Last Day on Earth (7 page)

He’s busting his ass, every single day. He knows if he doesn’t make it now, it’s straight back to the SRO in Chicago. This is his one chance. No meds. No more Suicide Steve. But everyone’s against him. Even Sallie Mae.

Ahron comes back from dinner, so Steve fires up the Xbox, puts in the earphones, plays Halo. He likes the sniper rifle best. Zoom in 5×, or 10×, one shot, one kill, clear across the canyon. You can see the vapor trail from the bullet. He’s one of the marines.

Ahron tries to get Steve off Xbox, tries to get him out, but he refuses. Steve doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, won’t leave the room except to eat, Ahron tells the police later.

At midnight, Steve takes a shower. He wears long sleeves every day, even when it’s muggy and hot. He doesn’t want anyone to see his tattoos, the homemade sword on his forearm. He showers when no one will see, keeps the light turned off, likes the darkness.

Steve can’t sleep. Ahron snores. Everything about him is loud. But Steve can’t sleep because he’s thinking about Sallie Mae and thinking about everything that’s due in his classes. Not tomorrow, not even next week, but for the entire semester. He goes over everything in his head, every midterm, every final coming up, every paper. It all has weight, heft, a physical presence pressing in on him, his mind a flatland still but the horizon building up, coming closer.

He feels hollow, also. He remembers beautiful dark brown skin, wants to touch it, wants to feel her again. He remembers her, jacks off and then feels lost. It was impossible, just from the way everyone looked at them when they went out. And they were right. It was an abomination. Phillip Schroeder, one of his suitemates, will tell police later that Steve “was struggling to recover from a former relationship. Apparently he had been involved in an interracial relationship with an African-American woman. However, the racial differences between them had created too much stress and strain on both of them.” Another part of Steve’s racism, to be drawn to what he said he hated? Another denial from a man who wanted not to be gay? Who was this woman, and how long were they together?

Ahron’s alarm goes off, and Ahron doesn’t wake up. He has some sort of condition where he doesn’t wake up from sleeping. You can yell at him or even shake him, and he won’t wake up. But he still sets the alarm, a little gift for Steve.

So Steve hucks tennis balls at his head, hard, and this finally wakes him up. Ahron is upset, has the nerve to complain. Steve turns on CNN, loud.

Steve has class that day in Cole Hall, a big auditorium. Three sections of seats for several hundred, two aisles between. The seats go right up to the wall in the side sections, a kind of trap. The two aisles the only way out. The professor is up on a stage. Music 220—Intro to Music. Steve listens.

Back at the dorm, he runs into Phillip, the only one of his suitemates he can really talk to. Ahron isn’t around. Steve speaks quietly, but he’s hurrying, tripping over his words, telling Phillip about Ted Bundy, about Jeffrey Dahmer, about Hitler. Amazing, the things they did, how they got away with it. The planning, and can you imagine actually eating human flesh? Frying it up like a steak? “He would talk about them as if he idolized them,” Phillip wrote in his statement to police. “He was intrigued as to how they committed their murders and he would tell their stories to others over and over again.”

Phillip is good to talk to. He listens. But then he says he has homework to do, breaks off the conversation just as they’re really getting into
Hitler, and then there’s dinner, and Steve is eating alone again, watching CNN. The news, always something, always some killing somewhere, some disaster. And the control. The façade of two parties, masking the real power brokers. But Steve can see. He can read between the lines. He’s going to switch his major from computer science to political science. While he watches, he reads
Hunting Humans
, a book that covers many of the most famous mass murderers, or one of his gun magazines. Then he’s back to studying.

The next day, he’s on the phone again with Sallie Mae, screaming at them. He needs his tuition money now. They tell him spring semester isn’t until January, months away, and he’ll have the funds before then, but he tries to make their tiny little brains understand he needs the money now. Anything could happen.

Later, he talks with Phillip again, getting back to their conversation about Hitler and the others. “I told him to stop because I had already heard him tell me their stories too many times and I was tired of hearing them,” recalls Phillip. He doesn’t want to talk about Hitler or Bundy or Dahmer anymore.

