Lord, has mercy on us.
Gunman Kills 5 on Illinois Campus by New York Times
DeKALB, Ill. — With minutes left in a class in ocean sciences at Northern Illinois University on Thursday afternoon, a tall skinny man dressed in black stepped out from behind a curtain on the stage of the lecture hall, said nothing, and opened fire with a shotgun, the authorities and witnesses said.
The shooting occurred on the campus of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Ill.
The scene at N. Illinois University this afternoon.
Students outside of Cole Hall at Northern Illinois University.
gain, witnesses said, perhaps 20 times. Students in the large lecture hall, stunned, dropped to the floor.
Five people, all of them students, were killed, John G. Peters, the president of Northern Illinois, said at a news conference Thursday evening. Sixteen others were injured. Hospital officials said several of the students had been shot in the head.
The gunman, whom the authorities did not immediately identify, also died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Mr. Peters said, noting that the man’s body was found on the stage. Police from the campus, in a snow-filled city of about 40,000 people 65 miles due west of Chicago, said three weapons were found with the man’s body — two handguns, including a Glock, and the shotgun. He had ammunition left over, the police here said.
The gunman had been a graduate student at the university in 2007 but was no longer enrolled, Mr. Peters said.
Desiree Smith, one of the university students, said she saw students fall down around her as the gunman opened fire. She tried to crawl away, she told a local television station, CLTV, thinking she was going to die, then wondered if she should play dead before getting up to run out of the classroom.
Ms. Smith said the gunman was wearing a black beanie cap or a ski cap. She said he aimed, right off, for one person: the classroom instructor.
Other students told of a chaotic scene in which panicked students dropped to the floor, the blood of victims spattering those who escaped injury.
“This thing started and ended within a matter of seconds,” said Donald Grady, the chief of police at the university.
The class in Cole Hall had been an introductory offering, and most of the 162 students registered for it had probably been freshmen or sophomores, said Jonathan Berg, chairman of the department of geology and environmental geosciences.
Mr. Berg, who was in his office about two blocks from Cole Hall when the shooting began, ran over and found injured students sitting on sidewalks, waiting for ambulances. Some had bandages on their heads, he said.
Mr. Berg said an instructor and a teaching assistant had been in the classroom along with students; he said he believed that the instructor had been wounded, but not seriously.
In the moments after the shooting, university officials put into action a detailed security plan created for just such an incident, Mr. Peters said. Many universities and colleges around the country designed elaborate lock-down and notification plans in the days and weeks after a student at Virginia Tech killed 32 people on that Blacksburg campus, the worst shooting rampage in modern American history.
“This is a tragedy,” Mr. Peters said. “But from all indications we did everything we could when we found out.”
Shots rang out inside Cole Hall shortly after 3 p.m. Central time, Mr. Peters said. At 3:07 p.m., the campus was ordered into a lockdown, he said. At 3:20 p.m., he said, the university posted an alert on its Web site, through its e-mail system, and through another campus alarm system. “There has been a report of a possible gunman on campus,” the alert read. “Get to a safe area and take precautions until given the all clear. Avoid the King Commons and all buildings in that vicinity.”
By 4 p.m., Mr. Peters said, the police had determined that there was only one gunman, now dead, and issued another message to students at 4:14 p.m. “Campus police report that the immediate danger has passed,” it read. “The gunman is no longer a threat.”
The authorities here canceled classes for the rest of the evening and Friday. Counselors had been called in, they said, and counseling was being offered in every residence hall by Thursday evening.
Leaders at the university said the events in Virginia a year ago had shaken many, but also led to a focus on security and the possibility of such an incident at Northern Illinois.
“Since Virginia Tech, people have had time to think about how to respond to these things, so it’s fresh on everybody’s mind,” Mr. Berg said. “And they’re trying to do everything they’ve been talking about for the last few months.”
Police officers arrived at the classroom within two minutes, Chief Grady said, adding that even with elaborate plans, it might be impossible to prevent such violence entirely.
Students here had heard of threats at the university late last year, a fact that left some wondering whether there might have been some connection to what had happened on Thursday. Last December, university officials canceled classes for a day during final exams after someone scrawled threats in a dormitory bathroom, including a reference to the Virginia Tech killings and a racial slur. The police here said Thursday that they had no reason to suspect a connection.
Chartered in 1895, Northern Illinois University is a public institution with more than 25,000 enrolled students, 91 percent of them from Illinois.
In Springfield, the state capital, Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich declared a state of emergency after the shootings, offering state relief for expenses and the state emergency management agency to offer help.
“The State of Illinois will provide whatever assistance and support is necessary to university staff and students, and to local officials,” Mr. Blagojevich said.
Officials and students said they had yet to even start to come to terms with all they had seen.
Outside the dormitories on Thursday evening, it looked like the last day of school. Students streamed out of dorms carrying backpacks and luggage. A caravan of parents’ cars made its way onto campus to meet them, and many waited for their children in idling vehicles.
“You don’t think it’s going to happen at your university and you certainly don’t think it’s going to happen in your department to people you know,” Mr. Berg said.
“You don’t know how to react,” he said.
 當地醫院表示接收了17名傷者 |
槍擊事件發生在北伊利諾伊大學。大學位於迪卡爾布，距離芝加哥約100公里。
校內學生表示，一名同時持有手槍和獵槍的白人男子在講堂內開槍。
早些時候的報道稱，至少17人受傷，其中一些頭部受了重傷。一人送院後不治。
“單獨行事”
警方在新聞發佈會表示，他們已經找到了一支手槍和一支獵槍，但仍在尋找另一支小型槍支。
警方相信槍手單獨行事，目前未能確定他開了多少槍。
BBC在華盛頓的記者利特爾引述大學校長說，槍手曾經在該校就讀。
大學當局事發後馬上在互聯網發出警報，呼籲校內學生找地方躲避。
這是一周之內美國發生的第四起校園槍擊事件。
一名女子上周五（8日）在路易斯安那理工學院開槍打死兩名同學後吞槍自盡﹔星期一（11日），田納西州一名17歲青年被指開槍把一名學生打致重傷﹔星期二（12日），一名15歲學生在加利福尼亞州一所初中內被打傷。
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