Last Day on Earth (8 page)

In fall 2004 he meets Mark, who has a half-burned Bush/Cheney American flag on his door. Steve is excited. “I could never do that,” he says. He has an anti-Bush sticker, but a half-burned flag?

Mark is someone he can talk to, finally, about all of it—the methodology of Columbine, going through weapons choices, the plan, each step, what they could have done differently. Mark a fast talker, smart as hell, quiet and calm but well-versed in all this stuff. Randy Weaver, the Turner Diaries, Waco, Oklahoma. The federal government. There’s a new angle here. Before it was Bundy, Dahmer, Hitler, and conspiracy was on the side, but the two can be brought together.

Libertarians, that’s what “Greg” says they are. Another new friend. Steve convinces Greg to switch his major to political science. They talk about the individual. Steve’s favorite author is Nietzsche. The superman, above moral code. Only the weak let themselves be ruled by morality. They talk about Firearms Owner ID (FOID) cards. “It’s back to the days of the Hitler regime,” Steve says. “The government is trying to track us.”

Greg grew up in a hunting family, beaten once for using the wrong caliber on a pheasant. Watched his uncle slaughter a pig with a dull axe and had to finish it with a sledgehammer. He has good insight into how Columbine could have been improved. He agrees with Steve, also, on zero tolerance or respect for the NIU administration, for Sallie Mae and everyone else who controls us.

Steve’s academic focus is shifting away from political science, though, toward sociology and criminology, because of Jim Thomas. Steve helps found the NIU chapter of the American Correctional Association on campus and becomes its treasurer and later VP. He gets Mark to join, even though he’s in political science. This is when he tells Thomas, “I’m focusing strictly on academics. I want to make something of myself after the group home.”

ON A SUNNY, COLD FRIDAY MORNING
in April 2008, I drive to Chicago and park in front of a large warehouse that has been converted to lofts. Josh Stone comes downstairs to let me in. He looks like a large farm boy, with a red goatee. He’s the current president of the NIU chapter of the American Correctional Association. I feel awkward, but I shouldn’t. He’s friendly and easy.

Josh leads me upstairs to Jim Thomas’s loft, which has a narrow hallway and then opens into a bar–living room area with floor-to-ceiling windows and a fantastic view of the Chicago skyline. I meet Amy, Kathryn, Ilana, and Diana, all members of ACA. They’re friendly, but I also know I have to be careful. This group has developed a code of silence. They’ve been hounded by TV crews at all hours and by one
Chicago Tribune
reporter for over a month. They’re not willing to talk to media. But Jim has told all of them, in a blast email, that I’m *NOT MEDIA*. I’ve clarified this by letting everyone know that I’m writing a story for
Esquire
and a book, and I’ve also said my intention is to write a more sympathetic piece about Steve, looking at his final act primarily as a suicide.

“What a beautiful view!” I say, and for the next five hours, I don’t breathe a word about Steve.

We’ve met to tour the Salvation Army’s Community Corrections Center, the largest halfway house in the country, helping former inmates transition back into society. Amy has toured thirteen prisons so far. She and Josh tell me about a tour to Angola, a maximum security prison that holds a rodeo twice a year. They strap a poker chip onto a bull’s forehead and all the inmates try to grab the chip to get fifty dollars. The inmates also play a poker game in the middle of the ring while a bull is let loose, and whoever is the last to remain sitting wins. They have monkeys strapped to dogs, inmates who have never ridden doubling up on horses, etc., and the whole thing is also a crafts fair.

We walk a few blocks, meet the Salvation Army program director for lunch, and then take the full tour, marching up and down narrow stairways and hallways, peeking in residents’ rooms with closets full of protein powders, hearing about programming and challenges. This was Steve’s field, criminology and corrections, and these were his friends, so I try to just soak it all in. The place was formerly a YWCA, and it feels like that, similar to a large, simple youth hostel in a city, only with a few more rules. I’m surprised to learn that the average time inmates stay in prison in the United States is only a year. And it’s the work of places like this to undo all the negative behaviors inmates have learned during their year in a broken system.

