Last Day on Earth (20 page)

They also don’t know what to do if someone knocks at the door. What if someone is trying to escape the shooter? They wait in fear, and though they feel guilty, they think about barricading the door with the big file cabinets. They have the lights turned off, hiding in the dark. If Steve were to call out from the other side of the door, though, they would let him in, because they all know and trust him.

Kishwaukee Memorial Hospital is a new, large facility where everyone will be taken for treatment. It’s the only hospital in a thirty-mile radius, and not a Level I trauma center. Later they’ll put together a PowerPoint presentation showing how they responded. Much of the info in the presentation will be inaccurate, though, including when the shooting started, who was shot first (they, like the media, think that Joe Peterson was shot first), and even when their own units first responded. Most of this is NIU Police Chief Don Grady’s fault, since he won’t release info, even to partner organizations, even months afterward. He doesn’t release his official report until more than two years later, and it’s full of errors and omissions. The PowerPoint slides say the scene was secure at 3:15 and EMTs were responding by then, but the police radio traffic logs show the scene declared clear three minutes later, with a repeated request for medical units to come ASAP. In the PowerPoint presentation, all responses are organized, but the radio log has one officer asking where to walk his victim to an ambulance, and he keeps repeating this request for almost five minutes, from 3:19:30 to 3:24. Chaos is what’s happening, and numerous police, fire, and ambulance units are doing their best to sort it all out, but there’s also infighting from the first moments between police units. Lt. Spangler of the DeKalb police is the head of the Area Task Force, and he should be given immediate control of the entire case, but Grady refuses to ask for help. There have
been several years of bad blood between the NIU police and DeKalb police, who feel that Grady has isolated, shored up his own control, gotten rid of any at NIU who would oppose him, and refused joint training that would have helped in this situation.

Kishwaukee claims they transport the first patient at 3:26, about twenty minutes after the shooting, which began before 3:05 and ended before 3:08. They transport their last patient at 4:53, an hour and a half later. Their ED (emergency department) has fifteen beds, thirteen of which are in private rooms, two of which are in trauma bays. The private rooms are large and meant to be able to handle trauma, so the staff is able to improvise.

On that day, when the first call comes in, they already have nine patients, with acute influenza, pregnant hyperemesis, cephalgia, pharyngitis, fifth disease, ulnar fracture, and three other pediatric patients. They have two ED doctors on duty, with a third en route, seven nurses (one en route), two EMT’s, and one clerk. They find they don’t have to use their “call tree” to notify anyone because the entire town already knows. The first ambulance reports there will be two or three patients. The next reports eight. The next reports fifteen to twenty. They don’t know whether the shooter is still at large, or whether there is more than one shooter, or whether this might be gang related, with possible retaliation at the hospital. They have to figure out where to put their current patients, how to organize their staff, and whether to lock down the facility for security. They decide to lock down at 3:20, establish an Incident Command. They don’t have their first patient yet, but they give initial staff assignments, set up wireless phones, and even have a preset media plan. They’re moving really quickly.

At 3:20, media helicopters are already in the air, but the hospital is having trouble getting enough helicopters for evacuation of seriously wounded victims. They’re told that only Air Angels are flying, due to the weather, so they’re trying to get more from Rockford Memorial Hospital. They’re also talking to their sister hospital, Valley West Community Hospital.

By 3:30, they decide to use the second helicopter pad at the hospital and quickly remove the snow from it. At 3:38, half an hour after the
shooting, their first patient arrives, with gunshot wounds to the head and left chest.

Back at NIU, when Joe Peterson is taken, finally, to the student center, he says, “Oh my God, is this all that’s left?” Because only a few of his students are gathered. “There were books, bags, shoes, and blood everywhere.”

Jerry Santoni is in a squad car, listening to the police radio. There’s some confusion, because DeKalb isn’t set up yet on the newer radio system, and the police think at first that there might be more shootings in the library. They dispatch officers to check it out. They also follow up on a report of a trail of blood that turns out to be only syrup.

There are still a lot of students and teachers hiding in various rooms in all the surrounding buildings, still afraid the shooter might be going from room to room. Alexandra and the other students in the sociology lab will wait for two and a half hours. They’re finally able to reach the sociology office by a landline and are given the okay to go outside at 5:30 p.m.

