Mystery surrounds NIU Shooter: (Steven Kazmierczak)

[Junkdrawer]

We're just now getting a little info on yesterday's shooter:

A gunman dressed in black stormed into an oceanography class at Northern Illinois University Thursday afternoon and opened fire with a shotgun and two handguns, killing five students and wounding 16 more in a matter of seconds.

Then, still on stage, he killed himself, authorities said.

The gunman was not a current student at the school of more than 25,000 that rises from cornfields and subdivisions 65 miles west of downtown Chicago, authorities said.

NIU President John G. Peters said the man had been enrolled as a sociology graduate student at NIU but left school last spring. Peters said the gunman had no police record.

Late Thursday, sources confirmed that they have tentatively identified the shooter as a 27-year-old graduate student in social work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.



http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-niu-gunman_webfeb15,0,1760508.story?page=1

Here's a paper he co-authored:


SELF-INJURY IN CORRECTIONAL SETTINGS: "PATHOLOGY" OF PRISONS OR OF PRISONERS

....

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

....

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2006.00111.x


This one is getting more bizarre by the minute.

[Wednesdays]

1. Any connections to state or federal government?

:shrug:

[Junkdrawer]

2. Info just started trickling in...so far, none I've seen. n/t

[KharmaTrain]

3. Still Too Early...

NIU has a pretty extensive law enforcement program thus I'd suggest not jumping into the tinfoil too quickly.

There are many questions here as to how he got behind the stage...and why that specific class. It was entry level, general studies taught by a TA. My daughter said that if this guy really had wanted to do damage, he was not far from the student center that was full of students. Gut feeling here is that someone did someone wrong...good love or unrequitted love gone terribly wrong.

[Junkdrawer]

6. When these things happen, I always have three questions:

1.) Why did they do it?

2.) Did they exhibit any warning signs?

3.) If there were copious warning signs, how did they get the guns?

So far, we have a guy with no warning signs and a clean, if not exemplary, record doing a mass murder. But, as I've been saying also, info is just beginning to trickle in...

[KharmaTrain]

11. "Always The Quiet Ones"

Unfortunately, we always get your answers when its tragically too late. And it drive one crazy if there is evidence that turns up that there should have been red flags or what caused someone's wire to trip to go to such a drastic level. I always wonder about the person's own concept of humanity when planning and then carrying out such a henious attack on society...what cause a person to dehumanize to such a point they have no hesitation to do this act.

NIU is in a rather rural area still...we used to call it "Cornfield County". He used a shotgun and hand guns...easily accessible in the area. In my NIU days, I knew several students who were avid hunters and kept guns in their dorm rooms (yep, the University allowed 'em)...and Illinois has some goofy FOID laws that allows anyone to purchase guns without having to report them to the government. It'd be another story if he had used an assult weapon.

[Junkdrawer]

13. I may go with this Vonnegut quote as my new tag line:

That there are such devices as firearms, as easy to operate as cigarette lighters and as cheap as toasters, capable at anybody's whim of killing Father or Fats or Abraham Lincoln or John Lennon or Martin Luther King, Jr., or a woman pushing a baby carriage, should be proof enough for anybody that, to quote the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, "being alive is a crock of shit."


--- Kurt Vonnegut

[Nevilledog]

4. Sorta off topic.... but this bugs me.

The articles I've read keep saying this guy was dressed all in black, but I saw an interview with a student who was there when the shooting occurred (on last night's Nightline) and he said the guy was in jeans, a gray sweatshirt and a white cap. Why can't they get even the small details correct? Is it cause a guy dressed all in black just sounds scarier?

[EFerrari]

5. I heard a student / witness interviewed immediately after the event

on CNN. The interviewer asked the student if the gunman was dressed in black. The student said yes.

It's possible that the student agreed with the suggestion because he was shocky. And, I distinctly remember that the reported asked "was he dressed in black" and not "what was the gunman wearing".

[ProfessorGAC]

7. He Was In Black

On CLTV news yesterday, i watched the news conference with the chief of NIU police. He said they found the gunman, dressed all in black, dead on the stage with gun still in hand. This was live. So, as early as about 4:30pm yesterday, the cops were saying he was dressed in black.
The Professor

[EFerrari]

8. Thanks, Professor. How are you holding up?

To think that all I ever had to deal with were fake bomb threats before mid-terms.

[ProfessorGAC]

9. Recovering from Pneumonia

But, getting better, if a still a little weak.

I never worried about bomb threats when i was still teaching chemistry. Odds were that one of the grad students would have been the perp and was in the building whenever i was. I just don't see grad students in chemistry as the suicide bomber type. Bombers, yes. Suicide bombers, not so much.

GAC

[EFerrari]

10. Glad to hear you're better. The only students who dressed all in black

in Wheeler Hall were the Comp Lit students. I believe it was a requirement. :)

[ProfessorGAC]

12. LOL!

Damn beatnik wannabes!
GAC

[Nevilledog]

14. I guess I'm not surprised.

In my line of work the biggest thing I fight against is the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. The student they interviewed said he was in the back of the room when the guy came from behind the curtain and started shooting and he was so descriptive about what the guy was wearing. I guess it just struck a cord with me because the MSM spends so much time trying to indoctrinate us with "fear, fear, fear" that when I repeatedly heard the "dressed all in black" message it didn't sit square with me.

[ProfessorGAC]

16. Understandable

The Professor

[libnnc]

15. As a grad student this story is very unsettling

:scared:

What the hell happened to this guy? What on earth would make someone do something like this?

[tuckessee]

17. I wonder which prescription drugs he was using? n/t

[AngryOldDem]

18. I just read a story that quoted someone as saying that he had just gone off his medications.

That is very plausible. I've seen people who have gone off their medications -- especially for bipolar or schizophrenia -- and the transformation is indeed frightening.

I think what underscores all of these tragedies is the need for accessible and competent mental health care. That is something that has been neglected for far too long and for far too many reasons, and I think we're beginning to see the sad, tragic consequences.

[Junkdrawer]

19. Link: "College shooter stopped taking his medications"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23171567/

[AngryOldDem]

20. Thanks for the link. n/t