College shooting a frightening end to a long winter

M. Taufiqurrahman , The Jakarta Post , DeKalb, Illinois | Sat, 02/16/2008 12:42 PM | Headlines

It has been one of the most severe winters in the history of DeKalb, a small sleepy college town 104 km west of Chicago.

After coping with temperatures that sometimes dropped to below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, residents were looking forward to spring and Valentine's Day.

But things took a horrible turn when a young man slipped into Cole Hall, took hostage of a teaching assistant and started shooting at the 135 students waiting for a geography lecture to start. By the end, six people, including the gunman, were dead.

I was on the fourth floor of the NIU memorial library when the shooting started. From the library's tall windows overlooking Cole hall, I could see the tragedy as it happened.

At first the throngs of students leaving the two entrances to the hall suggested that a a fire drill was taking place. But minutes later, police, paramedics and firefighters had arrived, and I knew that something was very wrong.

Before long, the area around the hall had been cordoned off. Police and TV helicopters hovered above the grounds I spend all day in.

I grasped the true gravity of the situation when heavily armed police surrounded Cole Hall, where only two months beforehand an Balinese dancer had performed for a cultural night organized by the university's Southeast Asian studies center.

One of the library attendants was against us evacuating the building. "I think we should stay inside just to be safe," he told me.

Before our conversation was over, however, the library management announced that we had to leave the building immediately. On the way out, we passed through three shotgun-toting policemen, and students with tense, confused and angry faces.

The timely evacuation and the quick presence of police officers at the NIU could have been the results of security measures that were introduced in December after police found threats scrawled on a campus bathroom wall that included racial slurs and references to last April's Virginia Tech shootings.

Final exams for the fall semester were rescheduled following the threat. The Virginia Tech shooting taught the management of NIU much about guaranteeing the safety of students and teachers, until its own tragedy struck.

In fact, the management of NIU should win praise for its quick response. Only minutes after the first gunshot was heard, when the situation was at best muddy, the NIU Web site had already posted a message about the presence of a gunman on campus. At around 3:40 p.m. a new message was posted stating that the situation was under control.

Following the December threat, the NIU management distributed manuals on how to deal with a shooting incident, but it was not quite enough to prepare people.

"I didn't believe that the December threat would end up like this," Philip Jusario Vermonte, a Ph.D student at the NIU Political Science Department told me.

Vermonte was on his way into Cole hall when students began fleeing.

"They ran like hell and I saw blood on the shirt of the students," he said. "The shooter is really sick, I mean if he wants to commit suicide, why does he have to drag other people down with him?" he said.

Business administration major Gemilang Zull Mallarangeng, son of presidential spokesman Andi Mallarangeng, said he had been about to take his mid-term exam when his instructors locked all the doors and told students to stay in class until further notice.

"We turned on the TV and knew what was happening and we were locked in for, like, one hour. It was surreal," he said.

Ali Akrom, a PhD student and Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara, native, said he had seen an omen in a display of a Javanese graveyard in the NIU Department of Anthropology in a hallway that ran through Cole Hall.

"Don't you think it was a bad sign?" he said.

There are 10 Indonesian students attending NIU, most of whom are in the political science department.

Comments (0) | Post comment

A | A | A |