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

After school, they go home to Steve’s, 758 Penrith, Elk Grove Village, Illinois. A small tract home, one story, three small bedrooms. If it weren’t for the living room extending a few extra feet, the house would be a perfect rectangle, same as a double-wide. His mother is a secretary, his father a letter carrier. They won’t be home for hours.

A bedroom community, four variations on this tract house, and Steve’s butts up against a major road, four lanes. Only a chain-link fence between the small back lawn and the cars.

Steve goes straight for the pellet gun, walks outside to the shed, perfect cover. He pumps the gun, building up air pressure, slides in a small pellet, and closes the bolt.

He can hear his dog breathing, though, up close. A pug with breathing problems. So he picks it up by its hind legs and hurls it, hard, with both hands, against the wall.

Now he can focus. The cars are going fast, and they’re only in view for a couple car lengths. And the pellet is slow. So he has to hold the gun aimed to the right, and the moment a car flashes in from the left, he pulls the trigger. The gun spits, the sound of air released, and then he and Adam hang for a moment in concentration, in hope, waiting for the sound of a pellet hitting metal.

They squeal if they hear it, their joy as compressed as the air in the gun. Wait and watch as drivers try to come back, try to pinpoint them. Not easy to do on a busy, fast-moving street. A few times, drivers circle around through the neighborhood, even figure out the right house. The doorbell or loud knocking, but the door is locked, the lights out. The joy so complete, it’s nearly impossible to keep quiet.

Even better than the pellet gun, though, is Pete Rachowsky. A kid in Steve’s grade who carries the materials for a Drano bomb in his backpack. Plastic bottle, Drano or Works toilet cleaner, aluminum foil. Simple. He teaches more than a dozen kids how to make the bombs. Steve and one of his few friends, Joe Russo, decide to make one. Maybe it’s a way to cement the friendship with Joe. Steve is very protective of his friends, realizes there aren’t many who will have him.

They wait until after dinner on February 5, 1994. A Saturday night, eighth grade. Joe meets him at the corner and they walk to Jewel supermarket, only a couple blocks away. Steve has a two-liter plastic bottle in his backpack. They buy Works toilet cleaner and aluminum foil, worry about getting caught. Steve comes in here all the time with Adam to eat candy out of the bulk bins. He’s used to feeling nervous here. He’s ready to say his mother asked him to buy these things, but the checker doesn’t ask.

They walk along Arlington Heights, the busy street behind Steve’s house. They take a left on Cosman and walk the strip of houses that face the forest preserve. At the corner, they pass the barn and cottage of the preserve and keep going. This is the way to Joe’s house, so they can say they’re just going home. The houses here look across the street at a hundred feet of lawn and then trees. Easy to disappear anywhere along here, and there’s not much traffic.

They find a house that’s dark, no one home, no cars in the driveway. 235 Cosman, a two-story with an indented porch. They sneak up to this porch, tiptoeing, and crouch down. Steve pulls out the bottle, and they stuff aluminum foil into it. A lot of foil, and then Steve worries it’s too much, but they pour in the Works, cap it, and run across the street to hide in the trees.

Nothing happens for a while. They wonder if they made it wrong. They think about running back across to check. Then it blows, an explosion louder than they could have hoped for. Glorious. They run back through the forest, hyped up on adrenaline and joy, laughing.

Five days later, on February 10, Pete’s mother, MaryAnn Rachowsky, finds two-liter bottles, Works toilet cleaner, and aluminum foil in her son’s backpack. She tells the police, they haul Pete in for questioning, and he eventually gives up Steve and Joe.

The detectives call Steve’s parents on the twenty-second, and they agree to bring him in for questioning. “We spoke to Steven’s parents and they related that Steven was very nervous and scared about being at the police station and he realized that what he had done was a mistake,” reads the police report from February 24, 1994. “They advised that they would discipline him and would like us to speak to Steven to scare him in order that he would not make any bombs in the future.”

Steve is remorseful. He tells the police that fifteen students know how to make the bombs. He gives names. He vows he’ll never do something like this again. Does he already hate himself at this point? Are his apologies already over the top, as they will be in later years? The police aren’t psychiatrists and of course can’t see the future. They see only a scared, remorseful kid, a minor offense, no property damage, no injuries. They station-adjust him, close the case, send him home to be disciplined by his parents.

MY OWN JUVENILE REPORT IS FROM 1980.Only one contact with the Santa Rosa police, and not with the.300 magnum. It was a BB gun, a hot summer’s day, at the fence in our backyard. A fifteen-foot drop-off to the neighbors’ yard below, since we were on a hill. Pine trees along the fence, shady and hidden. My mother at work.

I usually shot at birds with the BB gun and also a pellet gun, but today the neighbors’ dog was barking at me. A black Lab, like the one I’d had with my father. I’d spent weekends at his ranch in Lakeport, California, before he moved back to Alaska. That dog had greeted me every Friday evening by knocking me flat. I’d see the white diamond on his chest, then I’d hit the ground.

I don’t know why I decided to shoot at the neighbors’ dog. I have only the facts of Steve’s life to understand what he did, the details of scenes, and really that’s all I have from my own life. I can’t remember enough of what I felt or thought twenty-eight years ago. A self is not a constant thing, and a mind changes from year to year and can’t remember how it thought before. We think we remember, but that’s fiction, built on the few facts that were noted and stored away.

A beautiful dog, rich black coat, tail wagging as it barked. It was on a back porch that was only a concrete slab in front of a sliding glass door to the living room. The neighbors’ yard was large, with a lot of trees, so the dog was at least fifty feet away, maybe more, and I do remember thinking that a BB was far too slow to do any damage, especially at this range. At the most, it would feel like a swat.

I aimed a couple feet above the dog’s back to account for the fall of the BB and pulled the trigger. A light cough of air, and the brass BB arced away and fell even lower than I had thought, hitting the concrete under the dog’s belly and slapping into the sliding glass door behind. Then there was a pause. The dog wasn’t barking. I wasn’t breathing, and all was still. I could see the BB stuck in the glass, but since that was impossible, I thought I was imagining it.

The glass moved in waves. Large ripples over its entire length, become a liquid, something I had never seen, something I didn’t know was possible, and then it exploded. The entire sliding glass door shattered into thousands of fragments.

The sound was loud, and I should have been running away, but I had just witnessed the most beautiful and improbable thing.

Then the neighbors’ sons emerged from the shattered doorway and I ducked down. They were yelling, and after a few more moments, I heard them start up their VW van and roar down their street to come around the block.

I ran into the house with the BB gun, to the hallway closet, pushed it behind my mother’s coats and pulled out my old BB gun, the broken one. I ran back outside to our shed and was opening the door when I happened to see my neighbor, Ned, looking out his bedroom window at me. He was a year or two younger than I was, a small kid, and we were friends, sort of. I had shot him once with the BB gun, a really lucky shot as he ran down the sidewalk away from me. Just pointed the gun high in the air, and he was far away, running fast, but the BB somehow arced perfectly and hit him in the back. Luckiest shot of my life, and today had been the unluckiest.