“I’ll always be grateful for the 2 years that I spent with Steven. Even though some times were extremely difficult, I feel so lucky that he was in my life. Steven had a profound influence on my life. If it weren’t for Steven, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. He touched every part of my heart and soul. I wish that everyone would be able to experience what Steven and I shared.
“I feel responsible because I didn’t know what he was thinking and how he was feeling. There is nothing that I wouldn’t have done for him. I wish he would have talked to me about what was going on in his head. I don’t think Steven knew what his final actions would do to me. I think that Steven thought that all the things he sent to me would be enough to get me through the devastation he left behind.
“Some people were angry when I told them about the wedding ring Steven sent me. I don’t think that Steven meant anything bad by it. The ring was Steven’s way of telling me that if things were different, he would have married me and we would have been happy. I think the ring was his way of finally telling me that he wasn’t afraid to commit. I know that Steven loved me even though he had a difficult time showing me all the time.”
Jessica beats herself up about warning signs, and also about the last day she saw him, February 11, three days before the shooting.
“You can write a book about me someday,” he told her that day.
“Why would I want to write a book about you?” she asked him.
“I can be your case study,” he said.
On the way to the Marilyn Manson concert the week before, he asked her, “What do you think happens when you die?”
A few months earlier, he told her, “One day I might just disappear and you will never find me. Nobody will ever find me.”
A few months before that, he told her, “If anything happens, don’t tell anyone about me.”
~ ~ ~
NIU PROFESSOR KRISTEN MYERS talks about the “forward, together forward” campaign here, which is from the school fight song and is posted on the door of nearly every business in DeKalb. She talks also about the “new normal” approach from the administration. It sounds like something out of Orwell’s 1984. “Everyone is supposed to move forward now as if nothing happened, because now is the ‘new normal,’” Kristen says. “But I’m not willing to ‘absorb’ any more and move on in the ‘new normal.’”
Kristen’s angry now because she adored Steve as a student and helped recommend him. He went to parties at her house and met her kids. “If I had the money, I’d move away right now. I’d leave the country, I think. Maybe Canada or Mexico.” She was in Panera with her daughter and suddenly felt she had to tell her what to do if a shooter came in the door. “When I had to talk to my daughter in Panera, that was it.” She tells me that a young woman on the faculty carries a kind of popup Lexan shield now to every class, a contraption made for her by her husband. And Kristen’s husband taught at Virginia Tech before coming to NIU. His father and grandfather committed suicide. There’s a sense of doom.
Jerry Santoni is “ready and anxious to move on afterward in classes,” so he’s frustrated by the counseling sessions, some of which he feels become “just random gossip sessions.” But he can’t believe the oceanography course continues after the shooting. “The teacher [Joe Peterson] was pretty relentless, even for the final. I took the class only as an elective. The only policy change was that we’d have announced quizzes instead of pop quizzes. I thought he would react a lot more sympathetically.”
Jerry is in a bathroom on campus a few days afterward, his first day back in school, and someone bangs against a towel dispenser, which makes a loud sound. “I seriously went through three seconds of ‘Oh God, What’s happening!’ I remember the echoing of the shotgun blasts.”
“The students were the most inspiring thing,” Joe Peterson says, talking about how they forged on and completed the class. Less than 10 of his 160 or so students dropped out. “I’m not a victim of this guy,” he says. “I’m a survivor of him.”
But the damage Steve did extends to thousands of people. The funerals for the five students he killed — Catalina Garcia, Ryanne Mace, Dan Parmenter, Gayle Dubowski, and Julianna Gehant — are held the week after, from February 18 to 20, “but there are really about forty thousand victims,” Jim Thomas says. “This entire university and community.” And one could extend that farther, too, of course. The vice principal at Steve’s former high school in Elk Grove Village tells me they can’t even hold a fire drill now, students are so spooked. The effort put into emergency response plans at universities across the country mirrors the Homeland Security effort, expensive and entirely incapable of responding to a swift attack.
Steve’s godfather, Richard Grafer, is “sick to death of talking about Steven. I didn’t know him. For fifteen years we had no contact. Now my own neighbors drive by and point at my house. I’ve shut down my entire life because of Steven. I can’t go to a grocery store without people saying, hey, I saw you on TV, your godson killed a bunch of people.”
Josh Stone hits a setback around Easter, when someone burns Steve’s cross. There have been other attempts to take away or vandalize the sixth cross, but this one hits Josh hard, and he’s struggling again.
“I understand it’s tough for the people who knew him,” Joe Peterson says. “It’s true there aren’t a lot of memorials to him. And I’m glad.”
Three months after the shootings, Jessica still cries every time we talk. “I feel this need to protect him,” she says. “He was such a private person.” We were supposed to meet for dinner, but instead we’re standing in a Barnes and Noble in Champaign, thumbing through books on the tables near the front door. Her friend Josh is with her again. He’s her moral support each time we talk. He doesn’t say anything, and I don’t know anything about him.
She shows me her new tattoo, six stars on her left forearm. Steve’s is red and black, NIU’s colors, but I don’t think she realizes these are also the colors of Jigsaw, Marilyn Manson, Nazis, and Steve’s “Terrorist” T-shirt. She touches one of the other stars. “I don’t know the other names yet,” she says, and cries much harder. “I’m not ready yet for the other names, for what he did.”
After the shootings, Jessica received all those painful and confusing gifts from Steve, including the platinum wedding band, and even Fight Club seems to have a message for her: “You shot yourself,” the protagonist’s girlfriend says at the end, and he answers her, “Yes. But I’m okay. Marla, look at me. Trust me. Everything’s going to be fine. You met me at a very strange time in my life.”
“I’m worried about who you’re talking with,” Jessica tells me, and she makes me name Julie, Rich, and Adam again, Steve’s high school friends. “I talked with Susan,” she says, “and she couldn’t remember them.” So I mention the “wiretap” arranged by Adam, the Tubes, and now she remembers the stories. “Oh no,” she says.
But the worst two, for her, are sex with his dog and Craigslist. “You can’t write about those,” she says. “Steve was such a private person.”
“I have to make sense of his life,” I tell her. “And sexual shame is part of why he hated himself so much, which is part of why he was able to do this. If I leave out the secret summer of sex with Nicole, or all the people from Craigslist, he doesn’t make any sense.”