DEKALB, Illinois — The man who gunned down five people at Northern Illinois University in a suicidal rampage became erratic after halting his medication and carried a shotgun to campus inside a guitar case, police said yesterday.
Stephen Kazmierczak, a 27-year-old former student at the school, was also wielding three handguns during Thursday’s ambush attack inside a lecture hall. Two of the weapons, the pump-action Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun, were purchased legally less than a week ago, authorities said.
The two others were also purchased legally from the same shop, but it was unclear when Kazmierczak picked them up, said a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He had a valid permit required for all Illinois residents who buy or possess firearms, authorities said.
Investigators recovered 48 shell casings and six shotgun shells following the attack, campus Police Chief Donald Grady said. The gunman paused to reload his shotgun after opening fire on a crowd of terrified students in a geology class.
Kazmierczak was taking some kind of medication, Grady said. “He had stopped taking medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks,” Grady said. He declined to name the medication.
Correcting information his office released earlier yesterday, DeKalb County Coroner Rusty Miller said five students, not six, were killed in the rampage in addition to the gunman. Miller said the higher victim total was the result of confusion over the fate of a patient taken to another county for treatment.
The gunman’s father, Robert Kazmierczak, briefly came out of his house in Lakeland, Florida, to talk to reporters. “Please leave me alone. ... This is a very hard time for me,” he said as he threw his arms up and wept. He declined further comment about his son and then went back inside his house, saying he was diabetic.
The shooting was the latest in a spate of attacks in US schools and universities, and was reminiscent of the Virginia Tech massacre last April when a South Korean student killed 32 people before fatally shooting himself.
Grady said Kazmierczak was an “outstanding” student while at the university and authorities were still trying to determine why he would kill. There was no known suicide note. Kazmierczak had been a graduate student in sociology at the university as recently as spring 2007, the school’s president, John Peters, said. He also said the suspect had no record of police contact or an arrest record while attending Northern Illinois, a campus with 25,000 students about 105 kilometers west of Chicago. The gunman was a student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Chancellor Richard Herman said.
Witnesses said the gunman, dressed in black and wearing a stocking cap, emerged from behind a screen on the stage of 200-seat Cole Hall and opened fire just as the class was about to end around 3 p.m. (2000 GMT).
Officials said 162 students were registered for the class but it was unknown how many were there Thursday.
Allyze Jerome, 19, a second-year student, said the gunman burst through a stage door and pulled out a gun.
“Honestly, at first everyone thought it was a joke,” Jerome said. Everyone hit the floor, she said. Then she got up and ran, but tripped. She said she felt like “an open target.” “He could’ve decided to get me,” Jerome said yesterday. “I thought for sure he was gonna get me.”
President George W. Bush spoke by telephone to the university’s president and said people would be praying for the NIU community.
Students were urged to call their parents “as soon as possible” and were offered counseling at any residence hall, according to the school website.
The school was closed for one day during final exam week in December after campus police found threats, including racial slurs and references to shootings earlier in the year at Virginia Tech, scrawled on a bathroom wall in a dormitory.
It was later determined there was no imminent threat and the campus was reopened. Peters said he knew of no connection between that incident and Thursday’s attack.
