Six Dead After University Shooting

He walked into a geology class, dressed all in black. He pulled out a pistol, a shotgun and one other weapon and opened fire. A gunman bearing a deadly grudge burst into a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University Thursday and started spraying those in attendance with bullets.

When the silence returned, five people lay dead and another 15 were wounded. All were students.  ” At last report, there are six fatalities, including the shooter. Four males and two females. Four were dead at the scene. Two died later at the hospital,” explains school president John Peters.

The attack began around 3pm Central Time. The university, located in De Kalb, about 100 kilometres from Chicago, immediately went into lockdown, with warnings on the school’s website to run for cover and keep away from the campus.

But the emergency didn’t last long. Just minutes after the rampage began, it was over and the gunman was discovered dead, a victim of a self-inflicted bullet wound to the head. “The immediate danger has passed,” an updated message on the site read an hour later. “The gunman is no longer a threat.”

George Gaynor was in Cole Hall when the intruder came in. He was “a skinny white guy with a stocking cap on,” he recalls. “Some girl got hit in the eye, a guy got hit in the leg. It was like five minutes before class ended, too.”

Despite the chaos, witnesses sensed that the man appeared to be targeting a certain group of students in one part of the room. “It was almost like he knew who he wanted to shoot,” student Edward Robinson indicates. “He knew who and where he wanted to be firing at.”

Jillian Martinez is grateful to have escaped the carnage with her life. “He just started shooting at all the kids,” she recalls. “He just started shooting at people, and I ran out of there as fast as I could. I ran all the way to the student centre; when I got there I could still hear shooting (from the classroom).”

Cops have learned the identity of the shooter and it now appears he had a connection to the campus.  Officials say he was a former grad student who left the school in 2007, and was no longer attending the university. He apparently had at least three guns, although only two have been recovered. They haven’t released his name.

No one has any idea what may have driven the man to his final deadly act.

The college is home to 25,000 students and will remain closed on Friday. Northern Illinois now becomes the latest U.S. campus to be hit by terrible violence – and the fourth overall this 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.

They join an infamous list that includes the worst of them all. Last April, a 23-year-old student and loner named Cho Seung-Hui took out his rage at Virginia Tech in the town of Blacksburg. He took  32 people with him, before turning the gun on himself. 

A tape he made prior to the shooting and sent to a U.S. network would later blame  “snobs” and those who looked down at him for his decision to commit the act.

With files from the Associated Press

Shooting Timeline

According to university officials, here’s a breakdown of what happened on Thursday afternoon.

3pm: Shots fired in Cole Hall by a man dressed in black. He’d been hiding behind a screen inside the room. Eighteen people hit.

3:03pm: Northern Illinois University Police respond.

3:07pm: Campus is locked down.

3:20pm: A campus alert goes out on websites, email, voice mail and the media. The message: there’s a gunman on campus. Stay where you are.

4pm: Police sweep the area and determine the gunman is dead and there was only one shooter.