Cops: NIU Gunman Displayed "No Red Flags"
Boxer Floyd Mayweather participates in a news conference in New York, Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012. Mayweather is scheduled to fight Miguel Cotto May 5 in Las Vegas. / AP Photo/Seth Wenig
If there is such a thing as a profile of a mass murderer, Steven Kazmierczak didn't fit it: outstanding student, engaging, polite and industrious, with what looked like a bright future in the criminal justice field.
And yet on Thursday, the 27-year-old 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 before committing suicide.
University Police Chief Donald Grady said, without giving details, that Kazmierczak had become erratic in the past two weeks after he had stopped taking his medication. But that seemed to come as news to many of those who knew him, and the attack itself was positively baffling.
"We had no indications at all this would be the type of person that would engage in such activity," Grady said. He described the gunman as a good student during his time at NIU, and by all accounts a "fairly normal" person.
"There were no red flags," Grady said. "He was someone who was revered by students and teachers."
Just last spring Kazmierczak was a success story, a sociology grad student here who'd earned a Dean's award for a paper on prison society, reports CBS News correspondent Cynthia Bowers.
Exactly what set Kazmierczak off - and why he picked his former university and that particular lecture hall - remained a mystery. Police said they found no suicide note.
Investigators learned that a week ago, on Feb. 8, 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 High 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 (pronounced kaz-MUR-chek) had no criminal record.
NIU Vice President Eddie Williams says his school learned a valuable lesson from Virginia Tech; still, he believes more drastic changes may be needed, reports CBS News correspondent Randall Pinskton.
One idea being proposed in nine states is allowing licensed gun owners - students or faculty - to carry weapons on campus. But many universities are strongly opposing that idea, saying more guns on campus would only increase the risk of more violence, Pinkston adds.
Kazmierczak had a State Police-issued FOID, or 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.
Army records indicate he enlisted in Sept 2001 and was discharged in Feb. 2002. He received an "entry level separation" which is neither honorable nor dishonorable, but rather uncharacterized.
"It was absolutely not due to bad conduct. It was an administrative discharge and we don't know why," Maj. Anne Edgecomb told CBS News.
© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report. And yet on Thursday, the 27-year-old 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 before committing suicide.
University Police Chief Donald Grady said, without giving details, that Kazmierczak had become erratic in the past two weeks after he had stopped taking his medication. But that seemed to come as news to many of those who knew him, and the attack itself was positively baffling.
"We had no indications at all this would be the type of person that would engage in such activity," Grady said. He described the gunman as a good student during his time at NIU, and by all accounts a "fairly normal" person.
"There were no red flags," Grady said. "He was someone who was revered by students and teachers."
Just last spring Kazmierczak was a success story, a sociology grad student here who'd earned a Dean's award for a paper on prison society, reports CBS News correspondent Cynthia Bowers.
Exactly what set Kazmierczak off - and why he picked his former university and that particular lecture hall - remained a mystery. Police said they found no suicide note.
Investigators learned that a week ago, on Feb. 8, 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 High 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 (pronounced kaz-MUR-chek) had no criminal record.
Authorities responded quickly to the shooting; the first 10 police officers were on the scene in 90 seconds. NIU launched its emergency alert system - a carefully rehearsed plan developed after Virginia Tech - sending out e-mails and messages on Web sites to notify students that a possible gunman was on campus and they needed to find a safe area.
NIU Vice President Eddie Williams says his school learned a valuable lesson from Virginia Tech; still, he believes more drastic changes may be needed, reports CBS News correspondent Randall Pinskton.
One idea being proposed in nine states is allowing licensed gun owners - students or faculty - to carry weapons on campus. But many universities are strongly opposing that idea, saying more guns on campus would only increase the risk of more violence, Pinkston adds.
Kazmierczak had a State Police-issued FOID, or 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.
Army records indicate he enlisted in Sept 2001 and was discharged in Feb. 2002. He received an "entry level separation" which is neither honorable nor dishonorable, but rather uncharacterized.
