NIU Community Wonders: Why Cole Hall?

[February 21, 2008]  DeKALB (AP) -- Steven Kazmierczak was an academic star at Northern Illinois University. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the Cole Hall auditorium where he returned to carry out his deadly attack.

Kazmierczak saw his academic career take off after taking his first sociology class at Cole. He earned A after A at NIU, after getting B's in high school and spending a year in a psychiatric treatment center.

Fellow students and teachers saw a young man almost desperate to learn.

Kazmierczak's books were littered with tabs, highlighting thoughts he literally wanted at his fingertips. They saw the piles of paper -- extra reading -- that he brought to class for the same reason.

"He was just devastatingly good, he would talk about ideas," said Jim Thomas, an emeritus professor of sociology and criminology at NIU who gave Kazmierczak the title of co-instructor instead of the less-prestigious teaching assistant.

All of which makes the Valentine's Day shooting at Cole Hall, where Kazmierczak fatally shot five people before committing suicide, even more confusing to university officials, investigators and people who knew him.

"By all accounts, this young man enjoyed some of the greatest satisfaction and success of his life at this institution, and why he chose to come back to here and commit this heinous crime is a mystery," NIU spokeswoman Melanie Magara said. "There was not a hint of trouble with this guy."

Kazmierczak left no suicide note and took very specific steps to hide his motive. He had removed the hard drive from his laptop computer and his cell phone's SIM card, a key computer chip, Magara said.

Adding to the questions has been apparently conflicting information from his former girlfriend, Jessica Baty. Police said she told them Kazmierczak had stopped taking medications and was acting erratically, but on Sunday she told CNN that he was irritable but there was no erratic behavior and that Kazmierczak had been taking Prozac.

Baty told a CNN reporter on Tuesday that Kazmierczak had been taking Xanax, Ambien and Prozac, prescribed by a psychiatrist he'd begun seeing shortly after the couple moved to Champaign in June 2007, the network reported Wednesday.

Xanax is a powerful anti-anxiety drug; Prozac is an antidepressant also used for anxiety, and Ambien is a sleeping aid.

Baty said she became "nervous" about the medication and tried to persuade her boyfriend to stop taking one of them. She says Kazmierczak stopped taking the Prozac three weeks before the attack.

Police on Wednesday declined to discuss Baty's comments.

It's not unheard of for psychiatrists to prescribe all three drugs for one patient, and while the three might cause unpredictable side effects when taken together, the combination isn't necessarily problematic, said Dr. Emil Coccaro, psychiatry chief at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

Of the three, Xanax is potentially the most problematic, he said. It can cause emotionally unstable people to become more emotionally unstable, and has been associated with "episodic discontrol" -- explosive behavior, Coccaro said.

He wasn't certain what effect stopping all three at once might have.

Campus Police Chief Donald Grady said Wednesday that police have interviewed 120 people and uncovered more than 100 pieces of evidence, but have no motive for the rampage. FBI special agent Bill Monroe said the agency has profilers working to establish a motive.

Grady also said that Baty is cooperating with their investigation.

Kazmierczak apparently had failed at other ventures -- a stint in the Army ended in early 2002 after five months and late last year he worked as an Indiana prison guard for about two weeks. But NIU, which he attended until enrolling in graduate school at the University of Illinois, was a place of sustained excellence.

Thomas wonders whether Kazmierczak chose Cole Hall specifically because of his success there.

"He had a sense of symbolism..." he said. "Steve chose to end it where he began it."

Dr. Susan Lipkins, an expert on violence on college and high school campuses, said the reason might be that Kazmierczak knew the building well.

"Violence is planned," she said. "Victims can be random but violence is rarely random. So he knew there would be a whole lot of people available to him to carry out his crime, and they were sort of like sitting ducks."

[Associated Press; By DON BABWIN]

Associated Press writers Ashley M. Heher, Caryn Rousseau, Lindsey Tanner and Michael Tarm contributed to this report.

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