Tag: Northern Illinois University

Magazine reveals new details about NIU shooter:

Talk about dropping the other shoe. For months we heard nothing about NIU gunman Stephen Kazmierczak or what his motive was. Now Esquire magazine is saying something that should not surprise me in the least but yet it does.

I originally thought that Kazmierczak was just a victim of an undiagnosed mental problem but as it turns out he was something much more familiar.

According to Esquire Magazine while Kazmierczak did suffer from mental illness it also turns out that he was nothing more than a copycat of Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui.

The story includes Kazmierczak’s fascination, chilling in retrospect, with Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech student who shot and killed 32 people before killing himself in April 2007.

“He was interested in what was going on in the mind of Cho, and why it was so successful, and how someone could do it, how they could pull it off,”‘ reporter David Vann writes, quoting a friend he identifies only as Kevin.

And his mental health history wasn’t exactly unknown either. Kazmierczak was drummed out of the Army after they discovered that he lied on his application about mental history. He held back about his history of suicide attempts, psychotic episodes, and hallucinations.

Just further proof that as a society we’re more concerned with the rights of the dangerously crazy than we are with the welfare of others.

NIU Shooting Investigation:

This is a really short article so here it goes…

There are new calls for a task force to be created at NIU to study the school’s response to the shootings on campus. The head of NIU’s Board of Trustees say’s she’ll be asking the school’s president to create the task force later this week. She also thinks the board needs to discuss whether an extensive review of the psychiatric history of gunman, Steven Kazmierczak is worthwhile.

Personally, I think that would be a waste of time and money. A lot of people try to make a comparison between NIU and Virginia Tech. There is no comparison here except that lives were lost on a college campus. At NIU the school did the best job that it could have. Police were at the scene in under a minute if I remember correctly. There’s not a whole lot that could have been done at NIU. Stephen Kazmierczak didn’t even attend NIU anymore so it’s not like he could have tipped off anyone there to his behavior. How could anyone have known what he was planning?

So save the taxpayers some money or use the money for the school’s mental health assistance program.

Sometimes there just aren’t any answers.

NIU gunman’s autopsy shows some antidepressant, cold medicine in his system, police say:

The autopsy of NIU gunman Stephen Kazmierczak showed that the only drugs in his system were trace amounts of an anti-depressant, a cold medicine, and nicotine.

Well, that blows my Ambien theory to hell.

Now the question is will the anti-pharmaceutical Luddites blame this on the anti-depressant, the lack thereof, or the cold medicine?

Don’t be surprised if we here from the anti-smoking brigade either.

UPDATE: It wasn’t an anti-depressant at all that was found in his system. It was the anti-anxiety drug Xanax.

Northern Illinois shooting goes unnoticed:

This is an op-ed piece from the San Jose State student newspaper about how the national media has treated the NIU shooting and how it’s basically ignored the story since it happened.

People reacted in horror when Seung-Hui Cho attacked Virginia Tech University last April, and grief gripped the nation for several days. Compare that with Thursday, when people didn’t even bat an eye when Steven Kazmierczak committed a similar crime at Northern Illinois University. It felt like a bad horror movie we had seen before.

Some took note, a few grieved and a lot just didn’t notice.

Only five days after the event, the NIU shooting and the issues surrounding it were less significant to CNN than satellites being shot down and Bill Clinton picking on a heckler. By contrast, the shooting at Virginia Tech filled our media’s consciousness for at least a week.

I hate to say it but the truth hurts sometimes. Ever since Columbine, it’s been all about body count as far as the media is concerned. At Columbine 13 were killed. At Virginia Tech 32 were killed. At NIU just 5 were killed. I think it also had something to do with the fact that as far as we know so far Stephen Kazmierczak wasn’t an attention seeking douchebag like Cho, Harris, and Klebold. Go down the list of categories on my site and tell me how many of the shootings you’ve heard of.

This is where I like to think that this is where this site serves its purpose. When one of these incidents unfortunately happens I post about it from start to finish.

Gunman Hid His Tracks, Officials Say:

It seems that The Times is on a roll lately.

Anyway, this is an article about how NIU gunman Stephen Kazmierczak covered his tracks prior to the shooting.

The hard drive from his computer and the SIM card from his cell phone are both missing. I think this lends credence to my theory about Kazmierczak possibly being a paranoid schizophrenic.

This wasn’t the typical school shooting either because as of yet there’s no evidence that Kazmierczak craved any kind of attention like that of Cho Seung-Hui or Kimveer Gill.

I think this is just a tragic incident of an undiagnosed mental illness.

NIU shooter’s girlfriend: No sign he was ‘planning something’:

Jessica Baty was the on again/off again girlfriend of NIU gunman Stephen Kazmierczak. In an interview with CNN Baty said that Kazmierczak went off his antidepressants because it made him feel like a zombie but that he wasn’t acting erratically in the weeks leading up to the shooting. If you ask me feeling like a zombie is preferential to being a dead mass murderer but I digress.

Bath also received two packages from Kazmierczak. One had two textbooks, a goodbye note, and a cell phone. The second contained a holster and ammunition.

If your meds make you feel like a zombie just don’t go off them. Contact your doctor and tell him/her your concerns about your meds. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries to get the right dosage of the right medication. Trust me, I’ve been there. Once they find the right medication and dosage it will make your life a whole lot better.

Tattoo artist tells of working with NIU gunman:

NIU gunman Stephen Kazmierczak had a rather large tattoo on his back in tribute to the horror movie Saw.

Jason Dunavan says his work included an image of the macabre doll from the horror movie “Saw” riding a tricycle through a pool of blood. There were images of several bleeding cuts in the background of the tattoo.

This revelation will cause two things to happen. The first is that I’m sure some reactionary group will blame the movie for the tragedy at NIU. I find that laughable of course considering many people, including my wife, are huge fans of the Saw series and I would say 99.9% are not criminals.

However, I think that will begin to change as mutants usually pick up the habits of past school shooters and will begin to adopt this as required movie watching for the mutant set as Natural Born Killers became in the past.