Steve must think Ahron has gotten to Phillip. “Strange Steve.” So to hell with them all. He’ll move out, get a single. This is unbearable, especially Ahron, but Phillip and Tom, too, and everyone else on the floor. He needs his own room. He’ll tell them he won’t take anything else.

It’s a long fight with housing, but he does finally get his way, before the end of the school year. He moves out.

And the next fall, 2003, things are much better. He takes Intro to Sociology in Cole Hall with Professor Jim Thomas. Thomas is an old guy, tall, with wild white hair. He asks questions. He puts them all on the spot. He makes them think. He challenges his own authority. “How can you subvert the power of the professor?” he asks. “If you’re not happy with this power relationship, what can you do to affect it?” He’s into “crim,” which is criminology, studies prisons.

Steve realizes prisons are a way into understanding America. The average stay is only a year, but the country believes they can lock people away, toss the key. Human garbage, just like how he was treated, but he’s back, he’s here, and so is nearly everyone who’s been incarcerated.
And nearly everyone who’s served in the military. Thomas offers a way of understanding institutions, the history behind them, how they take shape. He’s a softy, an old lefty, wants people rehabilitated, doesn’t ask questions about Steve’s past.

Steve takes two classes with Jim, drops by his office, feels uncomfortable calling him JT as the others do, but Jim encourages him, as he does with all his students, breaking down the barriers, questioning power. A small cinderblock office, yellowish, crowded with two gray metal desks, gray chairs, servers for running WebBoard, Unix, and the department site, filing cabinets, no extra space at all, slatted windows, but it feels homey, welcoming, safe. Jim keeps strawberry Crush in a small fridge. He lets his grad students have the run of the place, and Steve wants in, but he worries about offending, always feels like he’s intruding. “In the first year or so, he was always apologetic, extremely deferential, and seemed sheepish about taking up my time,” recalls Thomas. “He
always
asked: ‘Is this ok if I . . . ??’ I’d respond with something like, ‘Steve, it’s as much
your
office as mine—just don’t turn off the Unix servers.’”

Thomas becomes a positive role model for Steve. Steve writes later, for a questionnaire for Mark, that Thomas “was effective because he led by example and pushed those around him to excel, whatever they did, and lived by the philosophy ‘to each to his own ability.’ He wasn’t a communist, to be sure, as the quote may imply, but he did make you feel as though you were on an equal level with him, which I feel is a powerful quality of a leader. For a leader to make their underlings feel as though they are in the proverbial trenches with them, that is a powerful and unique ability for any charismatic leader to have.”

I MEET JIM THOMAS FOR THE FIRST TIME
on April 9, 2008, at his house in DeKalb. It’s an older section of town, a small two-story. I talk with his wife Barbara, who is an artist. She’s friendly and smart and interesting, but I can tell she’s also worried about my coming here, wants to protect her husband after all he’s been through with the media. Media trucks were on the lawn that first evening, and Jim finally interviewed with someone from the Associated Press, then appeared on CNN, but without showing his face.

Jim has agreed to meet with me partly because I’m a professor and memoirist, writing about suicide, not a reporter. And my intention at this point is to write about Steve primarily as a suicide, not as a murderer. I’m hoping to write something more sympathetic than other media. I don’t yet know, of course, about his juvenile record or really anything else of his earlier story. I believe the accounts that he was a sweet grad student who snapped.

Jim drives me to campus and we park in the lot right next to Cole Hall. I’m surprised by this. I wasn’t expecting something so direct right away. Jim was Steve’s friend as well as mentor.

“He was very methodical, very careful,” Jim tells me. “He would have parked as close as possible.”

This is the first time Jim has been to Cole Hall since the shootings almost two months ago. There’s no snow now, and that circular drive in front has a small pond in the middle, with lovely bridges. We peer in the windows (the building has remained closed as a crime scene), and I can see bloodstains on the floor, though no broken windows now. Flowers have been set outside.

I didn’t ask for this tour, but Jim walks me through the scene, including Steve’s earlier preparations. He took the sim card out of his phone, the hard drive out of his computer. Jim speculates that he might have been paying for meals with cash. The shooting was on Thursday, in a
class that met Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Jim believes Steve must have come to check on Tuesday. “He would have taken a risk in doing that,” Jim says. “He could have been recognized. He still knew a lot of people here.”

