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

Joe doesn’t hear another shot after the one that hits him in the arm. He gets outside, slips and falls on ice, and runs over to the next building and yells at students to warn them.

“Is this a joke?” they keep asking him, but he tells them, “I’ve been shot and I’m bleeding.”

“I ran down the hall screaming ‘there’s been a shooting in Cole Hall,’” Joe says. “I ended up in the anthropology building. I thought he might be going from building to building, like Cho.” It’s frightening to hide in a room, since the door keeps opening slowly as people go back and forth trying to find out what’s happened. Joe is so freaked out that “at some point, I threw a phone and hid under a desk.”

The girl Jerry Santoni feels guilty about hides under that coat on the floor until after the last shot. Jerry still feels terrible he didn’t help her. “She dropped out of school afterward and is still having problems,” he says. He’s also haunted by seeing Brian walk out with blood all over his face.

According to NIU Professor Kristen Myers, nine students are so paralyzed with fear they remain not only through the entire shooting but through the triage as well.

The first on scene from NIU turns out to be Joseph McFarland, who works in Cole Hall for Tech Services. He hasn’t heard any shots, but he’s heard the fire alarm. He checks the other auditorium first, then sees a guitar case and enters the rear stage door to see Steve, “dead on stage with a pool of blood around his head.” He sees a shotgun on his left side and a black handgun near his right side, spent shotgun shells and bullet casings scattered around. He tells police later that the auditorium was “pretty much cleared out” by the time he entered. He calls 911, and a few minutes later, the police arrive, so he leaves.

Alexandra Chapman, one of Steve’s friends, arrives in the parking lot outside Cole Hall at 3:05 p.m., as the shootings are taking place. Steve tutored her as an undergrad, and now she’s a grad student in sociology. She knows Dan Parmenter, also, from lacrosse. She doesn’t get out of her car right away, because she’s listening to an NPR segment. When she does finally get out, though, she notices that people are gathered outside of Cole and saying they’ve heard shots.

She sees the first police officers running across the small bridge in front of the hall with their guns drawn and sees Chief Grady running with his gun drawn, which really scares her, since she considers him “such a pacifist and all about decelerating a situation.”

Then she thinks maybe it’s dangerous to be standing outside Cole, so she goes to the sociology lab in DuSable Hall, where Steve tutored her. She and eight other grad students and three or four undergrads decide to lock themselves in. Someone has been seen bleeding in their building, wounded, and they think maybe the shooter is in their building now. The phones aren’t working because of all the traffic, the Internet is slow, and they don’t know what to do.

They’ve heard a lot of different rumors, not only that the shooter is going from building to building but also that there was a shootout with police, that the shooter is in custody, that he’s been shot by police. But they don’t know what to believe.

They also don’t know what to do if someone knocks at the door. What if someone is trying to escape the shooter? They wait in fear, and though they feel guilty, they think about barricading the door with the big file cabinets. They have the lights turned off, hiding in the dark. If Steve were to call out from the other side of the door, though, they would let him in, because they all know and trust him.

Kishwaukee Memorial Hospital is a new, large facility where everyone will be taken for treatment. It’s the only hospital in a thirty-mile radius, and not a Level I trauma center. Later they’ll put together a PowerPoint presentation showing how they responded. Much of the info in the presentation will be inaccurate, though, including when the shooting started, who was shot first (they, like the media, think that Joe Peterson was shot first), and even when their own units first responded. Most of this is NIU Police Chief Don Grady’s fault, since he won’t release info, even to partner organizations, even months afterward. He doesn’t release his official report until more than two years later, and it’s full of errors and omissions. The PowerPoint slides say the scene was secure at 3:15 and EMTs were responding by then, but the police radio traffic logs show the scene declared clear three minutes later, with a repeated request for medical units to come ASAP. In the PowerPoint presentation, all responses are organized, but the radio log has one officer asking where to walk his victim to an ambulance, and he keeps repeating this request for almost five minutes, from 3:19:30 to 3:24. Chaos is what’s happening, and numerous police, fire, and ambulance units are doing their best to sort it all out, but there’s also infighting from the first moments between police units. Lt. Spangler of the DeKalb police is the head of the Area Task Force, and he should be given immediate control of the entire case, but Grady refuses to ask for help. There have been several years of bad blood between the NIU police and DeKalb police, who feel that Grady has isolated, shored up his own control, gotten rid of any at NIU who would oppose him, and refused joint training that would have helped in this situation.

Kishwaukee claims they transport the first patient at 3:26, about twenty minutes after the shooting, which began before 3:05 and ended before 3:08. They transport their last patient at 4:53, an hour and a half later. Their ED (emergency department) has fifteen beds, thirteen of which are in private rooms, two of which are in trauma bays. The private rooms are large and meant to be able to handle trauma, so the staff is able to improvise.

On that day, when the first call comes in, they already have nine patients, with acute influenza, pregnant hyperemesis, cephalgia, pharyngitis, fifth disease, ulnar fracture, and three other pediatric patients. They have two ED doctors on duty, with a third en route, seven nurses (one en route), two EMT’s, and one clerk. They find they don’t have to use their “call tree” to notify anyone because the entire town already knows. The first ambulance reports there will be two or three patients. The next reports eight. The next reports fifteen to twenty. They don’t know whether the shooter is still at large, or whether there is more than one shooter, or whether this might be gang related, with possible retaliation at the hospital. They have to figure out where to put their current patients, how to organize their staff, and whether to lock down the facility for security. They decide to lock down at 3:20, establish an Incident Command. They don’t have their first patient yet, but they give initial staff assignments, set up wireless phones, and even have a preset media plan. They’re moving really quickly.

At 3:20, media helicopters are already in the air, but the hospital is having trouble getting enough helicopters for evacuation of seriously wounded victims. They’re told that only Air Angels are flying, due to the weather, so they’re trying to get more from Rockford Memorial Hospital. They’re also talking to their sister hospital, Valley West Community Hospital.

By 3:30, they decide to use the second helicopter pad at the hospital and quickly remove the snow from it. At 3:38, half an hour after the shooting, their first patient arrives, with gunshot wounds to the head and left chest.

Back at NIU, when Joe Peterson is taken, finally, to the student center, he says, “Oh my God, is this all that’s left?” Because only a few of his students are gathered. “There were books, bags, shoes, and blood everywhere.”