Last Day on Earth (19 page)

Joe Peterson is at the end of a lecture on ocean sedimentology. A lot of his 160 students are missing because it’s Valentine’s Day and they just had a test two days before, on Tuesday. Students at the top of the auditorium are getting antsy. Behind them, students arriving early for the next class keep opening the doors and peeking in.

Joe clicks to the second-to-last slide. He glances at his cell phone on the podium, 3:04 p.m., and steps from his podium toward center stage to give the last part of his lecture.

The door behind the screen bursts open. Steve walks abruptly onto the stage. He stands for a moment just looking at the class.

Jerry Santoni, a sociology major with an emphasis in criminology, a member of ACA, the group Steve helped found, has a first thought that “this guy’s lost,” coming in the stage door. But then Steve raises the shotgun.

He fires into the front row of students. Chaos. Multiple students hit, everyone rising to run. Unnum Rahman hears the shot and feels
something dripping on her face. She has a shotgun pellet in her forehead. Steve’s using only birdshot. She gets up and runs. But some students still think it might be some kind of joke. Jamika Edwards, for instance, sitting in the fourth row. Even though she’s very close, she thinks this can’t be real. Confusion.

Jerry Santoni is near the back, so he sees only a puff of smoke and a bit of fire. Jeremy Smith, in the very back, starts running after the first shot and is the first one out the doors, the first to escape.

Joe Peterson takes a few steps back to a stage door like the one Steve entered. He pulls on the door, but it’s locked. He pulls again and again, trying to open it as Steve fires his shotgun two more times into the students. Jamika says the second shot is fired high into the back rows. She runs with other students down the aisle but ducks into another seating area after just three rows and gets on the floor.

“How quiet it was between the shots is still haunting,” Joe says.

“He’s reloading!” someone yells. And now others are running.

The auditorium has three sections of seats separated by two aisles, and these aisles are the only way out, which means everyone has to bunch in together. Most of the students happen to be on the side of the classroom Steve is on, so he has a clear shot with many targets straight down the aisle. Some of the students crawl under the seats to avoid the aisle.

Jerry dives for the floor and hits his forehead, gets a concussion. But he doesn’t even notice, and he’s able to stay conscious. His glasses have fallen down, so he takes a moment to push them back up, then he runs out, but someone trips right in the door, and there’s almost a pileup. The guy behind him is injured and bleeding. “I remember the blood drops hitting the snow and turning it red.”

Jerry is planning to be a police officer, and he thinks fast enough to take an immediate right turn to get behind a wall, then he just keeps running, all the way to the student center. But he feels guilty already. From his pizza delivery job, he knows the girl who was sitting next to him, and he didn’t help her get out of there. She’s on the floor, hiding under someone’s coat.

Joe is hiding behind his podium, up on stage with Steve. The stage is large, and he’s at the other end. “I could hear the click of the plastic shotgun shells as he was reloading,” Joe says. “I remember thinking, ‘How the hell is he reloading so fast?’”

The first call to 911 comes in at 53 seconds after 3:04. Two seconds later, more calls, and officers Besler and Burke gather info, pinpoint the location and basic description of the shooter. It will take them more than a minute and a half to do this, though, until 34 seconds after 3:06, when they dispatch an officer to Cole Hall. A minute and a half is not a long time, but in a shooting, it’s an eternity. The police aren’t going to make the mistakes of Columbine or Virginia Tech. They’re moving as fast as they can, and the first officer who arrives is supposed to immediately go in, without backup. But Steve knows this new plan, too, and has planned his shooting to take only a couple of minutes. So despite best intentions, the police aren’t really responding to the event. It’s not possible to respond to this event. They’re going to respond to an aftermath.

Steve fires the shotgun three more times, shooting students in the back as they bunch up in the aisle, trying to escape. At this distance, the tiny bird shot pellets are spraying wide, hitting many with each shot, wounding and not killing. That eerie quiet again between each round.

“I had two thoughts during his second reloading,” Joe says. “I remembered that girl at Columbine hiding under her desk who got shot at point blank range. I also thought, ‘I just got married. I’m not going to do this to my wife.’

