Gunman at Illinois college kills 5, then himself

DEKALB, Ill. — A former student dressed in black walked onto the stage of a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and opened fire on a packed science class Thursday, killing five students, wounding 16 and setting off a panicked stampede before committing suicide.

Police said they have no motive for the rapid-fire assault, in which the gunman fired into the crowd with a shotgun and two handguns as students dove to the floor and ran toward the exit. At least four of the wounded were hospitalized in critical condition late Thursday.

"I kept thinking, 'Oh God, he's going to shoot me. Oh God, I'm dead. I'm dead. I'm dead,' " said Desiree Smith, a senior journalism major who dropped to the floor near the back of the auditorium.

"People were crawling on each other, trampling each other," she said. "As I got near the door, I got up and I started running."

The gunman fatally shot four women and a man, university President John Peters said. Four people died at the scene, including the gunman, and the other two died at a hospital, he said.

Investigators said the gunman was a former NIU graduate student in sociology.

Witnesses said the skinny gunman, dressed in black and wearing a stocking cap, emerged from behind a screen on the stage of 200-seat Cole Hall and opened fire just as the geology class was about to end around 3 p.m.

Officials said 162 students were registered for the class, but it was unknown how many were there Thursday.

Jillian Martinez, a freshman from Carpentersville, Ill., told the Chicago Tribune she was in the auditorium when the gunman entered. "He just started shooting at all the kids," she said. "... I ran out of there as fast as I could."

Lauren Carr said she was sitting in the third row when she saw the shooter walk through a door on the right-hand side of the stage, pointing a gun straight ahead.

"I personally Army-crawled halfway up the aisle," said Carr, 20, a sophomore. "I said, 'I could get up and run or I could die here.' "

She said a student in front of her was bleeding, "but he just kept running."

"I heard this girl scream, 'Run, he's reloading the gun.' "

The teacher, a graduate student, was wounded but was expected to recover, the school president said. He did not give details of the injuries.

Peters said the gunman was not currently enrolled at the 25,000-student campus about 65 miles west of Chicago.

"It appears he may have been a student somewhere else," university Police Chief Donald Grady said.

Authorities were not releasing the shooter's identity Thursday night but said they were not aware of any criminal history or violence in his past.

The gunman was found dead on the stage of the lecture hall, Grady said. He had a shotgun, a Glock pistol and one other small-caliber handgun, with ammunition left in both handguns, Grady said. He said gun magazines were found "all over the floor."

"We believe there was only one shooter," Grady said. The shooting was "over in a matter of minutes," he said.

Minutes after the shooting erupted, students phoned each other and sent text messages even before school officials could warn them, many said. The school Web site announced a possible gunman on campus within 20 minutes of the shots, and ordered a lockdown of the campus, part of a new security plan created after a student at Virginia Tech killed 32 people last year.

"This is a tragedy, but from all indications we did everything we could when we found out," Peters said.

George Gaynor, a senior geography student who was in Cole Hall when the shooting happened, told the student newspaper Northern Star that the gunman was "a skinny white guy with a stocking cap on."

He described the scene after the incident as terrifying and chaotic.

"Some girl got hit in the eye, a guy got hit in the leg," Gaynor said outside just minutes after the shooting occurred. "It was, like, five minutes before class ended, too."

Police said the gunman fired indiscriminately, but student Edward Robinson told radio station WLS that the gunman appeared to target students in one part of the lecture hall.

"It was almost like he knew who he wanted to shoot," Robinson said. "He knew who and where he wanted to be firing at."

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) sent 15 agents to the scene, spokesman Thomas Ahern said. He said information about the weapons involved would be sent to the ATF's national database. The FBI also was assisting.

All classes were canceled Thursday night and the campus was closed today. Students were urged to call their parents "as soon as possible" and were offered counseling at any residence hall, according to the school Web site.

The school was closed for one day during final-exams week in December after campus police found threats, including racial slurs and references to shootings earlier in the year at Virginia Tech, scrawled on a bathroom wall in a dormitory.

Police determined after an investigation that there was no imminent threat and the campus was reopened. Peters said he knew of no connection between that incident and Thursday's attack.

The shooting was the fourth at a U.S. school within a 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.

Associated Press writers Carla K. Johnson, Michael Tarm, David Mercer, Martha Irvine, Nguyen Huy Vu, Sarah Rafi and Mike Robinson contributed to this report.

Material from the Chicago Tribune is included in this report.