NIU tragedy hits home for students

When Jeremy Arceneaux ’10’s roommate walked into the room and informed the Riverdale, Ill., native of the shootings at Northern Illinois University (NIU), Arceneaux’s mind immediately jumped to his family and friends.

“I know a handful of people who go to NIU, one of whom is my cousin so the thought of a shooting hitting so close to home really frightens me,” he said in an e-mail. “I’m relieved to know that they are all okay, but I feel horrible so many other innocent people were killed and wounded.”

On Thursday afternoon, NIU alumnus and current University of Illinois graduate student Stephen Kazmierczak opened fire in a lecture, killing six students and wounding 15 more before turning a gun on himself.

For natives of Chicago and its suburbs, the shooting struck very close to home. The NIU campus is only about 65 miles away from Chicago.

“I know a few students at NIU,” Chicago resident Liz Dengel ’10 said. “But what drives it home for me is that it’s my little brother’s safety school for next year. Though I don’t think he’ll be going, it’s definitely too close for comfort ... It remains a constant reminder that no place is completely safe, including Princeton.”

Dengel said she found out about the shootings when she was invited to join a group called “Pray for NIU” on facebook.com. None of her friends at NIU were injured in the shootings.

“I could get out my soapbox and say something about stricter gun control, but honestly it just makes me really sad: for the shooter, for the victims, for the parents who assume that college is a safe place,” Dengel said.

Thursday’s incident comes less than a year after the shooting at Virginia Tech, in which a lone gunman killed 32 students before committing suicide. The two incidents, however, are not isolated.

In just the week prior to the NIU shooting, there were multiple instances of gun violence on high school and college campuses across the country.

On Feb. 12, 14-year-old Brandon McInerney shot and killed eighth-grade classmate Lawrence King in Oxnard, Calif.

The day before that, Cornelius Cheers, a 17-year-old sophomore at Mitchell High School in Memphis, Tenn., shot and seriously wounded senior Stacey Kiser in a gang-related argument.

On Feb. 8, Latina Williams, a 23-year-old nursing student at Louisana Technical College, shot and killed two fellow students in a classroom on campus, then turned the gun on herself.

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“It worries me that incidents like this have been happening more frequently at campuses around the country,” said Trenton Arthur ’10, a Chicago native. “I can’t begin to imagine what the aftermath of the shooting will be at [NIU].”

Emergency Response

The consequences of Thursday’s shootings at NIU were mitigated by NIU’s security plan, school officials told The New York Times. This plan is similar to Princeton’s own emergency-response system, which was revised in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings to include a campus-wide notification system.

Campus police at NIU arrived at the scene of the shooting less than two minutes after Kazmierczak began firing. Inspectors later found that Kazmierczak had more guns and unused ammunition concealed on his body, suggesting that he had perhaps intended to continue shooting longer but was stopped by the arrival of the police, the Times reported.

“In spite of the enormity of this tragedy, it could have been worse,” NIU spokeswoman Melanie Magara told the Times on Friday.

NIU senior Christian Krum told the Associated Press that he learned about the shooting from text messages sent by other students but never received a text message from NIU and didn’t receive an e-mail until over an hour after the shooting occurred.

To complement police response, NIU went into lockdown within the hour following the shootings and a message was posted on the university’s website advising students to “get to a safe area.” Later that afternoon, an e-mail warning was sent out to the NIU community.

Princeton’s emergency response system includes phone calls and text-messaging systems as well as some of the elements of NIU’s, such as website announcements and campus-wide e-mails.

Last April, following the shootings at Virginia Tech, the University purchased Connect-ED, a notification system that can send text messages, e-mails and voicemails to students warning them of emergency situations.

The University’s Connect-ED system has been tested twice since its purchase, once in May 2007 and again in October 2007. In the May test, a total of 28,000 e-mails and calls were attempted by the system with 86 percent of the calls successful and 61 percent of the e-mails delivered within 20 minutes.

The University has also faced some difficulties in encouraging students to enter their cell phone numbers on the SCORE website so that they can be called or text messaged by the Connect-ED system.

By October 2007, 90 percent of freshmen but only 25 percent of sophomores, juniors and seniors had submitted their cell phone numbers on SCORE. Students who have not registered their cell phone numbers still receive e-mail and phone notification messages.