Like most people around here, I’m still trying to make sense of the shootings that recently took place at the NIU campus in DeKalb. It’s just so different when one of these things happens close to home.
With the Columbine and VT shootings, I was able to maintain an emotional distance because those campuses were so far away. For those events, I was just reading about terrible tragedies in the news.
But when it happens this close, at a school where so many of my friends spent their college years, on a campus that I drive past at least once a month… well, it’s impossible to view the event simply as “news”.
We might never know why Steve Kazmierczak did what he did on February 14; even if we do find out, it’s not likely to make sense to us.
Thoughts and prayers to the family and friends of the victims here.