"It was absolutely not due to bad conduct. It was an administrative discharge and we don't know why," Maj. Anne Edgecomb told CBS News.
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Posted by joyous88 at 04:32 PM : Feb 16, 2008
Couldn''t have said it better myself....except for one minor detail.
Conservative is an honourable term, Churchill was a conservative, Edmund Burke was a conservative.
These Americans are not conservatives, they are RIGHT WING WACKOS.
1) This AM a perp used a car to kill 8 people in MD, w/a 200yd crime scene, and yet there is no outcry from the left to ban cars, despite a total lack of any constitutional right to own a car, despite +50K killed every year by vehicles (or more accurately, by the those driving them%u2026).
www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080216/NATION/818766356/1001
2) A few months ago a volunteer guard used her personal sidearm to stop yet another psycho murderer (4 dead) in CO, with multiple torso hits per coroner, on the premises of a church during a service, preventing many additional deaths. www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-shoot11dec11,0,3079377.story?coll=la-default-underdog
3) Yesterday an 80 yr old citizen used his pistol to defend his life from two home invasion perps, wounding one. Now both perps are in custody charged with assault, burglary, robbery.
www.wfaa.com/sharedcontent/dws/wfaa/latestnews/stories/wfaa080214_lj_hawes.bfc57dff.html
Yet I have yet to see ONE news agency reference to a law abiding gun owner who
- ACTED in defense of his/her person, or
- ACTED in the defense of others,
and ended up maiming/killing an innocent person in the process (not that that is impossible, but if law abiding gun owners are so incompetent then there should be an overwhelming number of www NEWS links the left can provide to support their ''''opinion''''.).
(cont)
until they get a gun,
if this guy HAD shown any "red flags" the police would have done what they always do;
USE A TASER ON HIM AND SEND HIM ON HIS WAY!
CONSERVATIVES HAVE TURNED AMERICA INTO A NAZI POLICE STATE ,THAT IS WHY THESE CLOWNS HAVE GUNS
Beyond that, if the left wants to restrict gun purchases by mentally-disturbed-but-un-medicated (ex: VA Tech) or mentally-disturbed-but-medicated (ex: NIU) individuals then I say lets do it, tie all psychological practitioners into the ATF database. But leave the law abiding gun owners alone, and ditch your simpleton Minority Report-esk claims that all law abiding gun owners are insane pre-criminals. Even if gun ownership by citizens were outlawed completely the majority of NON-SUICIDAL gun deaths (sorry, you want to off your self, you will find a way%u2026) are caused by criminal-on-criminals, the same criminals who deal in outlawed drugs, the latter which a billion dollar US criminal industry. Since the decades of the US war on drugs have NOT stopped the flow of drugs into the US, who on the left is signing on to the simpleton and naive notion that the US criminal industry will NOT import all the guns and ammunition they need for their billion dollar illegal business??
He was in the Army for about six months in 2001-02, but he told a friend he''''d gotten a psychological discharge.
Ohh SURE!!! Fun, Loving, Gentle and Quiet. Folks is time for some tough gun control policies.
Why, so they can start using explosives? A lot cheaper, more media-grabbing, more effective. Shall we take away all knives? Would that have saved a NY psychologist from getting attacked? Shall we take away all cars? They do kill more people than guns. Quit shaking your heads....go read the headlines.
The tool that is used is not the problem and everyone knows it. It''s just easier to blame the gun.
This is our own fault. We did this to ourselves. We have raised an entire generation that doesn''t know how to deal with problems. Doesn''t know how to deal with failure. Doesn''t know how to deal with losing a boy/girl friend. Someone thought that "everyone should be a winner". No one should lose. Life doesn''t play by those rules. Guess what...two people aren''t going to win the same game of checkers. The fat guy isn''t going to get a date with the head cheerleader. The ugly chick ain''t going to date the quarterback. It''s called reality and and we have a generation of people (probably more) that don''t know how to deal with it. What do they do...get a Rx, pop a pill and the world turns rosy. Until the pills are gone...then what?
You can take away everything and the problem will still exist. What are you going to when there''s nothing left to take away???????