By 3:45 at Kishwaukee, the rooms are jammed and family and friends are arriving, taken to the conference center in the lower level. The hospital has social workers, EAP (Employee Assistance Program) staff, and volunteers available immediately to talk to the families and also to help find out who the patients are. There are numerous problems with identification. But everyone is doing their best, an impressive response. Two radiologists are doing “wet reads” of the X-rays, for instance, so there’s no time wasted calling back and forth to get radiology reports.

The X-rays are disturbing. One nurse will say later she’s haunted by the “silhouette of bullets,” all the round shotgun pellets and larger pistol bullets transposed on the bodies. One shows two bullets inside the victim’s head. The X-rays look impossible to me, unaccountably brutal.

Phlebotomists are on hand to collect and label blood and send it to the lab via pneumatic tubes. And as everyone at the hospital works, NIU is also working. They schedule a media briefing for 5:30. They’re putting updates on their website and have a campus alert system in place that was activated by 3:20, sending out warnings by email, telling
students to stay in their rooms, telling everyone to stay away from campus, and cancelling all classes. At 4:10, they let everyone know that the immediate crisis is over. By 4:15 they’ve sent a crisis staff to the hospital to help students and families, and the chair of NIU student services is there to help identify students.

At 4:53, the last patient arrives at Kishwaukee. The dead have not been brought to the hospital yet, though, and the family of one of these students arrives at 5:30. They’re met by a social worker. Steve’s story has ended, but for everyone affected, the story is just beginning.

Not everything goes smoothly. Jerry Santoni, for instance, has left his keys and cell phone in Cole Hall, but he can’t get them back, and no one will give him a ride. His head injury and concussion aren’t considered severe enough. “I was told ‘the late night ride service will start up in two hours.’ I was also told, ‘people have been shot—your keys can wait.’”

The shooting is so impossible and disturbing for the victims, none of them can remember it entirely clearly, even that day at the hospital as they’re interviewed by police. Joe Peterson was on stage with Steve, for instance, and he remembers white and red on a black T-shirt, but he doesn’t put together that the red graphic was of an assault rifle, and his mind transposes “Terrorist” to “Anarchy.” He also tells police that he thinks at least ten shots were fired by the shotgun, and that the pistol was silver. He hasn’t had time to lose memory. Rather, his mind changed things from the moment they happened, and this is true for everyone in the room.

“I was there and I can still barely imagine what it was like,” Joe says. “It wasn’t real.”

“I remember it, but it’s like it was a dream or something,” Brian Karpes says.

Not one of the witnesses interviewed by police correctly identifies Steve’s shirt. Several think he was wearing a hoodie (a sweatshirt with a hood), though most recognize that he was wearing a separate black stocking cap. The clearest description of Steve in the police interviews comes from Jamika Edwards, and I believe she remembers him most
clearly because at first she thought it was just a joke. She wasn’t as panicked initially, so she was able to see. But even her description is transposed, thinking he may have had red hair, for instance, picking up the red graphic on the T-shirt. She says “he had a ‘stoned’ look on his face” and “his clothing was typical of someone you would see on TV that would do this.”

As Joe Peterson is being treated for the minor wound to his arm from that one pistol bullet, he feels tremendous survivor guilt. “I thought Brian was dead. I asked the hospital if Brian was okay but they told me, ‘We can’t release that information.’ I didn’t know for forty hours. We call Brian ‘Superman’ now, because the bullets just bounce off of him.”

At 6:00 p.m., three hours after the shooting, the hospital makes contact with the DeKalb County coroner regarding the victims who have died in Cole Hall. This is the first time, really, that the hospital finds out what has happened. They’ve been responding and treating victims but without context. Within an hour after that, at 7:00, their emergency department operations return to “normal,” according to their PowerPoint, including restocking supplies and cleaning. The immediate crisis has passed.

An hour later, the coroner and state police arrive at the hospital, and the hospital is still talking with families of victims until 11:00 p.m., including having to tell some families that their loved one has died. It’s not until midnight that the dead bodies arrive. They’re X-rayed, cleaned, and prepared for viewing. The PowerPoint slide asks, “Who is going to help with this?”

