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

THE MARY HILL HOMEis a narrow three-story brownstone, like the side tower on a castle with no castle attached. The street is narrow, lined with cars that have been dented up and beaten. A car parked out front has replaced panels of a different color. There’s an urban park across the street, chain-link fence and playground structures.

Before Steve moves in, he takes a tour and has a thorough evaluation:

“DESCRIPTION OF MEMBER: Steve is a 17 y.o. Caucasian male who appears his stated age. He is tall and overweight. During his tour, Steve was very quiet and did not ask many questions. His thought form appeared normal and his affect flat. He did not exhibit any bizarre or inappropriate behaviors during his tour.

“MEDICATIONS: Steve is currently taking Prozac 20 mg in the a.m., Zyprexa 10 mg at hs [hour of sleep] and Depakote 500 mg in the a.m. and 100 mg at hs. Past medications include Paxil, Cogentin, Risperdal, Lithium and Cylert.

“SYMPTOMS: Steve stated that when symptomatic he becomes anxious, depressed and unable to sleep. He reports losing interest in all leisure activities, has suicidal thoughts and feels worthless.”

They wake Steve early here. They monitor his medications so he can’t overdose. They make him keep everything clean. They make him work in the kitchen. He’s washing dishes, and they’re getting paid to make him do this. Then it’s off to therapy. Group problem-solving therapy, Mondays and Wednesdays. Vocational training on Fridays. Then all the one-on-one sessions.

Rather than getting better, his symptoms get worse. He’s oversedated, overweight, doesn’t want to take his meds. He has special powers, though, he tells his psychiatrist. He can see his old girlfriend, Missy. And he can read minds. He’s been able to do this all his life, but the power is stronger now, for some reason. He knows what they think of him here, how they underestimate him. In group sessions, you don’t need to be a mind-reader, the other residents so slow you can actually see them think, see each twitch of a thought, the forming of each word on their lips.

When I visit the Mary Hill Home, on a spring afternoon, I see one overweight young white guy in a sweatshirt ambling up to the house. I cross the street and meet him as he reaches the door.

“How do you like it here?” I ask him.

“It’s really stupid,” he says. “They don’t really help you. They just throw groups at you. I’m losing my hair because of it.” And he leans forward to show me. His red hair is in fact very thinned out, and he’s young, so maybe this is from the meds, but mostly he just sounds crazy and dumb, and I think this is what infuriated Steve most about the place. He felt he didn’t belong here.

Steve crawls through the days, through the months, the longest time of his life. Through the fall, through winter, every day unbearable, every day the same. He escapes several times, makes his way home to Elk Grove Village, to his parents’ home, begs them to take him back. Every time they drive him back to Mary Hill. Steve blames his mom, calls her a whore, a bitch, a slut.

Why won’t his parents take him back? Is his mother a monster who fattened him with horror films in his childhood then threw him away when he became frightening himself? Or is this far too simple? What was his father’s role?

Steve hates the Mary Hill Residence and is afraid of the neighborhood. When they encourage him to go out, nearly everyone he sees is African American. He rings at the front door, and there’s always a delay before someone comes to let him in. If he’s ever chased, if someone is trying to kill him, this won’t be fast enough. His racism doesn’t start here — he had a KKK card years before — but it does intensify. He’ll talk in later years about how much he hated this neighborhood, how much he hates affirmative action, the idea of helping these people. Did any of this come from his parents?

He listens to Marilyn Manson constantly now. Julie introduced him. She said it made her want to destroy stuff. It made her feel “really cool.” But to Steve it just feels like comfort, like going home. I’m just a boy, playing the suicide king. Your world was killing me. Nothing heals. Nothing grows. We used to love ourselves. We used to love one another. My prescription’s low. The world is so ugly now. I want to disappear. Our skin is glass. Yesterday was a million years ago. I know it’s the last day on earth .

Manson speaks to every part of Steve’s life, including the possibility of mass murder, asking the question, What If Suicide Kills?

Steve is only marking time. But then something beautiful happens. Columbine, April 20, 1999. Steve reads books on the occult, obsessively, but this is better. They can’t hide the news from him. Columbine is everywhere, on every newsstand, on the TV. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold just like Steve and his friends a year ago in high school, in trench coats, in the cafeteria, making the jocks pay. A brilliant idea, the propane tanks. If only they had exploded. Like watching himself. A triumph. Going out with dignity, not rotting here.

Eric and Dylan planned their killings and suicides in advance, like Steve. And there was no limit, really, to how many people they were willing to kill. They set a small firebomb in a field half a mile away that was supposed to go off at 11:14 a.m. to distract and divert police and fire crews. Then the two propane tanks were supposed to explode in the cafeteria a few minutes later, at 11:17. The tanks had enough explosive power to destroy the cafeteria, killing everyone inside, and could even have made the library above collapse into the cafeteria. Eric and Dylan waited outside in two different vantage points at their cars, armed to shoot students as they fled. If the bombs had gone off and the school had evacuated toward the parking lot, they could have killed hundreds.

The propane bombs didn’t go off, though, and nothing went as planned. Eric and Dylan missed most of the students they shot at, and Dylan didn’t shoot much at all. One teacher thought they were just horsing around and went to tell them to knock it off. Students were told to hide under their desks, and Eric mocked this, said “peekaboo” to Cassie Bernall before shooting her in the head. He bent down so close to her that the recoil from his shotgun broke his nose. He and Dylan were as putzy as shooters could possibly be, the entire event a comedy of ridiculous errors if it weren’t a tragedy, and it continued on for seventeen minutes of killing and another half hour of roaming aimlessly before suicide only because the police were even more pitiful, hiding outside, afraid to go in, protecting themselves. The one teacher who died, hours later, bled out because he wasn’t evacuated in time. It was the worst possible emergency response.

But in Steve’s mind, Eric and Dylan were somehow heroes. They took control, and ten days after the Columbine shooting, Steve decides he’ll take control, too. He goes off his meds, and he scores some pot. On Sunday, he smokes a lot of pot. But then he feels so paranoid. He’s outside, in the neighborhood, and he’s panicking. He runs back to Mary Hill, pounds on the door, and tells them he has to go to the hospital. They tell him to calm down, but he insists on being taken to the hospital. He needs to feel safe.

Steve needs structure. He’s not right. He’s broken. They’ve broken him from all the meds, and he’s just smart enough to know. He weeps about it. His life is tragic. His friends thought he was brilliant, but he just worked hard on his homework. His IQ is 100, just normal. Just smart enough to know how screwed up he is.

He pulls it together over time, the rigid daily routine, the long march. They place him in a job at Things Remembered, October 27, 1999, but it becomes the Christmas season, everyone shopping. It’s too stressful. The pressure, all the people, all these little things they want to buy. Gnomes and cottages and angels. Kitties and puppies. He needs to do things in threes to make sure they’re done, checks his apron is tied, checks it again, but he can’t do that here. He has to do each thing just once, and everyone he works with is a moron. He argues, and it’s his fault, of course, then they fire him, just three days before Christmas. Merry Christmas to you too.