There were many red flags before NIU attack; no one noticed

They're like onions, these campus shooters.

At first when you look at them they are smooth and shiny and don't smell much.

"There were no red flags" said Northern Illinois University Police Chief Donald Grady on Thursday right after the shooting and again Friday.

"We had no indications at all that this would be the type of person that would engage in such activity," Grady said when describing the gunman who killed five students and then quickly killed himself. He was "a fairly normal person."

Well there were red flags.

You didn't have to peel many layers of the onion to notice them.

A "fairly normal" man doesn't:

• spend at least a year in a psychiatric rehab home, put there by his parents who can no longer handle him.

• use knives, broken glass, razor blades or tin can tops to cut himself and then wait for someone to notice.

• join the Army, only to be kept from basic training for not revealing his psychiatric history.

• repeatedly stop taking prescribed medication even though it could cause homicidal and suicidal behavior.

• suddenly not show up for work one day in the field he was passionate for and then without explanation, never return.

• buy several guns even though you are not a hunter and have never expressed a need for personal protection.

And those are just the things that we know about the gunman after a couple of days working on his background.

That's the problem when one of these things happens. Something has to seriously stink before anyone even notices the source, much less bothers peeling back the thin, glossy skin. Unless the stench has overcome people, nobody seems to care.

It was nice to hear the NIU police chief, the NIU president, Gov. Rod Blagojevich and others repeatedly thank each other and gush praise for the terrific job that everybody did. But maybe there is too much attention being paid to responding as opposed to preventing in the first place.

The shooter had mental problems for at least 10 years. Unless he stole the anti-depressants that he was supposed to be taking, some doctor out there prescribed them and knew he still had demons.

And somebody was paying for the prescriptions and the treatment. He was a full-time student.

His father must have known because he and his late wife originally sent their son to psychiatric rehab.

His sister must have known he still had problems. He moved to Champaign last year where she lives and works in a social service job.

Some of his friends must have known. He told some of his Army dismissal and explained that it had been for "psychological reasons."

His girlfriend must have noticed something was up. Gun accessories had been recently arriving in the mail and she had recently split up with him and moved out.

His boss at the Indiana prison knew something was wrong. People don't just stop showing up for work and disappear for no reason at all.

Last Friday in Springfield, Illinois' security guru Michael Chamness met privately to brief top state lawmakers about the NIU shootings. As others have been doing, Chamness praised everybody who responded to the violent attack. "From our standpoint, NIU did everything correct," Chamness told legislators.

Then he said the DeKalb incident was unavoidable, just as NIU officials have been stressing. "There didn't seem to be the flags there were at the Virginia Tech tragedy."

I don't think that will end up being true. Indeed there were many of the same flags in this case, as there were with the student who shot and killed 32 people last April at Virginia Tech before killing himself.

Both men had extensive mental treatment histories and current psychiatric issues that doctors, relatives and some friends were well aware existed. Both men displayed recent erratic behavior. And both men made recent, first-time gun purchases.

The final state report on Virginia Tech's shooting found that university officials missed dozens of chances to intervene as that shooter's mental health deteriorated in the year before the rampage. The report cited "warnings of mental instability."

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine said that "connecting some of the mental-health dots might have averted the tragedy."

That may have been the problem with the NIU gunman as well. Anyone and everyone who could have connected the dots are doing so right now. But it's too late for that.

He already finished the picture … Thursday afternoon on the stage in that lecture hall.

And there is one more thing about that onion analogy that should make all of us think.

Onions grow in fields. There's never just one.