Brian Karpes is Joe Peterson’s teaching assistant, sitting in the front row, in front of Joe’s podium. He remembers Joe trying to open that stage door. “He pulls on the door like three times, and it’s locked. It was the most crushing feeling. Your only way out, and it’s locked.”
When Joe takes off running during the second reloading, Brian runs after him. “I ended up at the back of a large group, though, blocked, and I knew I’d be the first to get shot.” Brian’s a big guy. So he dives behind the podium, onto the stage, on his knees.
“I tried to peer around the podium to get a look at him, but the minute I saw him, he turned and saw me. He turned and fired, and he pulled the trigger of the Glock multiple times. He just kept shooting me. I got hit right in the head. It felt like getting hit with a bat. As I fell to the floor face-first, all I could think was, ‘I got shot and I’m dead.’ I hit the floor with my eyes closed and a ringing sound in my ear, and I thought this was literally the sound of my dying, going into the darkness.”
Bullets that miss are exploding against the concrete and tearing up Brian’s side with shrapnel.
“After a while, though, he moved on to others and I realized I was still breathing and not dead, and I realized I should just play dead.”
Steve jumps off the stage. Dan Parmenter is sitting next to his girlfriend, Lauren DeBrauwere. Media will report later that he was visiting the class just to be with her on Valentine’s Day, but he’s actually enrolled. He’s a jock, a good-looking guy. His family considers him their “miracle baby,” because he was born with a heart defect and survived surgery as a toddler. He’s in the front row, tries to shield Lauren, and Steve shoots him five times — twice in the head, twice in the back, once in the side — and kills him. Then Steve shoots Lauren, twice, in the abdomen and hip. One of the bullets travels up and narrowly misses her heart. Then Steve shoots the girl next to her. “It was almost like he went down a line,” Lauren’s father says.
Steve walks calmly up the aisle, shooting students with his pistols as he goes. Lieutenant Henert of the NIU police believes he used the Glock predominantly and tried one of the other pistols but had a problem with it.
“It would be quiet for a few moments,” Brian says, “All I remember is just unbelievable quiet — then a few more shots. Every time he’d shoot, I’d jump, and every time I’d jolt like this, I was yelling to myself, ‘You’ve gotta lay still.’”
It’s only a couple minutes, but it seems to stretch on forever.
Ivan Gamez is hiding in the right side seating section with his friends Sara Crooke and Angela Brocato. When Steve gets to their aisle, though, he isn’t looking at them. He’s looking only at the center section of seats, shooting students who are lying on the floor.
Gina Jaquez is lying on the floor in the fourth or fifth row with her friend Cathy — Catalina Garcia — and classmate Maria Ruiz-Santana. She hears several students scream for Steve to stop shooting. But he keeps shooting. He walks up and down the aisle, works his way along the rows. He walks closer to her. She can see his shoes under the seats, only five or ten feet away.
He keeps shooting, a few rounds at a time. Five dead. Eighteen injured. Samantha Dehner is one of the last to be injured, shot in the right arm and leg. Gina Jaquez is still right there next to Steve, hiding, terrified.
Then Steve walks away, hops back onto the stage.
One more shot. Then silence. Gina waits. Waits a bit longer. Finally, she taps her friend Cathy on the back. “Let’s go, Cathy!” she says. But then she sees blood on the floor near Cathy’s hip, and Cathy isn’t moving. She shakes her, and then she tries to get Maria off the ground. Tries to pick her up, but she won’t move, either.
~ ~ ~
BRIAN KARPES FINALLY NOTICES it’s been quiet for a long time, so he looks up and sees Steve lying near him on the stage. “He was in a half fetal position, his back to me. Instinctively, I pushed my glasses up, but there was blood smeared on them, and they were broken because the bullet that hit me in the head had hit the frame first. I was lying in a giant pool of my own blood. There was so much blood.”
He sees Joe’s cell phone lying on the ground and tries to call 911 but can’t get through. “I walked up the aisle and one of the students was stumbling, holding onto the auditorium seats. He’s got a hole in his chest and is bleeding. He’s passing out, and I couldn’t hold him up, because I was shot in my arm.”
“I grabbed another cell phone from the aisle, and this time there was a busy signal, so I thought things would be okay, and when I exited the building, it was kind of neat in a way, all the police and firefighters running toward the building, everyone coming to help. I tried to tell them there was a shooter, but I found out I couldn’t talk. I found out later that the left side of your brain is where your language lobes are, so I literally couldn’t talk until the swelling went down on that side of my head.”
Earlier, when Joe Peterson gets to the door, as the shooting is still going on, he thinks he isn’t going to make it out because there’s a mass of students. “But nobody was shoving,” he says. “It was amazing.”
Joe doesn’t hear another shot after the one that hits him in the arm. He gets outside, slips and falls on ice, and runs over to the next building and yells at students to warn them.
“Is this a joke?” they keep asking him, but he tells them, “I’ve been shot and I’m bleeding.”
“I ran down the hall screaming ‘there’s been a shooting in Cole Hall,’” Joe says. “I ended up in the anthropology building. I thought he might be going from building to building, like Cho.” It’s frightening to hide in a room, since the door keeps opening slowly as people go back and forth trying to find out what’s happened. Joe is so freaked out that “at some point, I threw a phone and hid under a desk.”
The girl Jerry Santoni feels guilty about hides under that coat on the floor until after the last shot. Jerry still feels terrible he didn’t help her. “She dropped out of school afterward and is still having problems,” he says. He’s also haunted by seeing Brian walk out with blood all over his face.
According to NIU Professor Kristen Myers, nine students are so paralyzed with fear they remain not only through the entire shooting but through the triage as well.
The first on scene from NIU turns out to be Joseph McFarland, who works in Cole Hall for Tech Services. He hasn’t heard any shots, but he’s heard the fire alarm. He checks the other auditorium first, then sees a guitar case and enters the rear stage door to see Steve, “dead on stage with a pool of blood around his head.” He sees a shotgun on his left side and a black handgun near his right side, spent shotgun shells and bullet casings scattered around. He tells police later that the auditorium was “pretty much cleared out” by the time he entered. He calls 911, and a few minutes later, the police arrive, so he leaves.
Alexandra Chapman, one of Steve’s friends, arrives in the parking lot outside Cole Hall at 3:05 p.m., as the shootings are taking place. Steve tutored her as an undergrad, and now she’s a grad student in sociology. She knows Dan Parmenter, also, from lacrosse. She doesn’t get out of her car right away, because she’s listening to an NPR segment. When she does finally get out, though, she notices that people are gathered outside of Cole and saying they’ve heard shots.
She sees the first police officers running across the small bridge in front of the hall with their guns drawn and sees Chief Grady running with his gun drawn, which really scares her, since she considers him “such a pacifist and all about decelerating a situation.”