College shooter's deadly rampage baffles friends

DEKALB, Ill. - If there is such a thing as a profile of a mass murderer, Steven Phillip Kazmierczak didn't fit it: outstanding student, polite and industrious, with what looked like a bright future in the criminal justice field.

And yet on Thursday, Kazmierczak, armed with three handguns and a brand-new pump-action shotgun he had carried onto campus in a guitar case, stepped from behind a screen on the stage of a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and opened fire on a geology class.

He killed five students and then himself in a lecture hall where he himself had once helped teach a class. Investigators are trying to figure out what led to these killings.

The manager of a motel near the university said Saturday that Kazmierczak checked into a room just three days before the deadly rampage. He paid cash and signed in under only his first name, said hotel manager Jay Patel.

He was last seen at the Travelodge on Tuesday, according to the manager. He had littered his room. Cigarette butts. Empty energy drinks. Cold medicine containers.

Authorities found a duffel bag in the room Friday with three zippers glued shut. A bomb squad safely opened it and the Chicago Tribune reports that investigators found ammunition.

The motel manager says Kazmierczak also left a laptop computer behind. It was seized by investigators.

"It's scary," said Patel, adding that he called police when he found the laptop and clothes.

Troubled mind
The discoveries added to the puzzle surrounding Kazmierczak.

While friends, family, educators and investigators remain baffled and shocked at the gunman's acts, a closer look reveals that Kazmierczak's friendly exterior masked a troubled mind.

University Police Chief Donald Grady said, without giving details, that Kazmierczak, 27, had become erratic in the past two weeks after he had stopped taking his medication.

A former employee at a Chicago psychiatric treatment center said Kazmierczak's parents placed him there after high school. She said he used to cut himself, and had resisted taking his medications.

He had a short-lived stint as a prison guard that ended abruptly when he didn't show up for work. He also was in the Army for about six months in 2001-02, but he told a friend he'd gotten a psychological discharge. He had signed up after Sept. 11.  

Investigators are working hard to find additional information that triggered Kazmierczak's rage. But, exactly what set Kazmierczak off — and why he picked his former university and that particular lecture hall on Valentine's Day — remained unknown. Police said they found no suicide note among those items recently discovered.

Authorities still search for a woman who police believe may have been Kazmierczak's girlfriend. According to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is still under investigation, investigators were looking into whether Kazmierczak and the woman recently broke up.

Investigators learned that a week ago, on Feb. 9, Kazmierczak walked into a Champaign, gun store and picked up two guns — the Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun. He bought the two other handguns at the same shop — a Hi-Point .380 on Dec. 30 and a Sig Sauer on Aug. 6.

All four guns were bought legally from a federally licensed firearms dealer, said Thomas Ahern, an agency spokesman. At least one criminal background check was performed. Kazmierczak had no criminal record.

Kazmierczak had a State Police-issued firearms owners identification card, which is required in Illinois to own a gun, authorities said. Such cards are rarely issued to those with recent mental health problems. The application asks: "In the past five years have you been a patient in any medical facility or part of any medical facility used primarily for the care or treatment of persons for mental illness?"

Kazmierczak, who went by Steve, graduated from NIU in 2007 and was a graduate student in sociology there before leaving last year and moving on to the graduate school of social work at the University of Illinois in Champaign, 130 miles away.

'Saw nothing to suspect'
Unlike Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho — a sullen misfit who could barely look anyone in the eye, much less carry on a conversation — Kazmierczak appeared to fit in just fine.

His work on prison issues had drawn notice in academic circles, according to published reports. And he had once helped teach a class in Cole Hall, the scene of Thursday’s tragedy, according to old documents on the Northern Illinois University Web site.

At the time of Thursday’s shooting spree, Kazmierczak, a native of Elk Grove Village in suburban Chicago, was a graduate student in the School of Social Work on the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois, authorities said.

In a post that remains on a Northern Web site, apparently a brief autobiography that he wrote in seeking the treasurer’s post of the Northern chapter of the Academic Criminal Justice Association, Kazmierczak said, “I've worked very hard as a student. … I feel that I'm committed to social justice.”

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