McHenry student holes up in lab, hiding from a killer

For two hours, they waited -- holed up in a windowless room, scouring the Web for any word about the killer on campus.

Laura Raymond, 29, of McHenry had come to this stuffy sociology lab to do homework.

Now, she was trying to maintain calm among classmates while an unspeakable tragedy unfolded one building over.

No one leaves, she told them, taking charge as a senior graduate student and assistant to the professor. She locked the door.

"When we heard somebody was dead, that's when everybody got real upset," Raymond said, her voice quivering. "It was the reality that this was really happening."

News reports -- accessible through the lab's 30 or so computers -- were mixed.

One said the gunman who shot 18 people at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb was dead; another said he was in police custody.

The Web browsers couldn't be refreshed quickly enough.

"I started shaking," Raymond said. "It was very surreal."

The hiding spot was a lab in DuSable Hall, a couple hundred feet west of Cole Hall.

All the 20 or so students in this room knew for sure was there had been a shooting. Where was the shooter?

A few coped by staying focused on homework.

Others wept.

They sent text messages to those on the outside, and called moms and dads.

An indescribable feeling lingered until word came by phone about 5 p.m. that it was safe to leave school.

"You think about (such tragedies) after some of the other stories of university shootings, and you feel for them," Raymond said. "But something like this … you never think it's going to happen.

"We won't be able to forget for quite a while."