Healing and remembrance
Scholarships, a garden, a special song honor NIU's five shooting victims
By Jameel Naqvi | Daily Herald StaffSecond of three parts
Geology 104 was Nicole Berns' first class in a large lecture hall.
It met in Room 101 in Cole Hall, a nondescript brick building where thousands of Northern Illinois University students had attended lectures since 1968.
"I can tell you I really loved that auditorium," said Berns, 30, a Schaumburg native. "It had this grand collegiate quality, and I just really liked to be there, and the teacher was really dynamic."
But Cole Hall was also the place where Berns crawled between seats to get to the door, injuring her hip as she fled from a gunman.
"I don't know exactly how it happened. It was just so frantic with so many people trying to push their way out, and I was crawling," said Berns, who was hurt in the Feb. 14 shooting that killed five students and injured 21. "The adrenaline was going, and I talked to someone who had been hit by gunfire, and he didn't even know until he got home."
Cole Hall sits locked now. Placards reading "Forward, Together Forward," a line from the school fight song that now is NIU's mantra, are taped to the front windows. Thousands of students pass by daily on one of the major walkways through central campus.
Many people are finding ways to remember the five students killed that day - Gayle Dubowski, 20, of Carol Stream; Catalina Garcia, 20, of Cicero; Julianna Gehant, 32, of Mendota; Ryanne Mace, 19, of Carpentersville and Daniel Parmenter, 20, of Westchester. Public memorials - a garden, scholarships, commemorations on the upcoming anniversary - all are underway. A special song, a trip to a beloved spot, ceremonies to award posthumous degrees add poignant remembrances for families and friends.
No one needs the reminders provoked by Cole Hall. Deciding what to do with the building has been a balancing act, forcing the university to weigh the needs of a student body short on classroom space as well as a smaller group of students for whom Cole Hall is a constant link to the violence that went on there.
The DeKalb university's ambivalence toward Cole Hall was evident in the weeks after Feb. 14. Just two weeks after the shooting, University President John Peters and Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich stood at a podium on a sidewalk cleared of snow outside Cole Hall and announced the one-story brick building would be razed and replaced with a new $40 million facility on a different site.
Students had just returned to campus, and seeing the building was difficult. "Going by Cole Hall, just seeing the door I ran out of - the first day was hardest," said Patrick Korellis, a 23-year-old from Lindenhurst who was hit in the head and arm by shotgun pellets. He wanted it torn down.
But during the week after the announcement, Peters and many in the NIU community were already having second thoughts.
After asking opinions of students, alumni and staff, NIU eventually settled on a $7.7 million plan to renovate Cole Hall, stop using Room 101 for lectures and add on to another building to replace the lost 500-seat auditorium, one of the largest on campus. Korellis, who graduated in May, now agrees with that approach.
"The vast majority of the campus came up with this scenario and supported the scenario we're pursuing," said Eddie Williams, NIU's chief of operations. "We wanted to be sure no one would be traumatized either way we went."
Yet, even the scaled-back plan is on hold, deadlocked in a capital construction bill in a state that hasn't passed one since George Ryan was governor. The 12,000 students a year who otherwise would have classes in Cole meet in ballrooms and smaller auditoriums across campus.
Waiting for funding, the university has little choice but to keep Cole Hall locked and empty. "It's entirely dependent on that," University Provost Ray Alden said.
"A peaceful place"
While Cole Hall's ignominious fate hangs in limbo, more positive and healing memorials move ahead.
The collaborative approach the university ultimately used to decide the fate of Cole Hall was employed from the outset to create a permanent memorial for Feb. 14 and the victims. A 40-member committee of alumni, students, faculty and community members sorted through more than 250 ideas, deciding in May to build a memorial garden on one of the several green spaces in view of Cole Hall.
"It was a response to a few common themes of a peaceful place, a place of remembrance, a place where somebody could go and sit down and reflect," said Vice President of University Advancement Michael Malone, who oversaw the memorial committee.
