Bolingbrook student recounts panic in classroom during shooting

DEKALB -- Desiree Smith wasn't supposed to be in the classroom. The senior journalism major had picked up the geology class at the last minute after dropping another course.

And now, there she was on the floor, face to face with another terrified student who'd also dropped to the ground as a gunman began firing Thursday afternoon in an auditorium at Northern Illinois University. Smith grabbed the other girl's leg as a sign of support.

"We watched each other, not blinking," said the 21-year-old student from Bolingbrook. Then as other students frantically crawled toward the back exit, she did the same -- eventually getting up and running for her life.

"I kept thinking, 'Oh God, he's going to shoot me. Oh God, I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead,'" she said. She could still hear the shot being fired as she fled the building and ran to a nearby dorm.

University officials later told how the former graduate student, who was dressed in black, opened fire with a shotgun and two handguns from the lecture hall stage. He killed six students and injured 15 others before committing suicide, authorities said.

The gunman fatally shot in a "brief, rapid-fire assault," university President John Peters said. Four died at the scene, including the gunman, and the other thtree died at a hospital.

Peters said the gunman was a former graduate student in sociology at NIU, but was not currently enrolled at the 25,000-student campus about 65 miles west of Chicago.

"It appears he may have been a student somewhere else," University Police Chief Donald Grady said, adding that police had no apparent motive.

Seventeen victims were taken to Kishwaukee Community Hospital in DeKalb, including a male who died there, and six were transported to other hospitals in critical condition, hospital spokeswoman Theresa Komitas. Another person died at OSF St. Anthony Medical Center in Rockford, an official there said.

Dan Parmenter, a 20-year-old sophomore from Elmhurst, Ill., was one of those killed, his stepfather, Robert Greer, told the Chicago Tribune.

"I'm not angry," Greer said. "I'm just sad, and I know that right now what I need to do is comfort my wife."

Lauren Carr said she was sitting in the third row of the lecture hall around 3 p.m. when she saw the shooter walk through a door on the right-hand side of the stage, pointing a gun straight ahead.

"I heard this girl scream, 'Run! He's reloading the gun!'"

Student Jerry Santoni was in a back row when he saw the gunman enter a service door to the stage.

"I saw him shoot one round at the teacher," he said.

Santoni dived down, hitting his head the seat in front of him, leaving a knot about half the size of a pingpong ball on his forehead.

Joseph Peterson, the 26-year-old graduate student teaching the geology class, told the Chicago Sun-Times the gunman appeared about 40 feet away from him and "just started firing away." The gunman chased Peterson, who escaped out a door and was later hospitalized with a shoulder wound.

George Gaynor, a senior geography student, who was in Cole Hall when the shooting happened, told the student newspaper the Northern Star that the shooter was "a skinny white guy with a stocking cap on."

He described the scene immediately following the incident as terrifying and chaotic.

"Some girl got hit in the eye, a guy got hit in the leg," Gaynor said outside just minutes after the shooting occurred. "It was like five minutes before class ended too."

Michael Gentile was meeting with two of his students directly beneath the lecture hall when the shootings happened. He could hear the chaos a few feet above his head.

"The shotgun blast must have been so loud," said Gentile, a 27-year-old media studies instructor. "It sounded like something was dropping down the stairs... We had no idea what this was."

Then, shorter, sharper noises he recognized as handgun shots.

"There was a pretty quick succession ... just pow, pow, pow," said Gentile, who didn't leave his office for about 90 minutes. He used a surveillance camera just outside his office to confirm that the people knocking on his door were police.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms sent 15 agents to the scene, according to spokesman Thomas Ahern. He said information about the weapons involved would be sent to the ATF's national database in Washington and given urgent priority. The FBI also was assisting.

All classes were canceled Thursday night and the campus was closed on Friday. Students were urged to call their parents "as soon as possible" and were offered counseling at any residence hall, according to the school Web site.

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 bathroom wall in a dormitory. Police determined after an investigation that there was no imminent threat and the campus was reopened. Peters said he knew of no connection between that incident and Thursday's attack. Peters said he knew of no connection between that incident and Thursday's attack.

The shooting was the fourth at a U.S. school within a week.

On Feb. 8, a woman shot two fellow students to death before committing suicide at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge. In Memphis, Tenn., a 17-year-old is accused of shooting and critically wounding a fellow student Monday during a high school gym class, and the 15-year-old victim of a shooting at an Oxnard, Calif., junior high school has been declared brain dead.