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.