The next day, the focus is on the media, titled “Fast and Relentless” in the PowerPoint presentation. “Be prepared for the amount of media presence during a disaster.” The hospital, after their experience, recommends prepared statements by only a few designated speakers: “Think before you speak.”

The media is certainly invasive, insensitive, and sloppy, with almost no fact checking. “It was weird reading news reports that I was dead or Brian was dead,” Joe says. “I read that my head was blown off. I still read
that I was the first one shot, but I wasn’t. I read I was chased around in the auditorium, but that wasn’t true. Why didn’t the media fact-check? I read that a student saw me on a gurney with half my face missing. My sister’s watching the news hearing that the instructor was the first one killed. The media has the attitude of ‘It’s the truth now, and tomorrow the truth may be different.’”

“There were reports that the TA passed on in the night,” Brian says. “My aunt and advisor both thought I was dead. And my aunt couldn’t get through to my mom because of a dead cell phone, so for a day and a half, my aunt thought I was dead.”

“The
Today Show
offered tickets to New York with Broadway tickets, etc., for my sister’s whole family if she could get me to appear on the show the next day,” Joe says.

The problem is that everyone wants to know who the shooter really was and how this could have happened. Especially since Steve was a Deans’ Award winner, a top grad student, someone “revered” by faculty, students, and administration. That’s why the media is so invasive. They know they’re not getting the full story. Even the nurses working at Kishwaukee sneak up to look at Steve’s body. We just want to know. Joe himself will become obsessed with the event. He’ll look up everything on Columbine and Virginia Tech, days online, but at some point, he says, “I realized I can’t do this anymore. And I went through all of that for nothing. I didn’t learn anything.”

What amazes Joe most is that more people weren’t hurt. “Six with the shotgun and forty-eight with the pistols,” he says. “And he hit less than thirty people. Thank God he was a piss-poor shot.”

“WHEN THE SHOOTING HAPPENED,”
Mark says, “I called Steve around 4:00 that day, or 3:30, and I was like, ‘I’ve been shot!’ I left a message like that, because I thought there was just a school shooting. So I was laughing, ‘I’ve been shot! Give me a call back.’”

This is their sense of humor, after all. “He had a shirt—well, you’ve seen the picture of the one shirt, the one with the American flag with the gun. I don’t think it’s a big deal, right? But the media posted it up, okay, here’s the gunman. But he also had a shirt that I thought was funny that just said ‘Terrorist’ on it. That’s all it was. So the joke was, you should show up with this at an airport and try and see what happens . . . He also had another shirt that was funny that had a picture of a rifleman—it was the whole JFK thing, right?—and it said ‘I love a parade,’ something like that. I thought it was the funniest shirt, and it was one of those things where he had that shirt and loved it but wouldn’t wear it out because someone might take it the wrong way, right? That’s unfortunately the state of affairs we’re in.”

Mark tries Steve again and again. Straight to voicemail each time.

At 10:00 that night, after details on the news make it seem that Steve is likely the shooter, he sends a text message to Jessica. “Is Steve okay?” Then a detective calls him at two in the morning, and Mark says, “Oh, it’s Steve.” There’s no denying anymore what he already knows.

When Jessica arrives home that evening, police officers are waiting for her. They won’t tell her what’s wrong, and she isn’t allowed to enter her apartment. Instead she’s taken away in a patrol car. She starts to cry, asks if something has happened to Steve. She hasn’t been able to reach him all day, and he didn’t show up for their class at U of I. The police won’t tell her anything, though. A long interview at the police station,
and she consents to a search of her apartment, so after midnight it’s back in the patrol car. “Did Steve kill himself?”

Yes, they tell her finally, and they search all of Steve’s things, all of her things, their life together. In photos of the search, she stands despondent in the middle of their living room, wearing a white T-shirt with a red, long-sleeved shirt underneath. The police go through everything, take things from her, Valentine gifts from Steve. The gifts are still wrapped. She was saving them for when Steve would arrive, planning to spend Valentine’s Day together. She opens them now in front of the police. And they don’t tell her about the $3,250 in cash they take, another gift from Steve. They take his copy of Nietzsche’s
The Anti-Christ
, other books and documents that might help her understand. They tell her they’re going to take his car.