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

Then something stupid happens, something maddening. He’s driving to work, early in the morning, talking with Jessica on the phone, passing endless farmland, cornfields, barns, and he misses his turn, drives past. This job is ridiculously inflexible. If you’re late even one minute on one day, you have to start over from scratch. Your couple of weeks in the training program are thrown out.

So he turns around and speeds back, 85 miles per hour in a 55 zone, and then sees the flashing lights, pulling him over. So that’s it. Why shouldn’t everything in his life fall apart?

He drives to Nick Eblen’s house — Nick is a training officer and has been letting Steve crash here some nights to shorten the commute — and clears out all his stuff. He leaves a two-page apology note, over the top:

“Dear Nick and Susan, I wanted to thank you for your kindness, but I am, regretfully, unable to continue with IDOC or with my training due to poor judgment on my part. I sincerely apologize for any embarrassment or shame that I may have caused by my stupid actions. For this reason, I must resign/quit my position. What happened is as follows: This morning I accidentally drove past Putnamville due to driving in the wrong direction. Upon discovering my error, I drove at a high rate of speed in order to arrive at the training facility on time. I was pulled over for speeding by a Putnamville officer and was given a ticket for a very high amount. I was also held over for a short period of time and was already past the training deadline. It’s clear that I lack good judgment and do not deserve to wear the CO uniform.”

What Steve can’t quite put into words, though, is how he’s just doomed.

“I may have graduated at the top of my college class, but I now understand that book smarts don’t translate into common sense. In college, and by past girlfriends, I was often told that I was too smart for my own good. I now understand what was meant by this comment. I have left the key you provided me as well as my training manual, cuffs, ID Badge, chits, and other equipment so it could be returned to you and the facility. Additionally, please do not pick up my paycheck next week, as I will have it mailed to my residence. I am very sorry that this happened, but I suppose it is a wakeup call for me. I take full responsibility for my actions, and am sorry to everyone whom I affected with my poor judgment. Again, thank you for your kindness. It is clear that I do not possess the necessary skills needed to be an effective CO, and I apologize for wasting your (and others) time. I hope that you will find it in your hearts to forgive me. I am ashamed that this happened, but only God knows why it happened. Sincerely, Steven Kazmierczak. P.S. Thank you for your kindness, and I am sorry that I did not work out.”

Nick Eblen thinks it’s odd how Steve “fell apart” from this seemingly minor event. After the shooting, he will tell police that Steve was a “neat freak,” with his pants creased and personal hygiene products perfectly arranged. He will remember Steve as “military-minded,” getting up at 4:30 a.m. to run, and “obsessed” with watching the news. He will tell police that “Kazmierczak had some very weird ways.”

The reference to God is interesting, too. It’s less than five months now until his shooting, and Steve is reverting back to who he was in junior high, his mother and her Catholicism a part of that.

Steve calls the prison and leaves a vague message, saying that he’s in trouble, so the prison superintendant, Julie Stout, sends two people to look for him, asking them to drive the route he would have driven. When they don’t find him, she contacts Illinois police and they go to his apartment in Champaign. They lecture him for wasting everyone’s time, very pissed off. Steve is pissed off, too, and thinks they’re ridiculous.

A COUPLE DAYSafter Steve loses his prison job, he fights with his former NIU friends on WebBoard. It’s an online discussion forum he still has access to. They’re talking about sex offenders. There’s a gay grad student at NIU who works with them and advocates for them, and this is a guy Steve respected. I meet with him in the student union at NIU, and he tells me about a discussion they had once. It was in one of the labs, a place they called the “zoo,” and everyone else had cleared out. “He felt comfortable with me.” Steve confessed his homosexual experiences. “I told him I would share some of my own skeletons in my closet, too, and we were going to have lunch or something.”

But then Jessica is looking around online, because she works in rehabilitating juvenile sex offenders, and she finds this guy on the list. He’s a former sex offender himself.

Steve exposes him as a hypocrite. Disgusting, a horrible, horrible person. Steve is vicious, relentless in his attacks. So vicious that Jim Thomas and Steve’s friends are shocked by the whole exchange. This isn’t the Steve they know. They can’t make any sense of this.

They don’t know Steve has gone off his Prozac. They didn’t know he was on Prozac in the first place.

Steve has an appointment at McKinley on October 16. “Steve stated that he noticed a worsening of his anxiety and obsessive compulsive thoughts with the discontinuation of the Prozac.” He’s still hiding most things from his doctor, though, and lying. “Steve stated that he had decided to quit his job in Indiana. He stated that the commute was too far and the job was taking too much time from his studies.”

Steve starts to spend a lot more time playing online shooter games with Mark. “Sometimes we wouldn’t follow the rules in games, whether it be team killing people [killing your own team]. Or we would pretend we were gay. Steve would do that to see how people would treat you differently if you were gay. And Steve would set up different rules, like making it so you could kill only with grenades, things that were not the norm and would make people mad, just to see how far you could push people, and to see how threatening will they get.”

They have voice communication set up online, so Mark can hear Jessica laughing in the background. It’s fun. But Steve seems to be aware, also, that something is wrong. He decides to write a paper on the connection between video games and mental illness. On October 19, he sends Mark an email asking for help: “Hey, I was wondering. . if you happen to stumble across any articles related to video games and mental health policy, please send them my way. I am specifically looking for articles/journal articles that relate violent video games to a predisposition to chemical disorders, (and actual legislation or law bridging these two concepts together. . such as the Illinois Safe Games Act struck down as unconstitutional just a few years ago). I’m working on research in this area and I hope to get together a publishable paper within the next few months on this issue, (hey, who knows. .). Anyway, I know you’re a news junkie like I am, and would appreciate any forwards if you find anything.”

“In Columbine,” Mark says, “they were playing Doom, he was playing Counter Strike back in 2002–3, and Grand Theft Auto, which obviously is the most violent game, there’s been studies done on video game violence, and maybe people with mental illness, they detach themselves from the emotional part? I don’t know if that’s true. There could be a combination. Maybe for some people it desensitizes. We would play Warhammer on PS3, Battlefield, Call of Duty 4, any of the team-based games. I didn’t tell the cops that, because you guys are just going to twist it around. But he wrote a paper on mental illness and video games, so I’m wondering if he saw a connection and knew himself.”

Steve’s relationship with video games is complicated, also, by his feelings about money and self-worth: “He always felt that he didn’t deserve things, material things,” Mark says, “because of his financial situation before school. He didn’t want to get into that situation again. In the group home, not having money. Spending money now on $300 game systems, maybe he felt he didn’t deserve it, right? Maybe he was worried that he would fall back. He had a problem with holding onto video game systems. He got me into Xbox 260 back in 2006, we both bought systems and played online, and then he sold it, just one day, he got out of it for awhile, said he needed the money for car repairs, then bought a couple other systems, sold those, went through a couple different computers, laptops, desktops, then he got an Xbox again in 2007 and we got back online, because he enjoyed playing online with me, and then up until fall of 2007, then he said he had a problem with the Xbox (later admitted he just didn’t feel he deserved it) and sold it, and he always had a fear that I’d get mad about that, so he wouldn’t tell me.” Steve sold all his things before his suicide attempts in high school.