It’s cold out, Jim’s breath steaming as he talks. He’s tall and doesn’t wear a hat, used to the weather here, but he looks fragile anyway because of this event and its effect on his life. What I admire is his courage to examine it head-on, trying to find out the truth despite how that feels.

“Jokes,” he tells me. “That’s a lot of how we’ve gotten through.” And he shares some of these jokes. “People say I was his mentor, so I trained him to do this, but I tell them I must not have done a very good job, because if I had, a lot more people would be dead.”

Everyone who knew Steve has been accused by media for almost two months now of missing warning signs. So their jokes reflect that.

We walk around the building to the back doors.

“I think he came in these back doors,” Jim tells me, “and checked both auditoriums. One has a sound booth, but the other has a screening room, and that has a door onto the stage.”

We both peer into the windows. We can’t go inside, because Chief Grady of the NIU police has locked everything down. He won’t meet to talk with me. His secretary slipped and told me that he’s let other people tour the hall, but since then she hasn’t even returned my calls.

Jim has rehearsed Steve’s last actions over and over, and he talks about them sometimes in first person. “It makes perfect sense to remove the sim card. I would do that, too. And I would lock the bag in the hotel not to throw off police—because they could just cut through a bag—but because I know I’ll be out during the day and don’t want someone from the hotel finding all the ammunition.”

“Why did he come back here?” I ask.

“He was returning here to Cole Hall because this is where it all began, his struggle to make something of himself through academic achievement after the group home.” Jim tells me Steve always felt he wasn’t worthy, and what he did with his final act was to annihilate all that achievement, giving in to that dim view of himself, making it true.

“The media hasn’t caught on yet to the significance of the first-person shooter games Steve played,” Jim says. “He would have checked out the auditorium ahead of time to make sure he staged his ‘game’ correctly. He was very methodical. He wouldn’t have left anything to chance.”

We walk to the student union next, very close by, and I grab a sandwich at Subway. Jim says he doesn’t ever eat lunch. Then we walk to his office, where Steve often sat and worked and helped other students.

Jim says I’ll get to meet Josh and other friends of Steve’s from the American Correctional Association student group on Friday, when we tour a community corrections center in Chicago. He tells me that he and Josh used to joke, even in front of Steve, that “Steve must be a mass murderer, because he’s so nice.”

“He was so deferential and polite, respectful,” Jim continues. “He was deferential to a fault, really. Josh and I tried to get him to relax, and he did open up and come out of his shell. He could be funny, and we got him to have a few drinks now and then.”

The media reported that a paper on self-mutilation in prisons was coauthored by Jim, Josh, and Steve, because it seemed like one of those warning signs, but Jim tells me it was actually started by another author, Margaret Leaf. She and Jim were really the authors of the paper, Josh did the research, and Steve did a bit of research but was mostly the editor. “He’d admonish us with ‘who wrote this?’ and it was fun. He was good at putting everything together, all of our messy writing.”

Then Jim sighs, shakes his head. “I would try to praise him and his work,” he says, “but he always felt his work wasn’t good enough. I tried to get him to submit a paper for a prize, but he wouldn’t submit it. ‘I don’t want to embarrass myself,’ Steve said, but it was a great paper. It could have won the prize.”

“Where do you think his insecurity came from?” I ask.

“That doesn’t necessarily come up directly in conversation,” Jim says. “You can talk with someone for years and still not know some things.”

MEETING JIM THOMAS
improves Steve’s life considerably. The fall of 2003 is much better for him than previous semesters. But he still has trouble sleeping, starting in October. By February 18, 2004, he finally goes in to see a doctor. Careful not to say anything about depression or anxiety, but just constantly thinking of things at bedtime. The doctor recommends he see a psychiatrist, of course, but that’s the last thing Steve wants.

In the summer, he takes a statistics course at Harper College, just on the side, to get ready for a statistics course he’ll be taking at NIU the next spring. He gets through the summer mostly, though, by playing first-person shooters online and reading about mass murderers and serial killers.