A mass shooting at Northern Illinois University left six people dead, including the gunman Steve Kazmierczak. NIU is located in DeKalb (65 miles outside Chicago).
Steve Kazmierczak
The victims were:
Catalina Garcia, 20
Julianna Gehant, 32
Ryanne Mace, 19
Gayle Dubowski, 20
Daniel Parmenter, 20
Valentines Day Massacre
Kazmierczak, 27, was not a current student. He had been enrolled as a sociology graduate student at NIU but left school last spring. Dressed in black, he stormed into an oceanography class and opened fire with a shotgun and two handguns. In a matter of seconds, 5 people were killed and 18 wounded. Then, still on stage, he killed himself.
This was the worst campus shooting in America since April 16, 2007, when 32 people were shot to death on the campus of Virginia Tech University by Seung-Hui Cho. (In Finland, on November 7th, 2007, Pekka Eric Auvinen killed 8 people at Jokela High School before turning the gun on himself).
Some info on Steve Kazmierczak:
alias: skazmie2
name: Kazmierczak Steven Phillip
sudent_department_name: School of Social Work
student_program_name: MSW:Social Work -UIUC
student_level_description: Graduate – Urbana-Champaign
student_major_name: Social Work
title: ACADEMIC HOURLY
type: person phone student staff
club he was in: Academic Criminal Justice Association, Vice-President
Kazmierczak coauthored a paper on prison self-injury:
Thomas, Jim, Margaret Leaf, Steve Kazmierczak, and Josh Stone. 2006. “Self-Injury in Correctional Settings: ‘Pathology’ of Prisons or of Prisoners?” Criminology and Public Policy 5(1):193-202.
Steve Kazmierczak: “Beginning graduate work at Northern Illinois University. In addition to his interests in corrections, political violence, and peace and social justice, he is co-authoring a manuscript on the role of religion in the formation of early prisons in the United States with Jim Thomas and Josh Stone. He is also develops content for online education and is an executive board officer of the NIU student chapter of the American Correctional Association.”
Political violence? Uncovering this man’s history should be very interesting, indeed.
… Steven P. Kazmierczak, 27, formerly of Elk Grove Village
… most recently registered as a graduate student pursuing a masters degree in sociology at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.
… just before he left NIU, Kazmierczak’s 58-year-old mother died in the fall of 2006 after suffering from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, a degenerative disease, according to obituaries from the time and ALS memorial Web sites.
… in 2006, the NIU sociology department gave Kazmierczak one of its highest honors, the Annual Dean’s Award.
… Kazmierczak graduated from Elk Grove High School in 1998. The high school yearbook lists him as enrolling in a special public service class and playing in the school band. He also made honor roll.
Update
Kazmierczak’s girlfriend, Jessica Baty, said that he was taking the drugs Xanax, Ambien, and Prozac. But he was never violent, according to her.
Since the shooting, authorities have intercepted a number of packages he sent to her, which included such items as a gun holster and ammunition, a textbook on serial killers for her class, the book The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche, and a final note written for her, signed with his given name and family name. The shooting was baffling to those who knew him, as he appeared outgoing and never appeared to have social problems. This has also confused investigators, who have not found a suicide note. Some of Kazmierczak’s former NIU roommates described him as a quiet man who usually stayed to himself. They stated that, while fairly normal, they did not see him spend much time with other students.
A story published by Esquire stated that he allegedly had a history of mental illness and attempted suicides, was bullied in high school, and had shown an interest in previous school shootings, particularly those that occurred at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech.
Perhaps it’s too late to add anything more to this discussion. It seems while contributors have been reflecting on this tragedy all the essentials have been touched upon: mental illness, how little we know about it yet how terribly it can distort a person’s functioning both in the world and in terms of thinking/feeling, the complexity and helplessness of it all for the afflicted as well as for those around him/her.
The point about gun laws in Illinois (what are the rules anyway?) seems very relevant in that some states restrict gun access if there’s a mental illness history, while others don’t. Of course the determined person can travel to a state where restrictions don’t exist to make their weapon purchase. Or get a gun illegally. The “gun lobby” and others who have never been touched by gun violence object to creating a national law about access to guns by the mentally ill, so it appears those who probably should never gain access to weapons will continue to get them. Perhaps it will take the murder of some pro-gun Senator’s child by someone who is mentally ill for this rule to change.
