Gunman showed hints of his darker side

The skinny young man who walked into a college lecture hall and opened fire Thursday once aspired to work with criminals and the mentally ill before his own life apparently unraveled in the grips of madness.

Steven P. Kazmierczak, 27, entered talent shows as a child, played saxophone in the Elk Grove High School marching band, impressed teachers at Northern Illinois University's graduate school and was known by several as an easygoing, friendly guy.

"The Steve that did this ridiculous thing was not the Steve that I knew," NIU graduate student Megan Sprangers said of the rampage that left five students dead, 16 wounded and the shooter dead of a self-inflicted gunshot.

But questions loom about a darker side of his personality and life. It all appeared to fall apart as time ticked toward Valentine's Day.

Hiding in his background, perhaps unknown to those around him, was a history of mental illness. He had previously turned violent without medication, according to a mental health worker at his former group home.

Police indicate the breaking point was two weeks before the shootings after the gunman stopped taking his medication and started acting "erratic." Authorities would not identify the type of medication.

And in that time span, he started buying guns -- lots of them.

Authorities say he apparently tried to buy guns six times, initiating background checks, just before he purchased a 12-gauge Remington model 870 shotgun and a Glock 9 mm handgun on Feb. 9, the Saturday before the shooting. He had two other handguns during the assault.

The week before, the NIU shooter bought two 9 mm magazines and a Glock holster from a Web site owned by Green Bay-based TGSCOM Inc., which sold a weapon to the Virginia Tech shooter, said Eric Thompson, the company's owner. The items arrived Tuesday at the shooter's Champaign apartment.

Yet, just weeks earlier the gunman was impressing teachers at the University of Illinois' graduate school of social work, where he was studying mental health and looking forward to a career working in prisons.

"He was a nice kid," said Jane Carter-Black, a social work assistant professor at the U of I at Urbana-Champaign and the shooter's academic adviser. "He seemed extremely committed to learning as much as possible."

At the time, he was entering his third semester at the U of I. There, he and other students worked for a professor compiling data for a research project on Illinois' mental health clinics.

"The others students enjoyed Steven's company," said Chris Larrison, an assistant professor in U of I's social work graduate program. "He was very personal, very easygoing."

Professors at NIU took similar interest when he was taking graduate sociology courses for at least a year after receiving a bachelor's degree at the DeKalb university.

In 2006, the small NIU sociology department gave the gunman one of its highest honors: the annual Dean's Award.

The shooter also co-authored a published study on prison policy, titled "Self-injury in Correctional Settings: 'Pathology' of Prisoners or of Prisons?"

According to that paper, he had interests in "corrections, political violence, and peace and social justice."

The gunman also served as vice president of NIU's Academic Criminal Justice Association and was on the board of a college chapter of the American Corrections Association.

At NIU, he helped tutor a sociology related statistics class, Sprangers said. He also once taught at Cole Hall, where the shooting occurred.

"He was probably one of the students' favorites," she said.

The shooter's mother died in the fall of the same year he received the prestigious graduate school award.

While living in Florida, she died from ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, a debilitating illness that kills its victims within months, according to her obituary and an ALS memorial Web site.

Just a few months later, the gunman transferred to the U of I and stayed in school through the summer, taking extra classes to qualify for the social work program.

Sprangers said she spoke with him a few times after he transferred and the gifted student told her he was happily pursing a new subject.

Then last fall he finally landed a prison job he had been searching out for months. He dropped his course load to part-time in September 2007 to take the job in Indiana, Larrison said.

"Steven was very committed to pursuing a career working with prisoners," Larrison said.

But just a few weeks into corrections officer training at the Rockville Correction Facility, he stopped showing up without explanation. His last day was Oct. 9.

"He just did not come back to work," said Doug Garrison, an Indiana prison spokesman.

While some say the gunman was an outgoing, average graduate student, others say they saw a different side.

Martha Shinall, his 78-year-old neighbor at his nondescript apartment building in Champaign, said the man was quiet, but odd. "I just had a feeling he wasn't too happy with the world," Shinall said.

After graduating from Elk Grove High School in 1998, the gunman was treated for mental illness at a group home in Chicago, Louise Gbadamashi, a former manger of the facility, told ABC7 Chicago.

"He was a cutter," she said. "He would cut himself. Then he would let you discover it."

The gunman rarely showed other outward signs of depression or other mental illness at the time, Gbadamashi said.

Sprangers knew her fellow classmate had a troubled upbringing, living at times in group homes. He served a brief stint in the military, which he said straightened him out. But he never spoke of taking medication, she said.

Some former high school classmates recalled him as a tad abnormal in his teens.

Adam Sielig, of Palatine, who played in the marching band with the shooter, described him as a decent person but recalled unusual, isolated outbursts.

"I want to say he was a bit more quiet, so some people might have pestered him to a point and he may have gotten angry with them," Sielig said.

Kazmierczak held a B average when he graduated, and was involved in the high school Japanese program, said Venetia Miles, a Northwest Suburban District 214 spokeswoman.

Ryan Chapetta, another band mate, said he was neither outgoing nor dark.

But James Schaefer, who last saw the gunman in college, has a different memory of his former schoolmate.

"You know when you look at someone and they are smiling at you -- and it's a creepy intensity?" the Elk Grove Village resident said.

Schaefer also said he worked with him summers at the Pirate's Cove theme park and at the library in Elk Grove Village.

The shooter's father lives in Florida and his sister, Susan, who is 29, lives in Champaign, family members said. The sister could not be reached for comment and the father told reporters in Florida, "Please leave me alone. …. This is a very hard time for me," before going back in his house, according to the Associated Press.

A sign on the front door read: "Illini fans live here."

Other relatives are stunned. "You are just kind of surprised that you could ever know someone involved in something like this," said Kathleen Klages of Harvard, who is distantly related to the shooter.

Nancy Czarnik, a first cousin to the shooter's mother and an Elk Grove Village board member, said, "I feel for all those families and all their loss."

Czarnik said the shooter was outgoing as a child and never in trouble. She said he appeared when he was about 10 years old in a talent show, playing the guitar and lip-synching.

Nearly 18 years later, the shooter used a guitar case to hide his 12-gauge shotgun as he slipped into the NIU lecture hall.

• Daily Herald staff writers Sue Ter Maat, Sara Faiwell, Kim Pohl, Nick Shields, Amber Krosel and Ames Boykin, contributed to this report.