Stopped Taking His Medication

Stopped Taking His Medication

From AP:

DEKALB, Ill. - The man who gunned down five people at Northern Illinois University in a suicidal rampage became erratic after halting his medication and carried a shotgun to campus inside a guitar case, police said Friday.

Nothing that says what the medication was, or what he was taking it for.

UPDATE: More details in this February 15, 2008 ABC News story:

Stephen Kazmierczak, the 27-year-old who opened fire on a crowded Northern Illinois University lecture hall, killing five, and then himself on Thursday, was discharged from the United States Army in February 2002 for unknown reasons, ABC News has learned.

Kazmierczak enlisted in September 2001, and was separated before he completed basic training, a defense official told ABC News.

Reasons for his separation include not revealing a condition during initial screening, or not adapting to military life.

The Privacy Act forbids the Army from characterizing the reason for Kazmierczak's discharge.

Kazmierczak had most recently been studying mental health issues at the University of Illinois, and had taken a job at a prison, according to his academic adviser.

But his career as a correction officer at the Rockville County Correctional Facility was short-lived, according to Doug Garrison, a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Correction.

"[Kazmierczak] was employed, starting the 24th of September 2007, as a correction officer at the Rockville Correctional Facility," Garrison told ABCNEWS.com. "He left employment on the 9th of October 2007."

"He just did not come back to work," said Garrison.

There's a lot of individual red flags here--none of them terribly significant by itself, but all combined suggest to me that Kazmierczak may have been having problems for some years, although not enough to prevent him from completing his bachelor's degree. His interest in mental health issues by itself wouldn't tell us much--but it sounds like his problems became dramatically worse in the last few months.

UPDATE 2: Here's another February 15, 2008 ABC News story:

The gunman who fatally shot five students before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University lecture hall likely planned his murder spree at least a week in advance, investigators said today.

The graduate student bought two of his four guns at a Champaign, Ill., gun store Saturday — indicating that he had been planning his assault for at least six days, ABC News' Richard Esposito and Pierre Thomas report. The other weapons were purchased from the same store in December and August 2007.

It appears that he purchased one handgun in August--perhaps he was becoming fearful--a not uncommon paranoid reaction. But the rest of the purchases appear to have happened in December--suggesting that his paranoia was getting worse.

With respect to allowing concealed carry permit holders to be armed on campus, this is pretty persuasive:

Police said he reloaded the shotgun in a shooting that lasted less than five minutes, before he took his own life. Police arrived on the scene within two minutes of the first reports, but it was too late to stop the gunman.

Reloading a Remington 870 shotgun, while not difficult, does require you to focus on what you are doing--it's not like swapping magazines on a pistol. If you were not in the direct line of sight while this was going on, there would have been a chance to draw, fire, and disable or kill him while he was reloading.