Coming to terms with the NIU tragedy

Coming to terms with the tragedy at Northern Illinois University has been difficult for everyone, perhaps greater for an Elgin woman who has attended school there since 2002.

Megan Sprangers graduated from Larkin High School in Elgin in 2002 and went to Northern as a sociology major. She graduated cum laude in 2006. She also was a defensive specialist on NIU's volleyball team for four years.

She's currently working toward a master's in sociology and is a teaching assistant, working with undergrads in the sociology computer lab.

During her years in DeKalb, she worked and became friends with Steve Kazmierczek, who killed five students and himself on Valentine's Day.

Learning the news

On Feb. 14, Megan was in her apartment, a five-minute walk from campus, scanning the Internet for job leads.

At 3 p.m., she was getting ready to go to work at DuSable Hall when a friend called from the parking lot near DuSable to tell her to stay home -- there had been a shooting. Several friends had called her from the computer lab and told her they were in lockdown mode.

Megan thought it might be a hoax until she saw one of the five helicopters that hovered over campus. Before the phone lines became too clogged to use, she was able to get in touch with her parents, Bruce and Lynn Sprangers of Elgin, to tell them she was OK.

She spent the rest of the day e-mailing her father with updates.

Days that followed

The day after the shootings, all 20 of the sociology graduate assistants met at DuSable Hall with a counselor, Sociology Director Kay Forrest, Sociology Graduate Director Kristin Myers, and Charles Cappell, the professor for whom the shooter had worked as a teaching assistant before moving on to the University of Illinois the previous summer.

They sat in a circle and took turns talking of his or her experiences with him.

Megan recalled that she had received a few e-mails from him -- the last in December asking her to come down to Champaign to visit him.

During the weekend after the shooting, the campus was an eerie place, Megan said.

Most of the students were gone, and blood on the sidewalk was a stark reminder of the tragedy. Megan began to grasp what had really happened -- and that she had known the person who had done it.

Not exactly the same person, she said, but the same body.

Questions kept rolling over in her mind: "Why didn't I see it coming? Why would he hurt so many people? Why did he take his own life?"

She says now there can never truly be answers to those questions. But she didn't know that then.

During the week of mourning, Megan chose to stay on campus. She had invested a great deal of herself in the place. Four years of sweat and toil on the volleyball court. And as a staff member, she felt she belonged there.

"I have my fingerprints all over the place," she said.

She appreciated the support of her colleagues, and the calls, e-mails and letters from all over the country and from friends as far away as Australia. She said she'd get eight e-mails, get up to retrieve a Coke and come back to eight more.

During the week after the shootings, the sociology faculty and staff met with the NIU provost and a counselor from Virginia Tech.

He told them how his campus is carrying on after the grieving -- that the process is best handled by simply letting it happen and that sometimes it takes six months to begin.

Helping to heal

As staff members, Megan and others in the sociology department were to keep an eye on problems that could arise: students who needed to drop a class, not getting assignments in on time, having trouble focusing on subject matter and dwelling on the friends they'd lost.

On Feb. 24, a large memorial was staged at the university's convocation center.

That was about enough for Megan, who called in sick the next day. She wasn't coping well and hadn't slept after the ceremony.

But the next day, she was back to work.

For the last five years, Megan spent her spring breaks in Pensacola, Fla., working with Habitat for Humanity. But this year she stayed home to assist and chauffeur her father after his knee surgery.

Returning to campus after break, she found the large message board gone, but the five white crosses still there.

Across the street, at the Lutheran church, there had been been six crosses. During break, one was burned down, but immediately replaced.

Megan says she feels good about that because her friend, too, was a lost soul.

At work and at school now the topic rarely comes up. From the outset, the topic has been implied rather than discussed in conversation.

As to the fate of Cole Hall, where the shootings occurred, Megan hopes students will be involved in the decision.

"Somehow, the students who are lost should be memorialized. They made a choice to go to school, and lost their lives for it," she said.

There should be some special way to preserve their memory, she said.

Megan echoes the line from the NIU fight song: "…forward, together, forward, " and hopes that somehow something good comes from the shared suffering.

Best of luck to you, Megan, and thank you for sharing.