NIU gunman quietly cremated
As the five young students gunned down in a Northern Illinois University lecture hall were being memorialized by large crowds of mourners, the body of the shooter was quietly cremated this week.
No funeral service was held for Steven Kazmierczak. There wasn't even a visitation. Not one relative or friend went to the suburban funeral parlor to pay his or her last respects to the once-respected-scholar-turned-pariah by his violence on the Valentine's Day.
Instead, a grieving relative Thursday said the aftermath of the campus slayings has fractured a family, and what remembrances there are -- ranging from heartbroken to hateful -- have been erected on Internet social networking sites.
When Richard Grafer called the shooter's father in Florida seeking details about his godson's funeral, he says he was met with anger over comments in the news about the 27-year-old former graduate student.
"He said he won't talk to me ever again," Grafer said.
Efforts to reach the gunman's father in Florida have been unsuccessful.
Armed with a shotgun and three handguns, the man walked in on a Cole Hall class and fired salvos of bullets and buckshot, killing five students and wounding 16 others before turning one of the pistols on himself.
On Thursday, a woman answering the telephone at the Grove Memorial Chapel in Elk Grove Village acknowledged the shooter had been cremated this week without a formal service or visitation.
"It's been taken care of," she said, declining to give her name.
Another employee at the funeral home, who also declined to be identified, said the cremation took place at another location and he did not know where the ashes were sent.
But it appears others -- especially those he loved and studied with -- have turned to the Internet to remember the shooter.
A MySpace.com web page belonging to his former live-in girlfriend, Jessica Baty, conveys a simple sentiment: "Jessica is loving and missing her Steven."
But the Internet sites also serve as a vehicle for others to vent their outrage at the killings and the shooter. A post on Facebook.com, dedicated to a slain student, dubbed the NIU massacre "a senseless act committed by a coward."
The shooter, who attended Elk Grove Village High School, had a history of mental illness and stopped taking his medications, causing him to act erratically and angrily, in the weeks leading up to the killing spree, police have said.
After a moment of silence on the DeKalb campus Thursday in remembrance of the victims, NIU police chief Don Grady said investigators continue to sift through the more than 100 pieces of evidence and more than 120 interviews to try to piece together a motive in the assault.
• Daily Herald staff writer Jameel Naqvi contributed to this report.