Another student
shot at a Northern Illinois University lecture hall has
died, raising the toll to seven, including the gunman, who
had graduated from the school and had been considered
a good student, officials said Friday.
The shooting was
the latest in a spate of attacks in U.S. schools and
universities, including the shooting of a
gender-nonconforming student at an Oxnard, Calif.,
junior high school who has since been declared
brain-dead; a 17-year-old accused of shooting and critically
wounding a fellow student Monday during a high school
gym class in Memphis, Tenn.; and a woman who shot two
fellow students to death before committing suicide at
Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge late last week.
The motive of the
Northern Illinois shooter, who graduated from the
university in 2006, was not known, officials said. The
gunman also wounded 15 people and sent panicked
students fleeing for the exits before killing himself.
''There is no
note or threat that I know of,'' Northern Illinois
president John Peters said on Friday ABC's Good
Morning America. ''By all accounts that we can tell
right now (he) was a very good student that the
professors thought well of.''
DeKalb County
coroner Dennis J. Miller on Friday released the identities
of the four victims who died in his county: Daniel
Parmenter, 20, of Westchester; Catalina Garcia, 20, of
Cicero; Ryanne Mace, 19, of Carpentersville; and
Julianna Gehant, 32, of Meridan.
Two other victims
died after being transferred to hospitals in other
counties, Miller said in a news release. Winnebago County
coroner Sue Fiduccia on Friday said a female victim
died in her county but has not been identified pending
notification of family. An autopsy was planned for
Friday, she said.
Witnesses said
the 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 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.
Allyse Jerome,
19, a sophomore from Schaumburg, said the gunman burst
through a stage door and pulled out a gun.
''Honestly, at
first everyone thought it was a joke,'' Jerome said.
Everyone hit the floor, she said. Then she got up and ran,
but tripped. She said she felt like ''an open
target.''
''He could've
decided to get me,'' Jerome said Friday. ''I thought for
sure he was gonna get me.''
The shooter had
been a graduate student in sociology at Northern Illinois
as recently as spring 2007, but was not currently enrolled
at the 25,000-student campus, university Peters said.
Authorities did
not release the gunman's name, but Peters said he had no
record of police contact or an arrest record while attending
Northern Illinois, about 65 miles west of Chicago.
The Chicago
Tribune, citing two unidentified law enforcement
sources, reported Friday that the gunman was a graduate
student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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, a
20-year-old 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!'''
More than a
hundred students cried and hugged as they gathered outside
the Phi Kappa Alpha fraternity house early Friday morning to
remember Dan Parmenter, the 20-year-old sophomore from
Elmhurst, who was one of those killed.
''I'm not
angry,'' his stepfather, Robert Greer, told the Chicago
Tribune. ''I'm just sad, and I know that right now
what I need to do is comfort my wife.''
All classes were
canceled Thursday night and the campus was closed on
Friday. Students were urged to call their parents ''as soon
as possible'' and were offered counseling at any
residence hall, according to the school website.
The school was
closed for one day during final exam 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. (Caryn Rousseau
and Deanna Bellandi, AP)
