David Vann - Last Day on Earth - A Portrait of the NIU School Shooter

Back at the dorm, he runs into Phillip, the only one of his suitemates he can really talk to. Ahron isn’t around. Steve speaks quietly, but he’s hurrying, tripping over his words, telling Phillip about Ted Bundy, about Jeffrey Dahmer, about Hitler. Amazing, the things they did, how they got away with it. The planning, and can you imagine actually eating human flesh? Frying it up like a steak? “He would talk about them as if he idolized them,” Phillip wrote in his statement to police. “He was intrigued as to how they committed their murders and he would tell their stories to others over and over again.”

Phillip is good to talk to. He listens. But then he says he has homework to do, breaks off the conversation just as they’re really getting into Hitler, and then there’s dinner, and Steve is eating alone again, watching CNN. The news, always something, always some killing somewhere, some disaster. And the control. The façade of two parties, masking the real power brokers. But Steve can see. He can read between the lines. He’s going to switch his major from computer science to political science. While he watches, he reads Hunting Humans , a book that covers many of the most famous mass murderers, or one of his gun magazines. Then he’s back to studying.

The next day, he’s on the phone again with Sallie Mae, screaming at them. He needs his tuition money now. They tell him spring semester isn’t until January, months away, and he’ll have the funds before then, but he tries to make their tiny little brains understand he needs the money now. Anything could happen.

Later, he talks with Phillip again, getting back to their conversation about Hitler and the others. “I told him to stop because I had already heard him tell me their stories too many times and I was tired of hearing them,” recalls Phillip. He doesn’t want to talk about Hitler or Bundy or Dahmer anymore.

Steve must think Ahron has gotten to Phillip. “Strange Steve.” So to hell with them all. He’ll move out, get a single. This is unbearable, especially Ahron, but Phillip and Tom, too, and everyone else on the floor. He needs his own room. He’ll tell them he won’t take anything else.

It’s a long fight with housing, but he does finally get his way, before the end of the school year. He moves out.

And the next fall, 2003, things are much better. He takes Intro to Sociology in Cole Hall with Professor Jim Thomas. Thomas is an old guy, tall, with wild white hair. He asks questions. He puts them all on the spot. He makes them think. He challenges his own authority. “How can you subvert the power of the professor?” he asks. “If you’re not happy with this power relationship, what can you do to affect it?” He’s into “crim,” which is criminology, studies prisons.

Steve realizes prisons are a way into understanding America. The average stay is only a year, but the country believes they can lock people away, toss the key. Human garbage, just like how he was treated, but he’s back, he’s here, and so is nearly everyone who’s been incarcerated. And nearly everyone who’s served in the military. Thomas offers a way of understanding institutions, the history behind them, how they take shape. He’s a softy, an old lefty, wants people rehabilitated, doesn’t ask questions about Steve’s past.

Steve takes two classes with Jim, drops by his office, feels uncomfortable calling him JT as the others do, but Jim encourages him, as he does with all his students, breaking down the barriers, questioning power. A small cinderblock office, yellowish, crowded with two gray metal desks, gray chairs, servers for running WebBoard, Unix, and the department site, filing cabinets, no extra space at all, slatted windows, but it feels homey, welcoming, safe. Jim keeps strawberry Crush in a small fridge. He lets his grad students have the run of the place, and Steve wants in, but he worries about offending, always feels like he’s intruding. “In the first year or so, he was always apologetic, extremely deferential, and seemed sheepish about taking up my time,” recalls Thomas. “He always asked: ‘Is this ok if I. .??’ I’d respond with something like, ‘Steve, it’s as much your office as mine — just don’t turn off the Unix servers.’”

Thomas becomes a positive role model for Steve. Steve writes later, for a questionnaire for Mark, that Thomas “was effective because he led by example and pushed those around him to excel, whatever they did, and lived by the philosophy ‘to each to his own ability.’ He wasn’t a communist, to be sure, as the quote may imply, but he did make you feel as though you were on an equal level with him, which I feel is a powerful quality of a leader. For a leader to make their underlings feel as though they are in the proverbial trenches with them, that is a powerful and unique ability for any charismatic leader to have.”

I MEET JIM THOMAS FOR THE FIRST TIMEon April 9, 2008, at his house in DeKalb. It’s an older section of town, a small two-story. I talk with his wife Barbara, who is an artist. She’s friendly and smart and interesting, but I can tell she’s also worried about my coming here, wants to protect her husband after all he’s been through with the media. Media trucks were on the lawn that first evening, and Jim finally interviewed with someone from the Associated Press, then appeared on CNN, but without showing his face.

Jim has agreed to meet with me partly because I’m a professor and memoirist, writing about suicide, not a reporter. And my intention at this point is to write about Steve primarily as a suicide, not as a murderer. I’m hoping to write something more sympathetic than other media. I don’t yet know, of course, about his juvenile record or really anything else of his earlier story. I believe the accounts that he was a sweet grad student who snapped.

Jim drives me to campus and we park in the lot right next to Cole Hall. I’m surprised by this. I wasn’t expecting something so direct right away. Jim was Steve’s friend as well as mentor.

“He was very methodical, very careful,” Jim tells me. “He would have parked as close as possible.”

This is the first time Jim has been to Cole Hall since the shootings almost two months ago. There’s no snow now, and that circular drive in front has a small pond in the middle, with lovely bridges. We peer in the windows (the building has remained closed as a crime scene), and I can see bloodstains on the floor, though no broken windows now. Flowers have been set outside.

I didn’t ask for this tour, but Jim walks me through the scene, including Steve’s earlier preparations. He took the sim card out of his phone, the hard drive out of his computer. Jim speculates that he might have been paying for meals with cash. The shooting was on Thursday, in a class that met Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Jim believes Steve must have come to check on Tuesday. “He would have taken a risk in doing that,” Jim says. “He could have been recognized. He still knew a lot of people here.”

It’s cold out, Jim’s breath steaming as he talks. He’s tall and doesn’t wear a hat, used to the weather here, but he looks fragile anyway because of this event and its effect on his life. What I admire is his courage to examine it head-on, trying to find out the truth despite how that feels.

“Jokes,” he tells me. “That’s a lot of how we’ve gotten through.” And he shares some of these jokes. “People say I was his mentor, so I trained him to do this, but I tell them I must not have done a very good job, because if I had, a lot more people would be dead.”

Everyone who knew Steve has been accused by media for almost two months now of missing warning signs. So their jokes reflect that.