“So I took off. I jumped down from the stage and ran down the aisle, except there were students everywhere, so it was more like spider-walking, using my hands, too. I was keeping my eyes on him as I went. I knew not to turn my back on him. I was halfway up the aisle when he turned and looked right at me. He had just reloaded the shotgun, but he dropped it. I didn’t see him reach for the Glock. It was so fast, he just suddenly had it, and he fired at me. There was no change of expression, not even excitement. It was like if you’re repainting a room
at home, painting the walls, and you realize you missed a few spots, it was that mechanical.”

This is Steve’s first of forty-eight shots with his pistols, after six with the shotgun.

“I felt something like a strong flick on my left shoulder. I was wearing three layers, so the bullet snagged. I felt something hot and round fall out of my sweater and hit my knuckle. I looked down and saw two white holes from my white shirt underneath my black sweater, and I touched it quick with my other hand. It felt hot, and the sweater was cauterized, felt like plastic. I just thought, ‘I’m really lucky.’ And I also thought, ‘I’m going to get out of here.’”

Brian Karpes is Joe Peterson’s teaching assistant, sitting in the front row, in front of Joe’s podium. He remembers Joe trying to open that stage door. “He pulls on the door like three times, and it’s locked. It was the most crushing feeling. Your only way out, and it’s locked.”

When Joe takes off running during the second reloading, Brian runs after him. “I ended up at the back of a large group, though, blocked, and I knew I’d be the first to get shot.” Brian’s a big guy. So he dives behind the podium, onto the stage, on his knees.

“I tried to peer around the podium to get a look at him, but the minute I saw him, he turned and saw me. He turned and fired, and he pulled the trigger of the Glock multiple times. He just kept shooting me. I got hit right in the head. It felt like getting hit with a bat. As I fell to the floor face-first, all I could think was, ‘I got shot and I’m dead.’ I hit the floor with my eyes closed and a ringing sound in my ear, and I thought this was literally the sound of my dying, going into the darkness.”

Bullets that miss are exploding against the concrete and tearing up Brian’s side with shrapnel.

“After a while, though, he moved on to others and I realized I was still breathing and not dead, and I realized I should just play dead.”

Steve jumps off the stage. Dan Parmenter is sitting next to his girlfriend, Lauren DeBrauwere. Media will report later that he was visiting the class just to be with her on Valentine’s Day, but he’s actually
enrolled. He’s a jock, a good-looking guy. His family considers him their “miracle baby,” because he was born with a heart defect and survived surgery as a toddler. He’s in the front row, tries to shield Lauren, and Steve shoots him five times—twice in the head, twice in the back, once in the side—and kills him. Then Steve shoots Lauren, twice, in the abdomen and hip. One of the bullets travels up and narrowly misses her heart. Then Steve shoots the girl next to her. “It was almost like he went down a line,” Lauren’s father says.

Steve walks calmly up the aisle, shooting students with his pistols as he goes. Lieutenant Henert of the NIU police believes he used the Glock predominantly and tried one of the other pistols but had a problem with it.

“It would be quiet for a few moments,” Brian says, “All I remember is just unbelievable quiet—then a few more shots. Every time he’d shoot, I’d jump, and every time I’d jolt like this, I was yelling to myself, ‘You’ve gotta lay still.’”

It’s only a couple minutes, but it seems to stretch on forever.

Ivan Gamez is hiding in the right side seating section with his friends Sara Crooke and Angela Brocato. When Steve gets to their aisle, though, he isn’t looking at them. He’s looking only at the center section of seats, shooting students who are lying on the floor.

Gina Jaquez is lying on the floor in the fourth or fifth row with her friend Cathy—Catalina Garcia—and classmate Maria Ruiz-Santana. She hears several students scream for Steve to stop shooting. But he keeps shooting. He walks up and down the aisle, works his way along the rows. He walks closer to her. She can see his shoes under the seats, only five or ten feet away.

He keeps shooting, a few rounds at a time. Five dead. Eighteen injured. Samantha Dehner is one of the last to be injured, shot in the right arm and leg. Gina Jaquez is still right there next to Steve, hiding, terrified.

Then Steve walks away, hops back onto the stage.

