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

“WHEN THE SHOOTING HAPPENED,”Mark says, “I called Steve around 4:00 that day, or 3:30, and I was like, ‘I’ve been shot!’ I left a message like that, because I thought there was just a school shooting. So I was laughing, ‘I’ve been shot! Give me a call back.’”

This is their sense of humor, after all. “He had a shirt — well, you’ve seen the picture of the one shirt, the one with the American flag with the gun. I don’t think it’s a big deal, right? But the media posted it up, okay, here’s the gunman. But he also had a shirt that I thought was funny that just said ‘Terrorist’ on it. That’s all it was. So the joke was, you should show up with this at an airport and try and see what happens. . He also had another shirt that was funny that had a picture of a rifleman — it was the whole JFK thing, right? — and it said ‘I love a parade,’ something like that. I thought it was the funniest shirt, and it was one of those things where he had that shirt and loved it but wouldn’t wear it out because someone might take it the wrong way, right? That’s unfortunately the state of affairs we’re in.”

Mark tries Steve again and again. Straight to voicemail each time.

At 10:00 that night, after details on the news make it seem that Steve is likely the shooter, he sends a text message to Jessica. “Is Steve okay?” Then a detective calls him at two in the morning, and Mark says, “Oh, it’s Steve.” There’s no denying anymore what he already knows.

When Jessica arrives home that evening, police officers are waiting for her. They won’t tell her what’s wrong, and she isn’t allowed to enter her apartment. Instead she’s taken away in a patrol car. She starts to cry, asks if something has happened to Steve. She hasn’t been able to reach him all day, and he didn’t show up for their class at U of I. The police won’t tell her anything, though. A long interview at the police station, and she consents to a search of her apartment, so after midnight it’s back in the patrol car. “Did Steve kill himself?”

Yes, they tell her finally, and they search all of Steve’s things, all of her things, their life together. In photos of the search, she stands despondent in the middle of their living room, wearing a white T-shirt with a red, long-sleeved shirt underneath. The police go through everything, take things from her, Valentine gifts from Steve. The gifts are still wrapped. She was saving them for when Steve would arrive, planning to spend Valentine’s Day together. She opens them now in front of the police. And they don’t tell her about the $3,250 in cash they take, another gift from Steve. They take his copy of Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ , other books and documents that might help her understand. They tell her they’re going to take his car.

Her mother and brother arrive to help her. She escapes to a hotel room. But the media’s already here, a news truck out front, everyone asking for warning signs.

A TV news team shows up at Alexandra Chapman’s front door by 9:00 p.m. They ask if they can film her watching the news. She doesn’t know yet that Steve was the shooter. They tell her it was Steve, garbling his last name, and then ask again if they can film her while she cries.

Josh Stone knows right away that it must have been Steve. “I used to joke that he could be a mass murderer, he was so uptight.” In the evening, he starts getting calls from the press, and the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times both drive out to his house, even though he’s an hour from DeKalb.

Several news teams show up at Jim Thomas’s house. He talks to Michael Tarm from the Associated Press, who seems “a cut above” the rest, and also agrees, finally, to do a short spot on CNN, shot from behind, not showing his face.

What the press don’t know, though, is that none of these people at NIU know the full story. Steve hid his life from them. So the goose chase goes on, through the night and into the morning, the demand for warning signs that, for these people, mostly didn’t exist.

Kelly knows things. She breaks down when she hears the news. She has to have psychiatric help, goes into the hospital but is out after about a day, according to DeKalb police. “She thought she was in trouble” because of her emails with Steve about wanting to commit mass murder.

In the early morning hours, Detective Redel calls Susan Kazmierczak, who’s out of town. He tells her that Steve was killed in the incident at NIU. She says she knows about the incident from the news. She asks whether Steve was the shooter. Redel says yes, and now Susan breaks down. She can no longer speak. After all the years of fear, of hatred, it’s finally happened. For her more than for any other person alive, what’s happened can feel inevitable, her brother a demonic force out of control for at least fifteen years.

Detective Lekkas from the DeKalb police department calls the Polk County sheriff’s office in Florida and asks them to notify and interview Steve’s father, who lives in Lakeland. Sergeant Giampavolo and Detective Navarro from the sheriff’s homicide unit knock on Bob Kazmierczak’s door at 5:00 a.m.

“I know why you’re here,” Bob says. “I’m the one you’re looking for.” He leads them to a table in the kitchen. On the center island, they notice a Friday edition of the Lakeland Ledger , which features the NIU shooting on the front page.

Bob tells the detectives that he heard about the shooting on the news the day before and worried that his son might have been involved. His fear was confirmed when Susan called him. Jessica called, also, at 3:00 a.m.

He tells them that Steve was diagnosed as bipolar at a young age and that he didn’t like taking his medications. He remembers that Steve said other students at NIU were “overprivileged” and “uppity” and looked down on him.

Bob reveals that Jessica told him she knew Steve was planning to get a hotel room near NIU in DeKalb. This doesn’t match with what she told police in her own report, that she thought Steve was visiting his godfather. What else is Jessica hiding?

Bob is in denial about various aspects of his own history with Steve. He says Steve was “a bit upset” at first about Thresholds but then it did not bother him and he liked it there. He says Steve was never arrested and never acted out violently toward anyone. He doesn’t mention any of the juvenile reports. The highest praise he can come up with is that his son “was a pretty good guy.” He puts most of the blame on the death of Steve’s mother. The detectives ask about guns, and he recalls that Steve and Jessica and Joe Russo visited the Saddle Creek Park Pistol Range at Thanksgiving with his neighbor and friend Joseph Lesek.

In the afternoon, Susan meets with Detectives Redel and Stewart in her living room, and she tells them everything. His troubled youth, their poisonous relationship, her hopes that maybe things could improve when he moved here to Champaign for grad school. She tells them she’s surprised he didn’t come to her house to kill her.

The media are outside, but Susan refuses to talk with them. She writes a statement, “For release ONLY IF PRESS CONTACTS MEMBERS OF OUR FAMILY.” Does she believe there’s a chance the press won’t contact members of her family? The statement, on the front door of her house, reads, “Our heartfelt prayers and deepest sympathies are extended to the families, victims, and all other persons involved in the Northern Illinois University tragedy on February 14, 2008. This horrible tragedy has our family in a deeply saddened condition. In addition to the loss of those innocent lives, Steven was a member of our family and we are grieving his loss as well as the loss of life resulting from his actions. As a result of our family’s extensive grief, we will not be making any additional statements to the news media. We respectfully request that the media honor our family’s wishes and recognize our grief following this tragic event.”