The committee looked for inspiration to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Va., where a gunman shot 32 people in April 2007. A semicircle of blocks of Hokie Stone, locally quarried stone named after Virginia Tech's mascot, emerged in the days after the shooting and was replaced that fall with a permanent, landscaped arrangement of 32 stone blocks, each engraved with a victim's name.
"Their permanent memorial is a very simple but striking semicircle of Hokie Stones," Malone said. "It was a very inexpensive but very meaningful memorial. That's what we're aiming for."
The final design of the memorial has not been decided, but Malone said the garden might incorporate seating, a fountain, "Forward, Together Forward" or the number five - for the five victims of Feb. 14. The Sycamore and DeKalb Chambers of Commerce have collected more than half the $100,000 maximum cost, which will be paid by private donations, Malone said. Work is expected to start in the spring.
As the Feb. 14 anniversary approaches, most visible signs of tragedy and remembrance have been removed from NIU's campus: the makeshift memorials, the melted candles outside Cole Hall, the five white crosses, the message boards on the commons.
But a room in the Holmes Student Center houses videos of the vigils and memorial services held in February, photos and biographies of the five victims and some of the condolences that flooded the university. Online, www.niu.edu/memorial gathers photos, videos, news reports and counseling resources and links to a guest book at legacy.com where messages of consolation continue to be posted.
Hope and remembrance
"Tragedy doesn't create our character, it reveals it." Writing about that credo was part of the application for new scholarships established in the shooting victims' names.
Hoping to make Feb. 14, 2009 a day of hope as well as sorrow, NIU plans to announce the scholarship recipients on that anniversary. The five $4,000 Forward, Together Forward scholarships will be awarded from funds - already more than $600,000 - that poured in after the shootings.
At the same time, the victims' families have established separate scholarship funds - the Gehants, Maces and Parmenters through the NIU Foundation, the Garcias through Sigma Lambda Beta Fraternity and the Dubowskis through the Chicago Church of Christ.
The anniversary will be hard for many at NIU, but for the victims' families there have been many difficult occasions - important for their children's legacy, but painful nonetheless.
Daniel Parmenter's family and friends gathered in the pouring rain in October to dedicate an Autumn Blaze maple tree in his honor along the shores of NIU's East Lagoon. Nearby, another tree was planted in honor of Ryanne Mace.
All five families have accepted posthumous degrees for their children or will at a future date. On May 17, graduates and their families gave the Dubowskis a standing ovation as they accepted a degree on their daughter's behalf during a morning graduation ceremony for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. That evening, at a ceremony for the College of Education, the families of Catalina Garcia and Julianna Gehant accepted degrees for their children.
"It was very thoughtful, and it was appropriate, and it was needed," said Shawn Andrews, a May graduate who watched the Dubowskis accept Gayle's degree.
During graduation ceremonies this month, Eric and Mary Kay Mace will accept a degree on behalf of their daughter, Ryanne - even though Ryanne would not have graduated until 2010.
"I don't really want to have to dredge some of this stuff up two years down the road," Eric Mace said, adding, "We're grateful that they want to do it."
Families have found their own ways to honor the victims.
In May, the Maces took a 21-day road trip out West to scatter their daughter's ashes in the family's former home state of Oregon on what would have been her 20th birthday, stopping at Ryanne's favorite places along the way.
"The point for this was not to try to gain closure for us - but to take her and put her to rest in a place we knew that she loved and knew it would always be beautiful," Eric Mace said.
Three of Gayle Dubowski's cousins collaborated on "Hey Love (Gayle's Song)" and offered the song for download on iTunes. So far, the song has raised about $400 for HOPE Worldwide, a charity that serves poor and sick people around the world.
"I don't know what I would have done in those first days without the song to work on," said Alisha Balogi, one of Gayle's cousins. "It's still hard to think about today."
"Hey love," the song's chorus says, "you can hardly imagine how much you're missed down here. Hey love, take our breaths to heaven."
• Daily Herald staff writer Jake Griffin contributed to this report.
