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

It’s a notably modern statement, asserting the primacy of grief and the individual and the lack of culpability for what anyone else in the family has done. In other times and other cultures, their houses might have been torn down and their bodies ripped to pieces, but in our time they can demand privacy to grieve, and there can even be a righteous quality to this demand.

It’s impossible not to feel bad for the family, though, especially when you think of all the hatred Susan had to endure from Steve over all those years. Bob, too, is such a tragic figure in his one TV appearance, coming to his door to try to fend off reporters, that I decided not to try to contact him. “Please,” he says. “Leave me alone. I have no statement to make, and no comment. OK? I’d appreciate that. This is a very hard time for me. I’m a diabetic, and I don’t want to be going through a relapse.” According to newspaper reports, “he throws up his arms and weeps.” And his arms do go up in an ancient and impossible attempt to capture the enormity of the loss, his voice breaking. He’s living something as extreme as Greek tragedy, his life suddenly on stage. The chorus is outside and will remain there. Only death will end his part, and this will come in October, but eight months is a long time. Steve’s mother, the most culpable in the tragedy — the one who loved horror movies, who feared her son and perhaps could be blamed for pumping him full of meds, keeping him at Thresholds, and returning him there each time he ran home, begging to be let in — was spared this.

There’s a chance someone else was more culpable, an older male in the family or a family friend who sexually abused Steve when he was young, because most of Steve’s problems and a few of his conversations with his friends point to this, but there’s no solid evidence, and it’s wrong even to suggest this against any individual without evidence, since an accusation in any sexual crime acts almost the same as a conviction. We may never know exactly why sexual shame drove Steve so mercilessly from at least as early as junior high until the very end. It’s impossible to say, also, whether he targeted women, minorities, and jocks in the shootings. It seems he did, especially women, but it’s hard to prove. It’s hard to say, also, why exactly he chose Valentine’s Day.

And I have to be careful. Some in my own family blamed my stepmother, for instance, for my father’s suicide, because he wanted to be with her in the end, somehow felt “shafted” (his word) after he had been the one to cheat and break up two marriages. Blaming women for men’s sexual shame and despair is inaccurate and dangerous. Homosexuality shouldn’t be blamed, either. Denial and shame were problems for Steve, but not his sexual orientation itself.

Culpability, blame, warning signs. The NIU sociology department and all who knew Steve are caught squarely and undeservedly in the crosshairs. By the afternoon of February 15 at NIU, the day after the shooting, there’s already a strong culture of media distrust and silence developing. The department holds a large group counseling session with about forty people, guided by a therapist, and Kay Forest, the chair, tells everyone that she’s not going to be talking to media. This generates a false police lead that she’s telling students not to talk to police, but that gets sorted out.

The department has been hit hard. One of the students killed, Ryanne Mace, was a sociology major. Several injured, including Jerry Santoni, were in sociology. And most in the department knew Steve well, remember him fondly. “I don’t want people to think of him as a monster,” Alexandra Chapman says, and her sentiment is echoed by many others.

At this counseling session, they go three times around the circle, the first time saying how they met Steve and how they knew him, the second time how they’re feeling now, and the third time what they want to take from this meeting. It’s a really long meeting, three hours, and emotionally draining for Alexandra. “It was odd to see my professors crying.”

Jerry Santoni is surprised to find out that the session for the victims of Cole Hall includes all who were enrolled in the oceanography course, not just those who were present for the shooting. But soon enough, he sees the reason for this. One of the girls who wasn’t present finds out that the girls sitting in front and behind her were both killed, which means she likely would have been killed. Another girl who wasn’t there for the shooting tells everyone, “My dad’s in the army, and he was upset at me for not doing anything.” She wasn’t even there. She’s tremendously upset now, crying. “And then my brother was making fun of me, because he’s stationed in Iraq and I’ve seen more action than he did.” Her family’s response is just unbelievable, on a par with groups who will push afterward for legislation to allow students to carry handguns in the classroom. The gun dealer who sold to Cho and Steve will give a lecture at Virginia Tech supporting “student conceal carry” two months after the NIU shooting.

NIU gives a press briefing on February 15 with a range of speakers, including the FBI, ATF, state police, local DeKalb and Sycamore police and fire, campus officials, and NIU’s own Police Chief Grady. But “dealing with the media” is what Grady says he finds most frustrating, and much of the NIU and DeKalb community will become frustrated with Grady simply because he won’t release a report of what happened in Cole Hall for more than two years. “He’s just sitting on it, apparently with a ‘there’s nothing else to be learned’ attitude,” Jim Thomas writes months later. “Grady has pissed off a lot of folks here by stonewalling the info. Grady is an ass for not releasing the report.”

At a vigil that night, Friday, February 15, there are six crosses, for Steve and the five he killed. This is when Alexandra Chapman sees that someone has draped and stapled a black Columbine shirt over Steve’s cross, so she tries to remove it, and then a TV camera crew spots her. “It’s like we’re not allowed to grieve because of what he did. The entire world met him that day, and they all hated him.” The person she and others in sociology knew and loved is being erased. They don’t yet know the tremendous gap between who they thought Steve was and who he really was, so nothing about the event or the world’s response can quite make sense to them.

The vigil is a large one, with about two thousand people gathered in candlelight. Jesse Jackson speaks. “Jesse Jackson, he’s one of those people that any time there’s a tragedy, he has to show his face up for a public image,” Mark says, “and Jesse Jackson went to one of the services. So I thought that was funny, that Steve would be laughing.”

Barack Obama also shows up, but he doesn’t speak. “I really liked that Obama showed up at the memorial service, quietly, and didn’t speak,” Joe Peterson says. “He didn’t use it for his own political gain. I told him how much I appreciated his presence.”

The Lutheran Campus Ministry is holding nightly candlelight vigils, also. Condolences are coming in from everyone, including President Bush, Governor Blagojevich, and numerous universities. Virginia Tech, though, provides the most amazing support, with every one of its departments reaching out to sister departments at NIU. With the increasing frequency of school shootings in the United States, our outreach during the aftermath should just get better and better.

AT QUARTER TO MIDNIGHT ON FEBRUARY 15,the night of the vigil, Greg, one of Steve’s undergrad friends from the NIU dorms, walks past the security checkpoint in the Grant North lobby on campus without showing his ID, and the access control worker, Joseph Puckett, challenges him.