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

We walk around the building to the back doors.

“I think he came in these back doors,” Jim tells me, “and checked both auditoriums. One has a sound booth, but the other has a screening room, and that has a door onto the stage.”

We both peer into the windows. We can’t go inside, because Chief Grady of the NIU police has locked everything down. He won’t meet to talk with me. His secretary slipped and told me that he’s let other people tour the hall, but since then she hasn’t even returned my calls.

Jim has rehearsed Steve’s last actions over and over, and he talks about them sometimes in first person. “It makes perfect sense to remove the sim card. I would do that, too. And I would lock the bag in the hotel not to throw off police — because they could just cut through a bag — but because I know I’ll be out during the day and don’t want someone from the hotel finding all the ammunition.”

“Why did he come back here?” I ask.

“He was returning here to Cole Hall because this is where it all began, his struggle to make something of himself through academic achievement after the group home.” Jim tells me Steve always felt he wasn’t worthy, and what he did with his final act was to annihilate all that achievement, giving in to that dim view of himself, making it true.

“The media hasn’t caught on yet to the significance of the first-person shooter games Steve played,” Jim says. “He would have checked out the auditorium ahead of time to make sure he staged his ‘game’ correctly. He was very methodical. He wouldn’t have left anything to chance.”

We walk to the student union next, very close by, and I grab a sandwich at Subway. Jim says he doesn’t ever eat lunch. Then we walk to his office, where Steve often sat and worked and helped other students.

Jim says I’ll get to meet Josh and other friends of Steve’s from the American Correctional Association student group on Friday, when we tour a community corrections center in Chicago. He tells me that he and Josh used to joke, even in front of Steve, that “Steve must be a mass murderer, because he’s so nice.”

“He was so deferential and polite, respectful,” Jim continues. “He was deferential to a fault, really. Josh and I tried to get him to relax, and he did open up and come out of his shell. He could be funny, and we got him to have a few drinks now and then.”

The media reported that a paper on self-mutilation in prisons was coauthored by Jim, Josh, and Steve, because it seemed like one of those warning signs, but Jim tells me it was actually started by another author, Margaret Leaf. She and Jim were really the authors of the paper, Josh did the research, and Steve did a bit of research but was mostly the editor. “He’d admonish us with ‘who wrote this?’ and it was fun. He was good at putting everything together, all of our messy writing.”

Then Jim sighs, shakes his head. “I would try to praise him and his work,” he says, “but he always felt his work wasn’t good enough. I tried to get him to submit a paper for a prize, but he wouldn’t submit it. ‘I don’t want to embarrass myself,’ Steve said, but it was a great paper. It could have won the prize.”

“Where do you think his insecurity came from?” I ask.

“That doesn’t necessarily come up directly in conversation,” Jim says. “You can talk with someone for years and still not know some things.”

MEETING JIM THOMASimproves Steve’s life considerably. The fall of 2003 is much better for him than previous semesters. But he still has trouble sleeping, starting in October. By February 18, 2004, he finally goes in to see a doctor. Careful not to say anything about depression or anxiety, but just constantly thinking of things at bedtime. The doctor recommends he see a psychiatrist, of course, but that’s the last thing Steve wants.

In the summer, he takes a statistics course at Harper College, just on the side, to get ready for a statistics course he’ll be taking at NIU the next spring. He gets through the summer mostly, though, by playing first-person shooters online and reading about mass murderers and serial killers.

In fall 2004 he meets Mark, who has a half-burned Bush/Cheney American flag on his door. Steve is excited. “I could never do that,” he says. He has an anti-Bush sticker, but a half-burned flag?

Mark is someone he can talk to, finally, about all of it — the methodology of Columbine, going through weapons choices, the plan, each step, what they could have done differently. Mark a fast talker, smart as hell, quiet and calm but well-versed in all this stuff. Randy Weaver, the Turner Diaries, Waco, Oklahoma. The federal government. There’s a new angle here. Before it was Bundy, Dahmer, Hitler, and conspiracy was on the side, but the two can be brought together.

Libertarians, that’s what “Greg” says they are. Another new friend. Steve convinces Greg to switch his major to political science. They talk about the individual. Steve’s favorite author is Nietzsche. The superman, above moral code. Only the weak let themselves be ruled by morality. They talk about Firearms Owner ID (FOID) cards. “It’s back to the days of the Hitler regime,” Steve says. “The government is trying to track us.”

Greg grew up in a hunting family, beaten once for using the wrong caliber on a pheasant. Watched his uncle slaughter a pig with a dull axe and had to finish it with a sledgehammer. He has good insight into how Columbine could have been improved. He agrees with Steve, also, on zero tolerance or respect for the NIU administration, for Sallie Mae and everyone else who controls us.

Steve’s academic focus is shifting away from political science, though, toward sociology and criminology, because of Jim Thomas. Steve helps found the NIU chapter of the American Correctional Association on campus and becomes its treasurer and later VP. He gets Mark to join, even though he’s in political science. This is when he tells Thomas, “I’m focusing strictly on academics. I want to make something of myself after the group home.”

ON A SUNNY, COLD FRIDAY MORNINGin April 2008, I drive to Chicago and park in front of a large warehouse that has been converted to lofts. Josh Stone comes downstairs to let me in. He looks like a large farm boy, with a red goatee. He’s the current president of the NIU chapter of the American Correctional Association. I feel awkward, but I shouldn’t. He’s friendly and easy.

Josh leads me upstairs to Jim Thomas’s loft, which has a narrow hallway and then opens into a bar — living room area with floor-to-ceiling windows and a fantastic view of the Chicago skyline. I meet Amy, Kathryn, Ilana, and Diana, all members of ACA. They’re friendly, but I also know I have to be careful. This group has developed a code of silence. They’ve been hounded by TV crews at all hours and by one Chicago Tribune reporter for over a month. They’re not willing to talk to media. But Jim has told all of them, in a blast email, that I’m *NOT MEDIA*. I’ve clarified this by letting everyone know that I’m writing a story for Esquire and a book, and I’ve also said my intention is to write a more sympathetic piece about Steve, looking at his final act primarily as a suicide.

“What a beautiful view!” I say, and for the next five hours, I don’t breathe a word about Steve.

We’ve met to tour the Salvation Army’s Community Corrections Center, the largest halfway house in the country, helping former inmates transition back into society. Amy has toured thirteen prisons so far. She and Josh tell me about a tour to Angola, a maximum security prison that holds a rodeo twice a year. They strap a poker chip onto a bull’s forehead and all the inmates try to grab the chip to get fifty dollars. The inmates also play a poker game in the middle of the ring while a bull is let loose, and whoever is the last to remain sitting wins. They have monkeys strapped to dogs, inmates who have never ridden doubling up on horses, etc., and the whole thing is also a crafts fair.