Steve was in a group home with similar rules, and several others in the ACA have connections, also. Josh’s brother was in and out of juvenile detention, for instance. “Whenever he was out, he had the stigma of being from juvie,” Josh says, and this created an awful momentum. This is what brings Josh and others to want to do such selfless work, helping people change the momentum of their lives.

We walk to a café afterward for drinks, and now, after five hours, the group begins to talk about Steve. I’m all ears, but I don’t ask questions. They say they thought it was someone else when they heard the shooter was a sociology grad student. There were several others, in fact, who seemed more likely to snap. “It couldn’t have been Steve,” Amy said. But then the group talks about how Steve dressed up for Halloween as Billy the Puppet, the doll from the SAW movies, which were his favorite.

“Do you think the gun he had was real?” Jim asks.

“Could be,” Josh says. The others don’t know, but they remember him carrying a pistol that night. “I can’t believe the media hasn’t found the photos of that costume,” Josh says.

Afterward, I drive Josh home an hour to DeKalb, then have dinner with him and his wife and her friend. Josh tells me funny stories, how he was afraid of Disney World for years because his dad almost drowned him twice and lost him there. On a water ride, his dad leaned back to make it more exciting but that banged Josh’s head into a piece of metal and he had to be fished out of the water and given CPR. Then Josh was trying to stand up on some kind of boogie board or surfboard
and fell and it whacked him in the head and he was knocked out again and had to be dragged ashore. Then his parents lost him and he was found by a showgirl from the Horseshoe Saloon, and a guy in a sheriff’s outfit with a star went and found his parents.

He also tells me grad school made Steve really anxious because there wasn’t enough structure. “Steve liked being told what to do when, like in the group home.” When he was assigned a paper or other work, he’d do it immediately, far ahead of Josh, and then still worry about it. “He was all about control.” Josh also says that when Steve moved away to the new grad program at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, he lost his support network, all his friends in DeKalb. He didn’t make new friends easily in the new school.

After the shooting, Josh was going around trying to help everybody, trying to be there for friends, and he was staying up all night drinking. He’d drink a full bottle of hard liquor and then wake up feeling even worse. He stopped, finally, when he almost gave his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter the wrong medication. That scared him enough to stop.

So this is how my first two weeks go. I visit Jim’s classes, both under-grad and grad. I attend a conference the department holds on ethnography and learn that what I’m doing here is really an ethnography, trying to blend into this community. And I go to a candlelight vigil for the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings.

The sociology grad students all stick together, and they watch yet again as Steve is erased from memorials. Commemorative bracelets are handed out, and there are only five beads, for his victims, no sixth bead. “It’s like we’re not allowed to grieve because of what he did,” his friend Alexandra Chapman says. In the first days, she tried to remove a Columbine shirt that was stapled over Steve’s memorial cross on campus. “It was really hard to remove, with all the staples, and then suddenly there was a camera and bright light right in my face. The world met him that day, a different Steve than we knew, and they all hated him.”

I feel sorry for Alexandra and the others. They’re going through suicide bereavement while the rest of the world is trying to make sense of a mass murder, hounding them for answers. And the truth is, they don’t know anything. I see why CNN, the
Chicago Tribune
, the
New York
Times
, the
Washington Post
, and many others have gotten nowhere. Steve was a very private person. He hid everything important.

My last night in DeKalb, I go bowling with all the grad students, and after a few drinks, one of them mentions that her cousin, Julie Creamer, dated Steve in high school. “She and Steve lost their virginity together. They were both on lithium and bonded through having the same diagnosis. He was a Goth then, wearing all black, and he loved Marilyn Manson. Julie tells stories like he was violent at times, beating at a wall or something when he didn’t do well on a test. You should give her a call.”

IN THE FALL OF 2004,
the same fall he meets Mark, Steve also has a new girlfriend, “Kim.” An art student he describes as “eccentric,” but he likes her. It’s been a long time since he’s had anyone. So now he’s doing better socially.

He’s sick from all the anxiety, though. “I had extended conversations with him regarding him and Kim,” Mark says. “When they were together, I provided him with quite a bit of advice. He always says how stupid he was for this or that. He had very low confidence with relationships. And at the beginning he was very to himself, right? So, it was hard to get him to open up, but once you became friends with him, he didn’t hold his cards as close—and that’s one thing he complained about with me, that I always held my cards close.”

