Last Day on Earth (21 page)

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.

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].”