One more shot. Then silence. Gina waits. Waits a bit longer. Finally, she taps her friend Cathy on the back. “Let’s go, Cathy!” she says. But
then she sees blood on the floor near Cathy’s hip, and Cathy isn’t moving. She shakes her, and then she tries to get Maria off the ground. Tries to pick her up, but she won’t move, either.

BRIAN KARPES FINALLY NOTICES
it’s been quiet for a long time, so he looks up and sees Steve lying near him on the stage. “He was in a half fetal position, his back to me. Instinctively, I pushed my glasses up, but there was blood smeared on them, and they were broken because the bullet that hit me in the head had hit the frame first. I was lying in a giant pool of my own blood. There was so much blood.”

He sees Joe’s cell phone lying on the ground and tries to call 911 but can’t get through. “I walked up the aisle and one of the students was stumbling, holding onto the auditorium seats. He’s got a hole in his chest and is bleeding. He’s passing out, and I couldn’t hold him up, because I was shot in my arm.”

“I grabbed another cell phone from the aisle, and this time there was a busy signal, so I thought things would be okay, and when I exited the building, it was kind of neat in a way, all the police and firefighters running toward the building, everyone coming to help. I tried to tell them there was a shooter, but I found out I couldn’t talk. I found out later that the left side of your brain is where your language lobes are, so I literally couldn’t talk until the swelling went down on that side of my head.”

Earlier, when Joe Peterson gets to the door, as the shooting is still going on, he thinks he isn’t going to make it out because there’s a mass of students. “But nobody was shoving,” he says. “It was amazing.”

Joe doesn’t hear another shot after the one that hits him in the arm. He gets outside, slips and falls on ice, and runs over to the next building and yells at students to warn them.

“Is this a joke?” they keep asking him, but he tells them, “I’ve been shot and I’m bleeding.”

“I ran down the hall screaming ‘there’s been a shooting in Cole Hall,’” Joe says. “I ended up in the anthropology building. I thought he might be going from building to building, like Cho.” It’s frightening to hide in a room, since the door keeps opening slowly as people go back
and forth trying to find out what’s happened. Joe is so freaked out that “at some point, I threw a phone and hid under a desk.”

The girl Jerry Santoni feels guilty about hides under that coat on the floor until after the last shot. Jerry still feels terrible he didn’t help her. “She dropped out of school afterward and is still having problems,” he says. He’s also haunted by seeing Brian walk out with blood all over his face.

According to NIU Professor Kristen Myers, nine students are so paralyzed with fear they remain not only through the entire shooting but through the triage as well.

The first on scene from NIU turns out to be Joseph McFarland, who works in Cole Hall for Tech Services. He hasn’t heard any shots, but he’s heard the fire alarm. He checks the other auditorium first, then sees a guitar case and enters the rear stage door to see Steve, “dead on stage with a pool of blood around his head.” He sees a shotgun on his left side and a black handgun near his right side, spent shotgun shells and bullet casings scattered around. He tells police later that the auditorium was “pretty much cleared out” by the time he entered. He calls 911, and a few minutes later, the police arrive, so he leaves.

Alexandra Chapman, one of Steve’s friends, arrives in the parking lot outside Cole Hall at 3:05 p.m., as the shootings are taking place. Steve tutored her as an undergrad, and now she’s a grad student in sociology. She knows Dan Parmenter, also, from lacrosse. She doesn’t get out of her car right away, because she’s listening to an NPR segment. When she does finally get out, though, she notices that people are gathered outside of Cole and saying they’ve heard shots.

She sees the first police officers running across the small bridge in front of the hall with their guns drawn and sees Chief Grady running with his gun drawn, which really scares her, since she considers him “such a pacifist and all about decelerating a situation.”

Then she thinks maybe it’s dangerous to be standing outside Cole, so she goes to the sociology lab in DuSable Hall, where Steve tutored her. She and eight other grad students and three or four undergrads decide to lock themselves in. Someone has been seen bleeding in their building, wounded, and they think maybe the shooter is in their building
now. The phones aren’t working because of all the traffic, the Internet is slow, and they don’t know what to do.

They’ve heard a lot of different rumors, not only that the shooter is going from building to building but also that there was a shootout with police, that the shooter is in custody, that he’s been shot by police. But they don’t know what to believe.