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 would 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.