Jackson, he’s one of those people that any time there’s a tragedy, he has to show his face up for a public image,” Mark says, “and Jesse Jackson went to one of the services. So I thought that was funny, that Steve would be laughing.”
Barack Obama also shows up, but he doesn’t speak. “I really liked that Obama showed up at the memorial service, quietly, and didn’t speak,” Joe Peterson says. “He didn’t use it for his own political gain. I told him how much I appreciated his presence.”
The Lutheran Campus Ministry is holding nightly candlelight vigils, also. Condolences are coming in from everyone, including President Bush, Governor Blagojevich, and numerous universities. Virginia Tech, though, provides the most amazing support, with every one of its departments reaching out to sister departments at NIU. With the increasing frequency of school shootings in the United States, our outreach during the aftermath should just get better and better.
AT QUARTER TO MIDNIGHT ON FEBRUARY 15, the night of the vigil, Greg, one of Steve’s undergrad friends from the NIU dorms, walks past the security checkpoint in the Grant North lobby on campus without showing his ID, and the access control worker, Joseph Puckett, challenges him.
“Go fuck yourself,” Greg tells him. He’s drunk. The confrontation escalates enough that Officer Jennifer Saam from the NIU police is dispatched to break it up.
Saam talks with Puckett privately in the lobby, and then Greg comes over and wants to tell his version. And he doesn’t want to talk in a more private location. He wants to stay right here in the lobby. To Saam, Greg “appeared normal yet slightly teary-eyed,” and she assumes the confrontation is just from “high tension” on campus after the shooting. She asks him whether he’s okay, and he says no. He tells her he knew some of the victims in the shooting. He was at work when he saw on the news that Steve was the shooter, and he immediately threw up.
Greg tells Officer Saam that he looked up to Steve, changed his major to political science because of him. He says everyone called Kazmierczak “Strange Steve” in the dorm, but that to him, Steve felt imposing. “Even though he was listed as 5'9", it felt like he looked down his nose at me as if he was 6'1".” Steve was about 6'1", actually.
“I then realized that Greg might be an important witness for the shooting investigation,” Officer Saam writes, “as he might have insight into Kazmierczak’s mindset.” Officer Saam is smart, and she gets Greg to talk. He tells her about the pig he watched his uncle slaughter with a dull axe, finished off with a sledgehammer. He confesses being beaten for shooting a pheasant with the wrong gun. And he agrees to meet with an investigator, as long as it’s not someone from the NIU staff. “I have absolutely no respect for the NIU administration,” he tells her. “Dr. Kelly Wessner can go fuck herself. Same as Brian Hemphill and especially that hall director of mine . . . you know who I mean [Stephanie Mungo].”
“Greg’s passionate hatred of NIU’s administration was alarming,” Officer Saam writes. “I knew that our department had prior interactions with Greg for various alcohol incidents and an incident with Officer Brunner. Greg is well versed in his constitutional rights and is highly argumentative about campus policies/rules.” He’s served on a housing governance board and a subcommittee called Believing in Culture. He tells her, “I was railroaded out of the organization. They told me to get out or they wo
uld put me out. They accused me of being racist, but I only liked to keep my meetings short and sweet—people were not going to waste my time by making the same points over and over again.” He tells her he doesn’t trust anyone here.
Officer Saam takes Greg to the Grant North Substation to talk with an investigator, but he wants to talk more with her, tells her he feels he can trust her. He knows her husband, Major Del Saam, from training exercises in ROTC. Greg tells her he wanted to commission as an officer in the army and become an MP, but the military wouldn’t let him continue in the ROTC because of asthma. “Greg is resentful and disgruntled about his failed dream, by his own admission,” she writes.
Greg says that after ROTC he went to the funeral of one of his classmates killed in Iraq. He tells Officer Saam that the Westboro Baptist Church protested the funeral. This was the kind of protest Steve wrote about also, describing it as “a religious right nutcase campaign to protest military funerals; their intent being to tie military deaths in Iraq to acts of god due to the United States supporting homosexuality.” Greg was arrested for disorderly conduct for his reaction to their protest. He knows there was a vigil this evening for the NIU victims, but he didn’t go because he’d heard the same church would be there to protest. “Greg did not trust himself to maintain control should he be confronted by those protesters again.”
Officer Saam is a great investigator. She writes, “It is important to note that Greg lives in the same residence hall (Grant D Tower) that the threatening graffiti was found in last semester in December.” According to Joe Peterson, this graffiti referenced Virginia Tech, said the mistake was in having only one shooter, and had a second sentence against blacks, mentioning the student center. Mark raised the question of why not shoot blacks at the student center. And Greg, Mark, Steve, and Kelly were all racist. Is there any chance Steve might have mentioned something to Greg, something that Greg perhaps did not quite take seriously? Is that why he threw up when he found out the shooter was Steve? I have no evidence for this, though, and it seems unlikely. Steve seemed intent to act alone and keep everything secret. But you have to wonder. “Greg is intimately familiar with the security issues on the elevators in Grant Towers,” Saam continues, “and could easily have accessed the Women’s restroom on the 6th floor. Greg currently resides on the 4th floor.” Officer Saam ends her report with a strong warning: “This information compounded all together, I am concerned about this student being able to manage his anger, frustration, and hatreds.” This could have been written about Steve. “I hope that Greg will be sought out and interviewed before he exhibits violence, either related or unrelated, to our current crime.” I haven’t been able to find a follow-up interview with Greg in the police records, and I’m helping to hide him right now by not using his real name, just as I’m helping to hide Mark and Kelly and others. Our concerns about privacy mostly protect the guilty and implicated. I hope there was a follow-up with Greg, and I hope they’re watching him still.
