Mystery remains over university rampage gunman

The former student who gunned down five people at his old US university in a suicidal rampage had recently “become erratic” after halting prescribed medication, it emerged today.

Police said 27-year-old Stephen Kazmierczak carried a shotgun into the building hidden inside a guitar case and also used three handguns during the attack inside a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University.

Two of the weapons, the pump-action Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun, were bought legally less than a week ago.

But officers were unable to say why he had carried out the massacre.

Campus police chief Donald Grady said investigators recovered 48 shell casings and six shotgun shells following the attack in Cole Hall. The gunman paused to reload the shotgun after opening fire on a crowd of terrified students in a geology class, sending them running and crawling toward the exits. He shot himself to death on the stage of the hall.

Kazmierczak was taking some kind of medication, Mr Grady said.

“He had stopped taking medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks,” he said, refusing to name the drug or provide other details.

Correcting information his office released earlier, DeKalb County Coroner Rusty Miller said five students, not six, were killed in the rampage, in addition to the gunman. Miller said the higher victim total was the result of confusion over the fate of a patient taken to another county for treatment.

The motive of the killer, who graduated from NIU in 2006 but was a student there as recently as last year, was still not known.

Mr Grady said Kazmierczak was an “outstanding” student while at NIU and authorities were still trying to determine why he would kill. There was no known suicide note.

“We were dealing with a disturbed individual who intended to do harm on this campus,” NIU President John Peters 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 3pm.

Allyse Jerome, 19, said the he burst through a stage door and pulled out a gun.

“Honestly, at first everyone thought it was a joke,” she said.

“He could’ve decided to get me. I thought for sure he was gonna get me.”

John Giovanni, 20, said the gunman calmly fired at the greatest concentration of students.

“He was shooting from the hip. He was just shooting. I was running but I was hurtling over people in the foetal position.”

Mr Peters said four people died at the scene, including three students and the gunman. The others died at hospitals. The teacher, a graduate student, was wounded but was expected to recover.

Five of the victims have been named: Daniel Parmenter, 20, Catalina Garcia, 20, Ryanne Mace, 19, Julianna Gehant, 32, and Gayle Dubowski, 20.

The killer had been a graduate student in sociology at Northern Illinois as recently as spring last year.

Mr Peters said he had no record of police contact or an arrest record while attending Northern Illinois, a campus with 25,000 students about 65 miles west of Chicago.

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 the latest attack.