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

Christmas 2007. Steve and Jessica drive to Susan’s house. Cold out, and Steve wants to see his father, who is visiting from Florida, but he’s vowed he’ll never see Susan again. So Jessica walks to the door alone.

They take his father to a restaurant and this goes fine. They talk about school and how they’ve liked moving to Champaign. Then Steve wants to talk about how Susan has been pressuring his dad to sell his house and move back to Illinois. He tells his dad it’s okay to stay in Lakeland. He shouldn’t be pressured. Steve wants him to be happy. Susan shouldn’t be trying to control his life.

The discussion is a bit tense. They switch the subject to Vegas, maybe going there in August. Then they go to Steve and Jessica’s apartment, exchange gifts. They give his dad the first season of The Sopranos , watch a couple episodes together. It seems like it all goes well, but afterward, they need to drop his father off at Susan’s.

Steve doesn’t go to the door, but he sends along his present for Susan. It’s a box of coal. Jessica laughed when he first told her, but she doesn’t think it’s funny now. He actually has a box of coal for Susan, wrapped in Christmas paper. After the shootings, Susan will tell police she’s surprised he didn’t come to kill her.

Two days after Christmas, Steve goes to Tony’s Guns and Ammo, buys a Hi-Point.380, which he’ll take to Cole Hall, and a 12-gauge shotgun. It’s possible this is when he decides to do the shootings, though I believe the decision comes later, on February 3. But by Christmas, he’s estranged from his family, and he isolates himself from his friends. Joe Russo tries to contact him around New Year’s and doesn’t hear back until February 12, two days before the shooting. Mark can’t reach him for a couple weeks but receives a response on January 10: “Long time no chat,” Steve writes. “Lot’s been going on. Suppose I owe you an explanation for my disappearance. I had some family issues to deal with over the last few weeks, but I have distanced myself from the drama recently. Family, as you know, is a complex thing, and I’ve never had any kind of healthy relationship with mine. So why bother resolving 20-year issues when I’m out on my own? Not worth it.”

“I never understood the extent of the issues,” Mark says now, “because I didn’t want to pry into his life.”

ON JANUARY 7, 2008,Steve pays $395 for a tattoo of a pentagram, upside down star, sign of the devil. Jessica will tell police later that it’s not that, it’s just “antiestablishment.” And what does that really mean? Is wanting to topple a real government less dangerous than wanting to align with a fictive being?

On January 11, Steve’s back in touch with Kelly by email. She took the breaking up well in November, said it was a good thing, even:

“It’s basically like we are both standing in a road and there’s. . oh let’s say. . a Greyhound bus barreling towards us. You’re the one who looks at the bus coming closer and says ‘Hmm. . I have been hit by a bus before, and it sucked. I should move.’ Unfortunately, I am the one who ends up standing in the road alone, staring at the bus and saying ‘Well, I have been hit by a bus before, and I don’t want to go through that again. However, maybe this time it won’t hurt so much. . I’m not sure if I want to take the chance or not.’ So. . what I’m saying is that in this situation, you had to be the one to shove me out of the road! It’s really better for both of us in the end. .

“As for CL [Craigslist], I haven’t met anyone since and don’t plan to anymore. . I’m giving up on all that and have decided to actually let my vagina grow shut, as mentioned in my original rant.:) Too many weirdos. I know you worry about me, as I do also worry about you too (especially when I don’t hear from you in days).”

In his email on January 11, Steve apologizes to Kelly: “Please don’t take any offense that I didn’t email you, as I had some family issues that needed to be sorted out, which is why I haven’t responded or been in touch. I’ve always been good at disappearing like that, and I apologize. Also, I got too attached to you initially for a supposed CE [Casual Encounter, a section on Craigslist], but hopefully you understand. What can I say? You were fantastic.”

Kelly responds positively, as usual, and they keep exchanging emails. “Thanks for not holding a grudge against me,” he writes. “Really, I’m a nice guy but can be a little odd at times. Stay macabre.”

Steve sends Kelly a link for a joke song on YouTube, titled “I wanna be like Osama,” that has a few odd echoes for the coming fame of his own mass murders only three weeks away now: “I know people will abhor me, but my God they won’t ignore me.” He tells her about “a religious right nutcase campaign to protest military funerals; their intent being to tie military deaths in Iraq to acts of god due to the United States (and their military, by proxy) supporting (or at least not opposing) homosexuality.” He’s gay and was in the military, but Kelly doesn’t know. She thinks she knows him, but she doesn’t, and this is the case for everyone else in his life, too, except maybe Jessica, who is in such deep denial she might as well not know.

Kelly tells him about a tattoo she’s thinking of getting, based on a raven tree design on the Bounty Hunter website (“The Universal Federation of Contempt” is Bounty Hunter’s tagline). Kelly wants to put “a quote from Nietzsche under it. . ‘You must become whoever you are’ or whatever the exact wording is, however I want it in German.”

“I like your tattoo idea,” Steve replies, and of course he would. A reference to the superman, above moral code. “As it seems as if you’ve thought about it for a while. Are there any good artists around Charleston [in Illinois] that you plan on going to? There are plenty of shops up here at UIUC, but I’m loyal to a particular artist, whom I’ve gone to for my last 3 pieces of work. I brought in my ideas and let him work his magic with his freehand, (His name is Jason and he works at Altered Egos). I love the fact that Bounty Hunter is somewhat inspiring to you. Have you ever purchased any T-shirts from them? I have 3 that I picked up a while back; one of which I would probably never wear on an airplane, (the terrorist-ak-47 one).” This is the shirt he’ll wear to Cole Hall. A black T-shirt with white letters that say “Terrorist,” with a red graphic of an AK-47 underneath. In the same email he criticizes “the apologist theories which tend to follow the extremely liberal line of thinking, ‘Don’t blame me, blame society.’”

Steve is all about the individual, about the freedom of the individual above morality and above government. He writes to Kelly that “Big Brother is watching you” and sends her a link to an article about new “secure driver’s license” rules. This concern is shared by civil rights advocates, but Steve’s focus is different.

“We are losing more freedoms by the day in the name of security,” Steve writes to Mark, “and it’s truly appalling. I hate both democrats and republicans alike. No one speaks for me anymore. Really, the invention of mutually exclusive ideologies in this country — liberal vs. conservative — has been a smokescreen for the real power brokers to utilize while achieving their own ends. Yes, it may sound like conspiracy, but it’s the truth, although I would never mention it to someone in public lest I be labeled a tinfoil old hat paranoid radical. The media, like FOX, CNN, MTV all help to perpetrate the illusion of democracy by plastering pictures of racial apologists and bible thumpers all over TV on a 24/7 basis.”

“This is just part of the conversation,” Mark says. “You can see that he is smart, intelligent, and has a good viewpoint. . More recently he started reading conspiracy theories, because we always talked half-jokingly about conspiracy theories and whatnot, but he said that he had some books and he’s more into it. 9-11 for instance, some conspiracies about that, like whether the Pentagon crash really happened, because the way they had the camera angle, they had a camera that showed it, and then the way there was no debris left over for a big 80-ton plane. . He wasn’t a conspiracy theorist, but he just had interest in it. So that’s an example of his intelligence. . I really respected him for his viewpoints. He wasn’t like a crazy tinfoil person. There was good theory behind what he said.”