The next day, February 16, there’s another big meeting in the sociology department for staff and faculty to be trained to respond to questions from undergrads. It’s a grief management session of sorts, but it turns into an exhausting therapy session, with everyone talking again about how they feel.
The sociology grad students keep in constant contact from the beginning by email and phone and text and in person. They have lunch, trying to figure out how they’re supposed to help their undergrads and really respond, and their waitress figures out what they’re talking about. She starts asking them questions, which feels overwhelming, and they think, God, if we can’t handle questions even from our waitress, what are we going to do?
This is when Josh Stone goes around trying to help everybody, trying to be there for Jessica and other friends, and ends up drinking a full bottle of hard liquor each night. He stops, finally, when he almost gives his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter the wrong medication. He and others in his family have histories of drinking problems, and he knows the warning signs.
On Sunday, February 17, three days after the shootings, Detective Wells calls Kelly. He’s found her from phone records. She made a call to Steve about forty minutes before the shooting, left a voicemail telling him she’d been hired for a new job. She tells Wells that “she never noticed anything about him that seemed abnormal.” I just have to repeat that. She tells Wells that “she never noticed anything about him that seemed abnormal.”
Wells asks Kelly for all her email correspondence with Steve, and she struggles with this, holds back some of the emails. “This is all very hard for me to deal with anyway,” she writes to Wells later that day, “and I just want what we had to remain separate from the mess that’s being shown. Like I have said, our last conversation has replayed in my mind so many times to find that one thing I missed . . . I know that your work is trying to identify motive, but there is no ‘why,’ if you understand what I mean. No one event caused him to ‘snap,’ as the entire thing was apparently so carefully planned. Steve was a very intelligent and caring person who eventually just let his problems overwhelm him. I’m sorry that it came to such a tragic end, but the only one who knows the events that preceded 2.14.08 is him.”
On the same day, Jessica agrees, finally, to an interview on CNN, because she wants to dispel rumors that Steve was abusive. She says he was a nice, normal guy. “No, no way, Steve would never do such a thing,” she says about the shooting. Steve was sweet, a nearly perfect student, a winner of the Deans’ Award. Her voice in grief is a baby voice, her open, pale midwestern face reveals only her sadness at this inexplicable event. She’s wearing an orange U of I sweatshirt, holds a love note from Steve she received the day of the shooting, along with her other gifts. “He was probably the nicest, most caring person ever.” She says she was his girlfriend. They’d been dating for two years, and he had recently gone off his medication because it made him feel “like a zombie.” “He was just under a lot of stress from school, and he didn’t have a job, so he felt bad about that . . . he wasn’t erratic, he wasn’t psychotic, he wasn’t delusional, he was Steve. He was normal.” Jessica seals the story. Successful student, caring boyfriend, sweet young man snaps for no reason, this event an anomaly in his life.
The next day, Kelly writes to Detective Wells, “It’s hard enough to deal with what happened, but then I have to hear the ‘girlfriend’ on cnn all the time. It’s just that now I don’t even know the truth. He was consistent from the first time we met that she was an ex, they were roommates, he cared about her a lot but had been encouraging her to date other people because he felt she was really possessive and jealous over him. Now I can’t help but question everything and it’s frustrating to not have the truth. I contacted her through myspace (I know I shouldn’t have, but when I did, I still believed she was the ‘roommate’) and now I’m certain that I’m unwelcome at any services for him after our brief conversation.”
Jessica is still trying to make sense of things herself. Even a month later, she writes to Mark, “I’ve decided that I have some questions that might seem odd. I want to know exactly where he shot himself. Is that bad? When I picture him, I see him shooting himself in the temple. Does that seem right? He doesn’t seem like a gun in mouth person. Sorry if this is disturbing.”
She was Steve’s confessor, after all. He told her everything, and he told everyone else almost nothing. So it’s strange for her now to know so little.
“So we said he’s not a gun in the mouth type of person,” Mark says. “He’s just not. She thought that, and I felt the same way. Probably the temple.”
The truth is that Steve put the gun in his mouth.
“I had to look up pictures of what people look like after shooting themselves like he did,” Jessica writes. “I probably shouldn’t have done that, because I’ve been having nightmares since I looked it up, but it just reaffirms my feeling that he was someone else that day. It wasn’t really Steve.”
“It’s been almost three months,” Jessica writ
es to me later, “and I still wait for Steven to come home. When I’m at home, watching television, I still turn to where he would be sitting, so that I can comment on something. When I’ve had a rough day at work, I start dialing his number so I can talk to him. Even though I’m in a new apartment, one that Steven never saw, it feels empty and not quite like home. There are pictures of him and us everywhere. I sleep in his shirts and I miss him so much. I didn’t realize how complete he made me and how lonely my world is without him here.
“I’ll always be grateful for the 2 years that I spent with Steven. Even though some times were extremely difficult, I feel so lucky that he was in my life. Steven had a profound influence on my life. If it weren’t for Steven, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. He touched every part of my heart and soul. I wish that everyone would be able to experience what Steven and I shared.
“I feel responsible because I didn’t know what he was thinking and how he was feeling. There is nothing that I wouldn’t have done for him. I wish he would have talked to me about what was going on in his head. I don’t think Steven knew what his final actions would do to me. I think that Steven thought that all the things he sent to me would be enough to get me through the devastation he left behind.
“Some people were angry when I told them about the wedding ring Steven sent me. I don’t think that Steven meant anything bad by it. The ring was Steven’s way of telling me that if things were different, he would have married me and we would have been happy. I think the ring was his way of finally telling me that he wasn’t afraid to commit. I know that Steven loved me even though he had a difficult time showing me all the time.”