The man who gunned down five people at Northern Illinois University (NIU) in a suicidal rampage became erratic after halting his medication, authorities said yesterday.
Stephen Kazmierczak, a 27-year-old former student at the school, carried a shotgun in a guitar case and was wielding three handguns during Thursday's ambush attack inside a lecture hall.
Stephen Kazmierczak
Two of the weapons - the pump-action Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun - were purchased legally less than a week ago, authorities said. The two other weapons also were bought legally, but authorities did not know when.
Kazmierczak was a sociology graduate student at NIU up to last spring and was an "outstanding" student while at the university, the school's president, John Peters, said. He also said the suspect did not have a criminal record while attending Northern Illinois, a campus with 25,000 students about 65 miles west of Chicago.
Campus Police Chief Donald Grady said authorities were still trying to determine why he would kill. There was no known suicide note, and Kazmierczak had been taking some kind of medication, Mr Grady said. "He had stopped taking medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks," Mr Grady said. He declined to name the medication.
Investigators recovered 48 shell casings and six shotgun shells following the attack, Mr Grady added.
The gunman paused to reload his shotgun after opening fire on a crowd of terrified students in a geology class.
Sixteen people were injured, and he shot himself dead on the stage of the hall. The shooting was the latest in a spate of attacks in US schools and universities, and was reminiscent of the Virginia Tech massacre last April when a South Korean student killed 32 people before fatally shooting himself. That rampage was the worst mass shooting in modern US history.
More recently, on February 8th, a woman shot two fellow students dead before committing suicide at a Louisiana technical college. In Memphis, Tennessee, a 17-year-old is accused of shooting and critically wounding a fellow student on Monday during a high school gym class, and the 15-year-old victim of a shooting at an Oxnard, California, junior high school has been declared brain dead.
The gunman was a student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Chancellor Richard Herman said. In the aftermath of the attack, the campus was closed today as students mourned the loss of friends while grappling with a nightmare scenario that unfolded the previous afternoon.
The school was closed for one day during final exam week in December after campus police found threats, including racial slurs and references to shootings earlier in the year at Virginia Tech, scrawled on a toilet wall in a dormitory. It was later determined there was no imminent threat and the campus was reopened.
AP