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

The first call to 911 comes in at 53 seconds after 3:04. Two seconds later, more calls, and officers Besler and Burke gather info, pinpoint the location and basic description of the shooter. It will take them more than a minute and a half to do this, though, until 34 seconds after 3:06, when they dispatch an officer to Cole Hall. A minute and a half is not a long time, but in a shooting, it’s an eternity. The police aren’t going to make the mistakes of Columbine or Virginia Tech. They’re moving as fast as they can, and the first officer who arrives is supposed to immediately go in, without backup. But Steve knows this new plan, too, and has planned his shooting to take only a couple of minutes. So despite best intentions, the police aren’t really responding to the event. It’s not possible to respond to this event. They’re going to respond to an aftermath.

Steve fires the shotgun three more times, shooting students in the back as they bunch up in the aisle, trying to escape. At this distance, the tiny bird shot pellets are spraying wide, hitting many with each shot, wounding and not killing. That eerie quiet again between each round.

“I had two thoughts during his second reloading,” Joe says. “I remembered that girl at Columbine hiding under her desk who got shot at point blank range. I also thought, ‘I just got married. I’m not going to do this to my wife.’

“So I took off. I jumped down from the stage and ran down the aisle, except there were students everywhere, so it was more like spider-walking, using my hands, too. I was keeping my eyes on him as I went. I knew not to turn my back on him. I was halfway up the aisle when he turned and looked right at me. He had just reloaded the shotgun, but he dropped it. I didn’t see him reach for the Glock. It was so fast, he just suddenly had it, and he fired at me. There was no change of expression, not even excitement. It was like if you’re repainting a room at home, painting the walls, and you realize you missed a few spots, it was that mechanical.”

This is Steve’s first of forty-eight shots with his pistols, after six with the shotgun.

“I felt something like a strong flick on my left shoulder. I was wearing three layers, so the bullet snagged. I felt something hot and round fall out of my sweater and hit my knuckle. I looked down and saw two white holes from my white shirt underneath my black sweater, and I touched it quick with my other hand. It felt hot, and the sweater was cauterized, felt like plastic. I just thought, ‘I’m really lucky.’ And I also thought, ‘I’m going to get out of here.’”

Brian Karpes is Joe Peterson’s teaching assistant, sitting in the front row, in front of Joe’s podium. He remembers Joe trying to open that stage door. “He pulls on the door like three times, and it’s locked. It was the most crushing feeling. Your only way out, and it’s locked.”

When Joe takes off running during the second reloading, Brian runs after him. “I ended up at the back of a large group, though, blocked, and I knew I’d be the first to get shot.” Brian’s a big guy. So he dives behind the podium, onto the stage, on his knees.

“I tried to peer around the podium to get a look at him, but the minute I saw him, he turned and saw me. He turned and fired, and he pulled the trigger of the Glock multiple times. He just kept shooting me. I got hit right in the head. It felt like getting hit with a bat. As I fell to the floor face-first, all I could think was, ‘I got shot and I’m dead.’ I hit the floor with my eyes closed and a ringing sound in my ear, and I thought this was literally the sound of my dying, going into the darkness.”

Bullets that miss are exploding against the concrete and tearing up Brian’s side with shrapnel.

“After a while, though, he moved on to others and I realized I was still breathing and not dead, and I realized I should just play dead.”

Steve jumps off the stage. Dan Parmenter is sitting next to his girlfriend, Lauren DeBrauwere. Media will report later that he was visiting the class just to be with her on Valentine’s Day, but he’s actually enrolled. He’s a jock, a good-looking guy. His family considers him their “miracle baby,” because he was born with a heart defect and survived surgery as a toddler. He’s in the front row, tries to shield Lauren, and Steve shoots him five times — twice in the head, twice in the back, once in the side — and kills him. Then Steve shoots Lauren, twice, in the abdomen and hip. One of the bullets travels up and narrowly misses her heart. Then Steve shoots the girl next to her. “It was almost like he went down a line,” Lauren’s father says.

Steve walks calmly up the aisle, shooting students with his pistols as he goes. Lieutenant Henert of the NIU police believes he used the Glock predominantly and tried one of the other pistols but had a problem with it.

“It would be quiet for a few moments,” Brian says, “All I remember is just unbelievable quiet — then a few more shots. Every time he’d shoot, I’d jump, and every time I’d jolt like this, I was yelling to myself, ‘You’ve gotta lay still.’”

It’s only a couple minutes, but it seems to stretch on forever.

Ivan Gamez is hiding in the right side seating section with his friends Sara Crooke and Angela Brocato. When Steve gets to their aisle, though, he isn’t looking at them. He’s looking only at the center section of seats, shooting students who are lying on the floor.

Gina Jaquez is lying on the floor in the fourth or fifth row with her friend Cathy — Catalina Garcia — and classmate Maria Ruiz-Santana. She hears several students scream for Steve to stop shooting. But he keeps shooting. He walks up and down the aisle, works his way along the rows. He walks closer to her. She can see his shoes under the seats, only five or ten feet away.

He keeps shooting, a few rounds at a time. Five dead. Eighteen injured. Samantha Dehner is one of the last to be injured, shot in the right arm and leg. Gina Jaquez is still right there next to Steve, hiding, terrified.

Then Steve walks away, hops back onto the stage.

One more shot. Then silence. Gina waits. Waits a bit longer. Finally, she taps her friend Cathy on the back. “Let’s go, Cathy!” she says. But then she sees blood on the floor near Cathy’s hip, and Cathy isn’t moving. She shakes her, and then she tries to get Maria off the ground. Tries to pick her up, but she won’t move, either.

BRIAN KARPES FINALLY NOTICESit’s been quiet for a long time, so he looks up and sees Steve lying near him on the stage. “He was in a half fetal position, his back to me. Instinctively, I pushed my glasses up, but there was blood smeared on them, and they were broken because the bullet that hit me in the head had hit the frame first. I was lying in a giant pool of my own blood. There was so much blood.”

He sees Joe’s cell phone lying on the ground and tries to call 911 but can’t get through. “I walked up the aisle and one of the students was stumbling, holding onto the auditorium seats. He’s got a hole in his chest and is bleeding. He’s passing out, and I couldn’t hold him up, because I was shot in my arm.”

“I grabbed another cell phone from the aisle, and this time there was a busy signal, so I thought things would be okay, and when I exited the building, it was kind of neat in a way, all the police and firefighters running toward the building, everyone coming to help. I tried to tell them there was a shooter, but I found out I couldn’t talk. I found out later that the left side of your brain is where your language lobes are, so I literally couldn’t talk until the swelling went down on that side of my head.”

Earlier, when Joe Peterson gets to the door, as the shooting is still going on, he thinks he isn’t going to make it out because there’s a mass of students. “But nobody was shoving,” he says. “It was amazing.”