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

On the same day, Jessica agrees, finally, to an interview on CNN, because she wants to dispel rumors that Steve was abusive. She says he was a nice, normal guy. “No, no way, Steve would never do such a thing,” she says about the shooting. Steve was sweet, a nearly perfect student, a winner of the Deans’ Award. Her voice in grief is a baby voice, her open, pale midwestern face reveals only her sadness at this inexplicable event. She’s wearing an orange U of I sweatshirt, holds a love note from Steve she received the day of the shooting, along with her other gifts. “He was probably the nicest, most caring person ever.” She says she was his girlfriend. They’d been dating for two years, and he had recently gone off his medication because it made him feel “like a zombie.” “He was just under a lot of stress from school, and he didn’t have a job, so he felt bad about that. . he wasn’t erratic, he wasn’t psychotic, he wasn’t delusional, he was Steve. He was normal.” Jessica seals the story. Successful student, caring boyfriend, sweet young man snaps for no reason, this event an anomaly in his life.

The next day, Kelly writes to Detective Wells, “It’s hard enough to deal with what happened, but then I have to hear the ‘girlfriend’ on cnn all the time. It’s just that now I don’t even know the truth. He was consistent from the first time we met that she was an ex, they were roommates, he cared about her a lot but had been encouraging her to date other people because he felt she was really possessive and jealous over him. Now I can’t help but question everything and it’s frustrating to not have the truth. I contacted her through myspace (I know I shouldn’t have, but when I did, I still believed she was the ‘roommate’) and now I’m certain that I’m unwelcome at any services for him after our brief conversation.”

Jessica is still trying to make sense of things herself. Even a month later, she writes to Mark, “I’ve decided that I have some questions that might seem odd. I want to know exactly where he shot himself. Is that bad? When I picture him, I see him shooting himself in the temple. Does that seem right? He doesn’t seem like a gun in mouth person. Sorry if this is disturbing.”

She was Steve’s confessor, after all. He told her everything, and he told everyone else almost nothing. So it’s strange for her now to know so little.

“So we said he’s not a gun in the mouth type of person,” Mark says. “He’s just not. She thought that, and I felt the same way. Probably the temple.”

The truth is that Steve put the gun in his mouth.

“I had to look up pictures of what people look like after shooting themselves like he did,” Jessica writes. “I probably shouldn’t have done that, because I’ve been having nightmares since I looked it up, but it just reaffirms my feeling that he was someone else that day. It wasn’t really Steve.”

“It’s been almost three months,” Jessica writes to me later, “and I still wait for Steven to come home. When I’m at home, watching television, I still turn to where he would be sitting, so that I can comment on something. When I’ve had a rough day at work, I start dialing his number so I can talk to him. Even though I’m in a new apartment, one that Steven never saw, it feels empty and not quite like home. There are pictures of him and us everywhere. I sleep in his shirts and I miss him so much. I didn’t realize how complete he made me and how lonely my world is without him here.

“I’ll always be grateful for the 2 years that I spent with Steven. Even though some times were extremely difficult, I feel so lucky that he was in my life. Steven had a profound influence on my life. If it weren’t for Steven, I wouldn’t be the person I am today. He touched every part of my heart and soul. I wish that everyone would be able to experience what Steven and I shared.

“I feel responsible because I didn’t know what he was thinking and how he was feeling. There is nothing that I wouldn’t have done for him. I wish he would have talked to me about what was going on in his head. I don’t think Steven knew what his final actions would do to me. I think that Steven thought that all the things he sent to me would be enough to get me through the devastation he left behind.

“Some people were angry when I told them about the wedding ring Steven sent me. I don’t think that Steven meant anything bad by it. The ring was Steven’s way of telling me that if things were different, he would have married me and we would have been happy. I think the ring was his way of finally telling me that he wasn’t afraid to commit. I know that Steven loved me even though he had a difficult time showing me all the time.”

Jessica beats herself up about warning signs, and also about the last day she saw him, February 11, three days before the shooting.

“You can write a book about me someday,” he told her that day.

“Why would I want to write a book about you?” she asked him.

“I can be your case study,” he said.

On the way to the Marilyn Manson concert the week before, he asked her, “What do you think happens when you die?”

A few months earlier, he told her, “One day I might just disappear and you will never find me. Nobody will ever find me.”

A few months before that, he told her, “If anything happens, don’t tell anyone about me.”

NIU PROFESSOR KRISTEN MYERStalks about the “forward, together forward” campaign here, which is from the school fight song and is posted on the door of nearly every business in DeKalb. She talks also about the “new normal” approach from the administration. It sounds like something out of Orwell’s 1984 . “Everyone is supposed to move forward now as if nothing happened, because now is the ‘new normal,’” Kristen says. “But I’m not willing to ‘absorb’ any more and move on in the ‘new normal.’”

Kristen’s angry now because she adored Steve as a student and helped recommend him. He went to parties at her house and met her kids. “If I had the money, I’d move away right now. I’d leave the country, I think. Maybe Canada or Mexico.” She was in Panera with her daughter and suddenly felt she had to tell her what to do if a shooter came in the door. “When I had to talk to my daughter in Panera, that was it.” She tells me that a young woman on the faculty carries a kind of popup Lexan shield now to every class, a contraption made for her by her husband. And Kristen’s husband taught at Virginia Tech before coming to NIU. His father and grandfather committed suicide. There’s a sense of doom.

Jerry Santoni is “ready and anxious to move on afterward in classes,” so he’s frustrated by the counseling sessions, some of which he feels become “just random gossip sessions.” But he can’t believe the oceanography course continues after the shooting. “The teacher [Joe Peterson] was pretty relentless, even for the final. I took the class only as an elective. The only policy change was that we’d have announced quizzes instead of pop quizzes. I thought he would react a lot more sympathetically.”

Jerry is in a bathroom on campus a few days afterward, his first day back in school, and someone bangs against a towel dispenser, which makes a loud sound. “I seriously went through three seconds of ‘Oh God, What’s happening!’ I remember the echoing of the shotgun blasts.”

“The students were the most inspiring thing,” Joe Peterson says, talking about how they forged on and completed the class. Less than 10 of his 160 or so students dropped out. “I’m not a victim of this guy,” he says. “I’m a survivor of him.”

But the damage Steve did extends to thousands of people. The funerals for the five students he killed — Catalina Garcia, Ryanne Mace, Dan Parmenter, Gayle Dubowski, and Julianna Gehant — are held the week after, from February 18 to 20, “but there are really about forty thousand victims,” Jim Thomas says. “This entire university and community.” And one could extend that farther, too, of course. The vice principal at Steve’s former high school in Elk Grove Village tells me they can’t even hold a fire drill now, students are so spooked. The effort put into emergency response plans at universities across the country mirrors the Homeland Security effort, expensive and entirely incapable of responding to a swift attack.