Profiles of students
Nicole BernsJenna Broderick
Samantha Brunell
Dan Ciamprone
Patrick Korellis
Monique Caspillan and Lhee Santos
Desiree Smith
Kevin Sundstrom
Jillian Thomas
Lindsay Ullmann
Chris Werve
Profiles of victims
Gayle DubowskiCatalina Garcia
Julianna Gehant
Ryanne Mace
Daniel Parmenter
"The most beautiful place she had ever been"
By Jameel Naqvi | Daily Herald StaffDuring her last semester at Northern Illinois University, Ryanne Mace was studying abnormal psychology.
Ryanne hoped to become a psychologist or therapist - helping people like the gunman who killed her and four of her classmates on Valentine's Day 2008.
The NIU sophomore read books about serial killers and other people who committed heinous acts.
"She had a real deep interest in people that were really bent," Ryanne's father, Eric Mace said. "She was really intrigued by what made these people tick."
Eric Mace doesn't hate the man who killed his daughter, but he has a few things to say to people who knew the gunman and ignored the warning signs.
"People opened up the - crack and made him fall into it," Eric said. "There's a whole lot of people - that watched him and didn't do anything."
Ryanne's mom, Mary Kay Mace, isn't able to forgive the gunman as easily.
"He went and opened fire on kids he never knew," Mary Kay said. "That doesn't make sense to me. For the first time in my life, I hope there's a hell."
Ryanne's desire to help people started when she was a student at Dundee-Crown High School in Carpentersville.
"She gravitated toward a lot of the kids that were not necessarily having the easiest time in high school," Eric Mace said. "We never thought she was going to be one of those kids. She was too busy helping everyone else."
Ryanne was also busy exploring her creative side - writing in diaries, drawing, knitting scarves and blankets for her friends, picking up the guitar, playing violin in the school orchestra.
"There were little knitting and weaving patterns in all corners of the house," Eric Mace said.
When Ryanne was home during her frequent visits to Carpentersville, her parents would find her curled up on her bed, her body outlined by unfinished projects and the latest books she was reading.
"She would be reading three different novels at the same time and keep them straight," Eric Mace said.
Mary Kay Mace wanted her daughter to attend NIU because the school was close to home, but Eric Mace wasn't sold until he researched the school's safety record.
As he prepared to send his daughter off the college, Ryanne's father remembered what his father-in-law said to him at his wedding: "I know you're a good man, but I feel like I'm giving my Stradivarius to a gorilla."
The changes Chief Donald Grady made to the campus police force - beefing up officer training programs and requiring his men to become certified emergency medical technicians - impressed Eric Mace.
"They were a real police force; they weren't security guards," he said. "They learned something from Virginia Tech and Columbine."
When she got to campus, Ryanne immersed herself in college life, taking general education classes and setting her sights on a degree in psychology.
"She didn't want to watch mice go through mazes," Eric Mace said. "She wanted to sit down and help people."
Ryanne joined a service fraternity, earned a spot in the university's honors program and held a job at the Elder-Beerman department store.
At the beginning of her sophomore year, she moved into an apartment on campus with three roommates. The apartment overlooked Huskie Stadium, and the girls could watch Saturday football games from their deck.
"She really loved college life," Mary Kay Mace said.
Eric and Mary Kay are both the children of Methodist ministers. They met while attending high school in Peoria and dated briefly before breaking up. Eric went to DeVry University; Mary Kay went to Illinois State University.
They kept in touch and eventually reconnected in college before getting married in 1985.
Ryanne's death tested the Maces' faith and marriage.
Eric Mace says he parted ways with organized religion 25 years ago. After his daughter died, clichés about death got under his skin.
"If you're praying to a god that sends a man in black to shoot my daughter and 'take her home,' I don't have anything to do with your - god," Eric said.
Still, Eric has been able to pull through his grief by talking to two ministers - his father and father-in-law.
"If there's ever a family in a business to deal with this, it's ours," Eric Mace said. "We've managed to do a good job falling toward each other rather than falling down."
Mary Kay was more observant and attended church on Sundays. Since her daughter died, Mary Kay has struggled with feelings that God abandoned her.
"My faith has taken a hit," Mary Kay said. "I'm still too angry to get past it right now."
While Eric didn't return to his sales job for three weeks, Mary Kay was able to quickly refocus on her job as an office manager.
"I just go on keeping busy, trying to think of her as she was - not as the girl who was killed, but as the girl who made every day special for me," Mary Kay said.
One of Ryanne's favorite spots growing up was Oregon's Silver Falls State Park, where she could walk behind the park's waterfalls and roam along the trails.
"It was the most beautiful place she had ever been," Eric Mace said.
Eric told his daughter he'd take her back to the park but never got the chance.
In May, the Maces set out to scatter their daughter's ashes in Oregon, where the family lived for two years when Ryanne was a young girl.
"I wanted to make sure I made good on my promise," Eric said.
The Maces spent three weeks on the road, stopping at the places Ryanne loved or always wanted to visit: the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone National Park and Glacier National Park, among others.
On May 13, 2008, a day before the three-month anniversary of the shooting at NIU, Ryanne returned home to Silver Falls.
It was her 20th birthday.
Before setting out, Eric Mace wasn't sure his marriage would survive the death of his only child. But the Maces made it back home with their relationship intact.
"I figured if we could get through that, we would probably be OK," Eric said.
Ryanne's portrait is the largest and most prominent among the family pictures on display in the Maces' living room.
Eric Mace used to force himself to look at his daughter's picture every day.
"If I make myself feel it enough, I can learn how to feel it and not fall apart," he told himself.
After a while, he stopped "picking at the wound," as he described it, and let it heal on its own.
"We get distance. We get some sort of numbing and scarring over, but this is never going to be over," Eric said. "You still have that thing where you wake up every morning and realize your daughter's dead."
Eric and Mary Kay are trying to keep their daughter's legacy alive. They have raised more than $28,000 for a memorial scholarship to help NIU graduate students pursuing degrees in psychology.
They plan to accept a posthumous degree on Ryanne's behalf in December, and Eric watched the university install a plaque in Ryanne's memory Oct. 1.
"We need to start focusing forward instead of backward," Eric said.
"I just don't want anyone to forget about her."
