It doesn’t matter. There are plenty of others on Craigslist.
Steve starts his new job September 14, 2007, working as a correctional officer at Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana. He’s dropped classes for this job and isn’t tutoring, either, or working as a research assistant. He’s made sacrifices, and the job isn’t what he expected. He enjoys parts of the training. They teach him how to use a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun, the same model he’ll use in Cole Hall. He has to take a test detailing how to load and unload it. He’s fast at loading it. But he wanted to help people in this job, and instead he’s just moving the inmates around from place to place. He has to hide his education from most of his coworkers, too. Being in a master’s program is a kind of stigma here.
On September 25, he’s hanging out with two of his coworkers, Nancy Hu and Samantha Hack-Ritzo, and tells them it’s the anniversary of his mother’s death. He’s just thinking about her. But because he sounds so oddly detached, Samantha tells him he should go to therapy, which he doesn’t appreciate. He’s taken himself off Prozac, because it’s given him acne all over his face, neck, and back. Going off Prozac is worse than being on it, though. He’s really anxious, and he’s checking everything, all day and night, can hardly get out of the parking lot in the morning, has to check so many times that his car door is locked. And he’s getting paranoid. His homemade sword tattoo on his forearm looks like a prison tattoo. So he has it covered by a skull with a dagger. The guy Jason who does it is good, has already covered Steve’s old rose tattoo with a skull and flames.
Then something stupid happens, something maddening. He’s driving to work, early in the morning, talking with Jessica on the phone, passing endless farmland, cornfields, barns, and he misses his turn, drives past. This job is ridiculously inflexible. If you’re late even one minute on one day, you have to start over from scratch. Your couple of weeks in the training program are thrown out.
So he turns around and speeds back, 85 miles per hour in a 55 zone, and then sees the flashing lights, pulling him over. So that’s it. Why shouldn’t everything in his life fall apart?
He drives to Nick Eblen’s house — Nick is a training officer and has been letting Steve crash here some nights to shorten the commute — and clears out all his stuff. He leaves a two-page apology note, over the top:
“Dear Nick and Susan, I wanted to thank you for your kindness, but I am, regretfully, unable to continue with IDOC or with my training due to poor judgment on my part. I sincerely apologize for any embarrassment or shame that I may have caused by my stupid actions. For this reason, I must resign/quit my position. What happened is as follows: This morning I accidentally drove past Putnamville due to driving in the wrong direction. Upon discovering my error, I drove at a high rate of speed in order to arrive at the training facility on time. I was pulled over for speeding by a Putnamville officer and was given a ticket for a very high amount. I was also held over for a short period of time and was already past the training deadline. It’s clear that I lack good judgment and do not deserve to wear the CO uniform.”
What Steve can’t quite put into words, though, is how he’s just doomed.
“I may have graduated at the top of my college class, but I now understand that book smarts don’t translate into common sense. In college, and by past girlfriends, I was often told that I was too smart for my own good. I now understand what was meant by this comment. I have left the key you provided me as well as my training manual, cuffs, ID Badge, chits, and other equipment so it could be returned to you and the facility. Additionally, please do not pick up my paycheck next week, as I will have it mailed to my residence. I am very sorry that this happened, but I suppose it is a wakeup call for me. I take full responsibility for my actions, and am sorry to everyone whom I affected with my poor judgment. Again, thank you for your kindness. It is clear that I do not possess the necessary skills needed to be an effective CO, and I apologize for wasting your (and others) time. I hope that you will find it in your hearts to forgive me. I am ashamed that this happened, but only God knows why it happened. Sincerely, Steven Kazmierczak. P.S. Thank you for your kindness, and I am sorry that I did not work out.”
Nick Eblen thinks it’s odd how Steve “fell apart” from this seemingly minor event. After the shooting, he will tell police that Steve was a “neat freak,” with his pants creased and personal hygiene products perfectly arranged. He will remember Steve as “military-minded,” getting up at 4:30 a.m. to run, and “obsessed” with watching the news. He will tell police that “Kazmierczak had some very weird ways.”
The reference to God is interesting, too. It’s less than five months now until his shooting, and Steve is reverting back to who he was in junior high, his mother and her Catholicism a part of that.
Steve calls the prison and leaves a vague message, saying that he’s in trouble, so the prison superintendant, Julie Stout, sends two people to look for him, asking them to drive the route he would have driven. When they don’t find him, she contacts Illinois police and they go to his apartment in Champaign. They lecture him for wasting everyone’s time, very pissed off. Steve is pissed off, too, and thinks they’re ridiculous.
~ ~ ~
A COUPLE DAYS after Steve loses his prison job, he fights with his former NIU friends on WebBoard. It’s an online discussion forum he still has access to. They’re talking about sex offenders. There’s a gay grad student at NIU who works with them and advocates for them, and this is a guy Steve respected. I meet with him in the student union at NIU, and he tells me about a discussion they had once. It was in one of the labs, a place they called the “zoo,” and everyone else had cleared out. “He felt comfortable with me.” Steve confessed his homosexual experiences. “I told him I would share some of my own skeletons in my closet, too, and we were going to have lunch or something.”
But then Jessica is looking around online, because she works in rehabilitating juvenile sex offenders, and she finds this guy on the list. He’s a former sex offender himself.
Steve exposes him as a hypocrite. Disgusting, a horrible, horrible person. Steve is vicious, relentless in his attacks. So vicious that Jim Thomas and Steve’s friends are shocked by the whole exchange. This isn’t the Steve they know. They can’t make any sense of this.
They don’t know Steve has gone off his Prozac. They didn’t know he was on Prozac in the first place.
Steve has an appointment at McKinley on October 16. “Steve stated that he noticed a worsening of his anxiety and obsessive compulsive thoughts with the discontinuation of the Prozac.” He’s still hiding most things from his doctor, though, and lying. “Steve stated that he had decided to quit his job in Indiana. He stated that the commute was too far and the job was taking too much time from his studies.”
Steve starts to spend a lot more time playing online shooter games with Mark. “Sometimes we wouldn’t follow the rules in games, whether it be team killing people [killing your own team]. Or we would pretend we were gay. Steve would do that to see how people would treat you differently if you were gay. And Steve would set up different rules, like making it so you could kill only with grenades, things that were not the norm and would make people mad, just to see how far you could push people, and to see how threatening will they get.”
They have voice communication set up online, so Mark can hear Jessica laughing in the background. It’s fun. But Steve seems to be aware, also, that something is wrong. He decides to write a paper on the connection between video games and mental illness. On October 19, he sends Mark an email asking for help: “Hey, I was wondering. . if you happen to stumble across any articles related to video games and mental health policy, please send them my way. I am specifically looking for articles/journal articles that relate violent video games to a predisposition to chemical disorders, (and actual legislation or law bridging these two concepts together. . such as the Illinois Safe Games Act struck down as unconstitutional just a few years ago). I’m working on research in this area and I hope to get together a publishable paper within the next few months on this issue, (hey, who knows. .). Anyway, I know you’re a news junkie like I am, and would appreciate any forwards if you find anything.”