February
15, 2008 Seven Dead in US
Campus Shooting,
Killer Identified By Parveen
Chopra
New York
Six students were killed and 15 injured when a gunman, identified as
a former student, opened fire inside a lecture hall at Northern
Illinois University (NIU) in suburban Chicago before shooting
himself. There was no Indian casualty in the incident, officials
said.
The shooter was identified Friday as former NIU student Steven
Kazmierczak. Belonging to Florida, the 27-year-old was currently
enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the
twin cities of Urbana-Champaign, about 200 km from Chicago. He had
no previous crime record and his motive is not yet known.
"By all accounts that we can tell right now, (he) was a very good
student that the professors thought well of," said NIU president
John Peters on ABC's 'Good Morning America'.
Four women are among those who were killed in the Thursday afternoon
shooting, Peters said at a news conference Thursday evening. One of
the critically injured has died since.
Peters said a graduate student was teaching an introductory geology
class at about 3 p.m. in a large auditorium inside Cole Hall, one of
NIU's main classroom buildings, when the gunman burst onto the stage
in the front of the room, armed with a shotgun and two handguns.
"The shooter just appeared from behind the screen in front of the
classroom in an introductory geology class. According to
eyewitnesses, it was a brief, rapid-fire assault," Peters said.
He added that the gunman, a former graduate student in sociology at
NIU, died "apparently from a self-inflicted wound".
There are close to 25,000 students at NIU, about 100 km west of
Chicago. The university has 862 international students from 88
nations, 300-350 being Indian.
Ravi Kiran Mudunuri, president of the Indian Students Association at
NIU, told IANS: "As far as the reports go, there is no Indian victim
in this senseless tragedy. We have forwarded announcements to
members of our organisation to stay calm and inform their parents of
the current situation."
The university has a 300-350 strong Indian students community.
Four of the deceased have been identified as Daniel Parmenter, 20,
Catalina Garcia, 20, Ryanne Mace, 19, and Julianna Gehant, 32.
The assailant was described by several witnesses as a young man,
dressed in black or dark clothes. He reportedly first fired the
shotgun before turning to the handguns and inflicting several head
wounds, according to reports.
George Gaynor, a geography student, who was in the lecture hall when
the shooting happened, told the student newspaper, the Northern
Star, that the shooter was "a skinny white guy with a stocking cap
on".
He described the scene immediately following the incident as
terrifying and chaotic. "Some girl got hit in the eye, a guy got hit
in the leg," he said.
Another student, Edward Robinson, said the gunman appeared to target
students in one part of the lecture hall. "It was almost like he
knew whom he wanted to shoot," he said.
All classes at NIU were cancelled Thursday night and the campus was
closed Friday. Students were urged to call their parents "as soon as
possible" and were offered counselling, according to the university
website.
The incident followed another campus shooting on Feb 8. A woman shot
two fellow students fatally before committing suicide at Louisiana
Technical College in Baton Rouge.
The worst campus massacre in the US happened at Virginia Tech
university when last April a mentally disturbed South Korean
American student killed 32 students and faculty before killing
himself. Among the victims were an Indian student and an Indian
American professor.
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