Northern Illinois Students Detail Horror of Shootings on Campus

I was online with my young friend Phil, the person helping me learn the ins-and-outs of making a blog, when he instant messaged me that his friend from East Moline, Illinois (our mutual home town) had just bolted from a classroom in Cole Hall on campus at Northern Illinois University, running for his life.

DeKalb, Illinois, where Northern Illinois University is located, is about an hour and a half drive to the east on Interstate 80. Many students from the Quad Cities attend NIU. I have taken workshops at NIU and my husband graduated from Northern Illinois University, a campus of about 25,000 students, many of them commuters.

The friend told Phil that his girlfriend was still inside the lecture hall at Cole Hall, in a geology class. She had been sitting right next to a student who was shot in the neck by a gunman, (some say black clad), who entered Cole Hall at approximately 3 p.m. (CDT) in this DeKalb, Illinois college town. The gunman was armed with a shotgun and 2 pistols, and, within 2 minutes or so, used that shotgun and those 2 pistols to shoot 22 students, six of them fatally, before taking his own life.

Said students Desiree Smith and Geoff Alberti, "I saw four people down on the ground. We were all crawling toward the exits in the back of the room on our stomachs." Desiree added that she saw the gunman shoot their instructor "in the arm."

Jim Donohue, who sustained about 20 buckshot wounds to his shoulder and the back of his head in the attack, said, "The gunman came out of the emergency exit on the right-hand side of the stage. My girl and I ran outside together. I consider myself fortunate. I feel horrible for others who weren't so fortunate. My dad and I had actually talked about what to do if something like this happened, after there were threats in December, and my dad said, 'Don't think. Just run.'"