As for determining when a person is mentally ill, I agree there are few if any truly objective tests to establish mental illness. An experienced professional can diagnose, usually accurately, but many aren’t all the experienced and further they have too many people needing care. The growing sophistication of functional brain imaging promises to eclipse this now very subjective process, but that technology scares lots of people. It sounds like as a form of “mind reading”, which many see as only a few steps away from brain washing and dangerously close to sacred moral and spiritual issues. However, the continually growing stain of lives lost to random violence in schools, malls, and other domestic situations may slowly be tipping public opinion in the direction of supporting a large-scale scientific effort to discover what goes on inside the brains of people who are labeled mentally ill. To say nothing of the “purely” criminal.
Imagine a study where every person convicted of violent crime were scanned. Even if the treatment of those convicted criminals was unaffected by their scan results, such a study would develop a database of correlates between brain function and future behaviors (or at least the risk of future behaviors). At some point that database could offer predictions. Is a pedophile going to re-offend? (Not all do, but certainly some do.) Is a person still prone to violence? Is a person delusional? Obsessed? Holding a grudge?
At some point functional correlates between how people’s brains work and certain types of crimes will be discovered. That’s my belief anyway.
I don’t think this type of study is being done anywhere today. Perhaps Kazmierczak’s violent actions will move the professionals a small step closer to acknowledging that research on this problem is essential and overdue. In the meantime we can hope those same mental health professionals, however handicapped they are by their lack of robust tests of mental dysfunction, excessive work loads and other difficulties, can minimize the number of future events like the one that occurred at NUI.
But they are hindered by what can only be called denial within a large segment of society — that mental health problems are common, insufficiently addressed or understood, and impose a very large burden on the whole of society. Mental illness has existed for a long time. In the past it was dealt with by murdering the afflicted; more recently these people were tortured and/or caged, sometimes for public ridicule. At least we don’t do that (much) now. (However, interested readers might find the book “Crazy” enlightening. And distressing.)
My hunch is that when we have faced the problem of mental illness squarely we will discover something precious and marvelous about ourselves as a byproduct, something that will let us look back upon today’s world and wonder “how did we manage to survive with such a primitive world view”. Unfortunately those six people who died in that classroom have no chance of seeing that come to pass.
Dear Jessica Baty,
Sorry. When Stephen took the lives of others by murdering them, he wasn’t a “victim” anymore.
He was a hard core manipulator. You have been duped.
The only I see that is sure about these situations is that the people involved (the perps) are confused. We need to keep open minds when thinking about motivation because we don’t know that they actually know what they doing when they do it. Ambien, for example. Was he dreaming? Mind control is another. Keep in mind that there is a very strong anti-faith movement amongst the intellectual community at this time (Social Darwinism and aethism rules). If you don’t believe me, then look up Gonzales vs. Iowa State University. Also, FIRE.
Fuck him let him rot in hell the stupid son of a bitch its where he belongs fucking
homocidal maniac .
this fucker pre meditate the murder and had it all planed out before hand which tells me
he thinks he was going to be some martyr or something well let me tell you martyr’s dont go to heaven
and have sex with 1000 virgins they fucking go to hell were the burn for eternity, so fuck this asshole its too bad someone
didnt fucking blow his goddamn head off before he got one shot off i would have love to been in this class with a 50 cal smith and wesson i would have turned the tables then .
Smart kid or not i would have blown his ass away ,
werent the nazi generals in world war II also real intelligent sick fucking bastard.
i live twelves miles from where this happened, and you would not fathom the amount of damage this sick little fuck has caused to
dekalb which a small town community that would have never dreamed of this happening .
i know this my kids will not go to college unless they either put metal detectors in or let the students arm themselves .
how many times does this shit need to happen before someone does something i.e. Kent State, Virginia tech, and now NIU .
I pray for the people of DeKalb who have to go thru all this shit because of one little evil fucker gone mad . Fuck him rot in hell you little bastard .
It’s because your government is sucks, i believe many more similar thing will happen in the near future until they realized how bad it is if we keep those gun stores alive.
Mad man = dangerous
Mad man with gun = Fatal
Simple solution…..
“Only a sick, and mentally ill person would ever do this.”
Most mentally ill people aren’t dangerous or violent. Maybe if you were less of an asshole you would be able to understand that!
“i know this my kids will not go to college unless they either put metal detectors in or let the students arm themselves .”
I feel sorry for any kid who has you as a parent!
In our society, nice guys finish last…well, sure but don’t be surprised if the nice guy blows away some not so nice guys before he decides to check out…treat people with some respect and this kind of shit won’t happen so often…otherwise, it’s an eye for an eye…lesson learned.
U of I is not a University for graduate Huskies. The evil seat of Champaign, Urban II the evil pope who started the crusades, is evil !