Greg says that after ROTC he went to the funeral of one of his classmates killed in Iraq. He tells Officer Saam that the Westboro Baptist Church protested the funeral. This was the kind of protest Steve wrote about also, describing it as “a religious right nutcase campaign to protest military funerals; their intent being to tie military deaths in Iraq to acts of god due to the United States supporting homosexuality.” Greg was arrested for disorderly conduct for his reaction to their protest. He knows there was a vigil this evening for the NIU victims, but he didn’t go because he’d heard the same church would be there to protest. “Greg did not trust himself to maintain control should he be confronted by those protesters again.”
Officer Saam is a great investigator. She writes, “It is important to note that Greg lives in the same residence hall (Grant D Tower) that the threatening graffiti was found in last semester in December.” According to Joe Peterson, this graffiti referenced Virginia Tech, said the mistake was in having only one shooter, and had a second sentence against blacks, mentioning the student center. Mark raised the question of why not shoot blacks at the student center. And Greg, Mark, Steve, and Kelly were all racist. Is there any chance Steve might have mentioned something to Greg, something that Greg perhaps did not quite take seriously? Is that why he threw up when he found out the shooter was Steve? I have no evidence for this, though, and it seems unlikely. Steve seemed intent to act alone and keep everything secret. But you have to wonder. “Greg is intimately familiar with the security issues on the elevators in Grant Towers,” Saam continues, “and could easily have accessed the Women’s restroom on the 6th floor. Greg currently resides on the 4th floor.” Officer Saam ends her report with a strong warning: “This information compounded all together, I am concerned about this student being able to manage his anger, frustration, and hatreds.” This could have been written about Steve. “I hope that Greg will be sought out and interviewed before he exhibits violence, either related or unrelated, to our current crime.” I haven’t been able to find a follow-up interview with Greg in the police records, and I’m helping to hide him right now by not using his real name, just as I’m helping to hide Mark and Kelly and others. Our concerns about privacy mostly protect the guilty and implicated. I hope there was a follow-up with Greg, and I hope they’re watching him still.
The next day, February 16, there’s another big meeting in the sociology department for staff and faculty to be trained to respond to questions from undergrads. It’s a grief management session of sorts, but it turns into an exhausting therapy session, with everyone talking again about how they feel.
The sociology grad students keep in constant contact from the beginning by email and phone and text and in person. They have lunch, trying to figure out how they’re supposed to help their undergrads and really respond, and their waitress figures out what they’re talking about. She starts asking them questions, which feels overwhelming, and they think, God, if we can’t handle questions even from our waitress, what are we going to do?
This is when Josh Stone goes around trying to help everybody, trying to be there for Jessica and other friends, and ends up drinking a full bottle of hard liquor each night. He stops, finally, when he almost gives his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter the wrong medication. He and others in his family have histories of drinking problems, and he knows the warning signs.
On Sunday, February 17, three days after the shootings, Detective Wells calls Kelly. He’s found her from phone records. She made a call to Steve about forty minutes before the shooting, left a voicemail telling him she’d been hired for a new job. She tells Wells that “she never noticed anything about him that seemed abnormal.” I just have to repeat that. She tells Wells that “she never noticed anything about him that seemed abnormal.”
Wells asks Kelly for all her email correspondence with Steve, and she struggles with this, holds back some of the emails. “This is all very hard for me to deal with anyway,” she writes to Wells later that day, “and I just want what we had to remain separate from the mess that’s being shown. Like I have said, our last conversation has replayed in my mind so many times to find that one thing I missed. . I know that your work is trying to identify motive, but there is no ‘why,’ if you understand what I mean. No one event caused him to ‘snap,’ as the entire thing was apparently so carefully planned. Steve was a very intelligent and caring person who eventually just let his problems overwhelm him. I’m sorry that it came to such a tragic end, but the only one who knows the events that preceded 2.14.08 is him.”
On the same day, Jessica agrees, finally, to an interview on CNN, because she wants to dispel rumors that Steve was abusive. She says he was a nice, normal guy. “No, no way, Steve would never do such a thing,” she says about the shooting. Steve was sweet, a nearly perfect student, a winner of the Deans’ Award. Her voice in grief is a baby voice, her open, pale midwestern face reveals only her sadness at this inexplicable event. She’s wearing an orange U of I sweatshirt, holds a love note from Steve she received the day of the shooting, along with her other gifts. “He was probably the nicest, most caring person ever.” She says she was his girlfriend. They’d been dating for two years, and he had recently gone off his medication because it made him feel “like a zombie.” “He was just under a lot of stress from school, and he didn’t have a job, so he felt bad about that. . he wasn’t erratic, he wasn’t psychotic, he wasn’t delusional, he was Steve. He was normal.” Jessica seals the story. Successful student, caring boyfriend, sweet young man snaps for no reason, this event an anomaly in his life.
The next day, Kelly writes to Detective Wells, “It’s hard enough to deal with what happened, but then I have to hear the ‘girlfriend’ on cnn all the time. It’s just that now I don’t even know the truth. He was consistent from the first time we met that she was an ex, they were roommates, he cared about her a lot but had been encouraging her to date other people because he felt she was really possessive and jealous over him. Now I can’t help but question everything and it’s frustrating to not have the truth. I contacted her through myspace (I know I shouldn’t have, but when I did, I still believed she was the ‘roommate’) and now I’m certain that I’m unwelcome at any services for him after our brief conversation.”
Jessica is still trying to make sense of things herself. Even a month later, she writes to Mark, “I’ve decided that I have some questions that might seem odd. I want to know exactly where he shot himself. Is that bad? When I picture him, I see him shooting himself in the temple. Does that seem right? He doesn’t seem like a gun in mouth person. Sorry if this is disturbing.”
She was Steve’s confessor, after all. He told her everything, and he told everyone else almost nothing. So it’s strange for her now to know so little.
“So we said he’s not a gun in the mouth type of person,” Mark says. “He’s just not. She thought that, and I felt the same way. Probably the temple.”
The truth is that Steve put the gun in his mouth.
“I had to look up pictures of what people look like after shooting themselves like he did,” Jessica writes. “I probably shouldn’t have done that, because I’ve been having nightmares since I looked it up, but it just reaffirms my feeling that he was someone else that day. It wasn’t really Steve.”
“It’s been almost three months,” Jessica writes to me later, “and I still wait for Steven to come home. When I’m at home, watching television, I still turn to where he would be sitting, so that I can comment on something. When I’ve had a rough day at work, I start dialing his number so I can talk to him. Even though I’m in a new apartment, one that Steven never saw, it feels empty and not quite like home. There are pictures of him and us everywhere. I sleep in his shirts and I miss him so much. I didn’t realize how complete he made me and how lonely my world is without him here.