Dressed in black and wearing a stocking cap, a former student of the Northern Illinois University opened fire at a class, killing five students on the spot and then shot himself on Thursday. Another person died on Friday, bringing the toll, including the gunman, to seven.Investigators and school officials did not immediately know why the man indiscriminately fired into the crowd with a shotgun and two handguns on Thursday, wounding 15 people and sending panicked students fleeing for the exits before killing himself.“We have no motive and I have no way of knowing what the motive was,” University Police Chief Donald Grady said.Witnesses said the gunman 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 on 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 President John 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 104 km west of Chicago.The Chicago Tribune, citing two unidentified law enforcement sources, reported on 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 sorority 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 cancelled on 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 Web site.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.