Steve gets physically sick from the anxiety. Abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhea. His acne gets worse, too. His body betraying him yet again. He goes to the doctor on April 18, 2005, and the doctor tries again to get him to see a psychiatrist, for follow-up on his bipolar disorder, but Steve knows not to go in that direction.

Senior year, he aces his statistics course with Charles Cappel, toughest course out there, ends up number 3 out of 90. Doesn’t mention the stats course he took at Harper College. He’s a piece of shit anyway. He knows this. They may be fooled, but he’s not fooled. Good grades aren’t going to change anything.

He tries to hide all his stomach problems from Kim, his loose stool, his bulimia. Goes swimming in the ocean in Florida at the end of the summer, and the problems get worse. So he sees a doctor and is really nervous. Someday they’re going to catch up to him. They’re going to find out about his history, they’re going to put him on meds again. It’s only a matter of time.

The doctor tells him the tests are fine and his abdominal conditions are likely from stress or anxiety. Tries to talk about this, but
Steve is out of there. It’s his senior year. He’s not going to blow it now.

He wants to apply for grad school at the University of Illinois down in Champaign, but Kim wants him to stick around. They’re going to live happily ever after. So fine. It’s not as good a program here, but he applies to NIU for grad school, gets Thomas and Cappel and others to write him recommendations. Easy enough. He’s a teaching assistant for Cappel, one of only two undergrads invited to do this.

And this is what he loves, finally. This is where he’s not a fake, when he’s helping students in the sociology lab. He’s good at it. Everything calms down, all the anxiety, all the stress, all the checking, the paranoia, all of it. He’s sitting in his chair and his breathing is regular, his body feels okay, his head is clear. Carefully groomed, long-sleeved shirt, normal. No tattoos showing, no trench coat. No slurred speech from meds. They come to him stressed out, but he’s able to show them how to work the problems, able to calm them. He doesn’t feel like an instructor. He feels like a healer. He spends as much time as they need, encourages them, inspires several of them, even, to apply for grad school. He affects their lives in a positive way, and they love him for it. All these cute young women, smiling at him, grateful.

“He is extremely patient and calm when tutoring students who are stressed out about statistics and the high standards imposed on them,” writes Cappel. “He has the highest ethical and academic standards, he thinks abstractly and analytically, and relates at an emotional and empathetic level with others.”

Another professor, Kristen Myers, is struck not only by Steve’s work ethic but also his sensitivity. She reprimands Steve one day in class for talking, and he comes to her office afterward very apologetic and actually cries. “He was such a sweet, sensitive man. There isn’t much room for men like that.” She says he was good-natured, tenacious, and very together. “Steve wanted to impress me with his skills as a student. It meant so much to him that I was struck by his rare sincerity. This is how most of us at NIU saw him.”

Steve tutors at Jim’s office, too. Still worried he might be overstepping, but the work calms him.

His relationship with Kim does not calm him. Screaming matches at the end of the semester that can be heard by the entire floor. He rents an apartment in January 2006, out of the dorms. He’s still with Kim, but getting a little distance, and he keeps in touch with Mark through online shooter games at night and emails about politics.

Things are not going to work with Kim. They break up February 27, 2006, the same day Jim Thomas recommends Steve for the Deans’ Award. Steve and Kim begin a long battle over a plane ticket her family paid for him, and this ends in her filing a police report, worried he might damage her property or her family’s property. She knows he’s bipolar and has a juvenile record.

Steve wants to forget about Kim, though, because he’s met someone new, Jessica Baty. “Even before Steven and I started dating, I felt drawn to him. The first time I remember seeing him was at Northern Illinois University in an undergraduate criminology course. Steven was tall, smart, and he always wore long sleeves. He would make me so frustrated in class because every time that I wanted to say something, Steven would always say it first. During lectures, I remember sitting across the room from him and just wondering about him. I wondered why he was so smart and why he said everything first. I wondered why he always wore long sleeves, even in the summer. When I asked someone about it, they didn’t know either.