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

I finally sold my father’s other guns when I was in graduate school. I needed the money, but I also just didn’t want them in my life anymore. What I really wanted was for them never to have existed. But once I sold them, I was surprised by this terrible feeling that I had sold off a part of my father, because I have so little of him left. He vanished with his suicide. We sold our land, also, that hunting ranch, for peanuts, stupidly, and it was mostly the land that held our family’s history and that connected all of us every year, scattered now.

I still love my father, even twenty-nine years after his suicide. The feeling hasn’t diminished at all, hasn’t faded over time, but I have nothing left to attach it to. If I could hold his.300 magnum now, would he come back to me, some closer memory, some echo of hiking with him through live oak and manzanita, watching him raise that rifle high over his head as we pushed through brush? If I remember that rifle, really focus on it, I can remember the sunlight on my father’s light-brown curly hair, receding, his lopsided grin as he looked down at me. But more than that, I can almost remember how the moment felt, what it was like to be there with him, to hunt with him, what it was like to belong. My father was what attached me to the world.

It turns out I don’t really have that many similarities with Steve. I certainly don’t share his racism, libertarianism, love of horror, fascination with killers, military training, ambivalent sexuality and sprees online and with prostitutes, medication and mental health history, drug-dealer friends, tattoos, disturbing mother, interest in corrections, etc. But I did inherit all my father’s guns at thirteen, when I was most hyped up on hormones, and the world meant nothing to me after he put that pistol to his head. I had nothing to lose. And I had witnessed a lot of brutality.

I watched my father gut shoot two deer once. It was on the upper glade of our ranch. We spotted a group of deer, including two bucks. We were so far away, they couldn’t possibly sense us. My father sighted in with his.300 magnum. I watched through the binoculars.

A great boom like artillery, my father recoiling, and I saw the buck hit in the stomach, gut-shot. It fell over and began tumbling down the steep slope, gathering speed in the dry grass. It was screaming, just like a human being. The voice really the same.

The second boom and the second buck was hit the same way, terrible luck. My father would be upset. A gut shot spoils the meat. He was a very good marksman, so this was unheard of, that he would gut shoot two in a row. This buck fell and rolled the same as the other, screaming also.

The two of them tumbled together down that long glade as we watched, and I’ll never forget their voices. I’ll never be able to erase them, though I’d like to.

I think we can be damaged, and I think Steve’s life was already destroyed before he left high school. He had an incredible drive, though, to make something of himself, and I think that must have made his final act all the more bitter to him.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe enormous thanks to my editor Tyler Cabot at Esquire . He assigned this story to me, then worked tirelessly, every day, for months, through the entire grueling process of interviews, writing, editing, and fact-checking. The two of us were equally familiar with more than a thousand pages of information from the police files in addition to all the interviews, and it was an amazing conversation, the closest collaboration I’ll ever have with anyone. This is his book as much as mine.

I also must thank Terry Noland at Men’s Journal, who assigned an essay, “My Father’s Guns,” which became an important part of this book, and the National Endowment for the Arts for generous support while I was writing. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs has now plucked two of my books from oblivion and given them a life, so I can’t say thank you enough to them, or to the contest judge, Lee Gutkind, and it’s been wonderful to work with the University of Georgia Press, just as it was wonderful to work with the University of Massachusetts Press.

I greatly admire Jim Thomas for his generosity, intelligence, and strength to pursue the truth even when it’s uncomfortable, and I was surprised that so many people would talk to me about such an upsetting story. Julie Creamer, Adam Holzer, and Rich Johnson, for instance, and many of Steve’s friends at NIU, including Aimie Rucinski and Kathryn Chiplis, and another of his professors, Kristen Myers. This is a community of generous, smart, warm people dedicating their lives to helping others, and so it’s terrible that this event happened to them.

Jessica and “Mark” will probably not be happy with some of the judgments and comments I’ve made, but I want to thank them for talking openly with me, and they certainly have my full sympathies in their bereavement, as do the members of Steve’s family.

The book is dedicated to those traumatized by Steve’s shooting, and I do believe that discovering and printing the full story is worthwhile. Joe Peterson and Brian Karpes, the teacher and teaching assistant in the classroom, have told me as much. They’ve said that not knowing was worse than knowing, even though the truth is ugly.