Gunman opens fire on Illinois campus
Shooter dead; hospitals told to expect up to 15 victims from university
Campus Shooting on Valentines
Shooter dead; hospitals told to expect up to 15 victims from university
Campus Shooting on Valentines
BREAKING NEWS
NBC News and MSNBC
updated 12 minutes ago
DEKALB, Ill. - A gunman opened fire Thursday in a packed lecture hall on the campus of Northern Illinois University, wounding as many as 15 people, police and witnesses said. Police said the gunman was dead.
Police reported that the scene was secure and that the gunman was “no longer a threat” about an hour after the shooting, which occurred about 4 p.m. ET in Cole Hall. It was not immediately clear whether the man committed suicide or was killed by police.
Three people with head wounds were being treated at Rockford Medical Center, and a spokesman at Kishwaukee Community Hospital in DeKalb told NBC News that area hospitals had been advised “to expect up to 15 injured people from the campus.”
Paul Sundstrom of Rockford, Ill., one of 150 to 200 students in the geography class when the shooting took place, told WMAQ that the gunman was a thin white man wearing a black “beanie” and a long black trench coat.
The man entered the room from the back, behind the professor, and began shooting without saying a word, Sundstrom said, firing in the general direction of the students. He emptied his clip of ammunition and calmly reloaded before resuming firing.
“I just don’t know why anybody would want to do anything like this,” Sundstrom said.
In keeping with a new security system put in place after the massacre last year at Virginia Tech University, the
University
issued an alert at 4:20 p.m. ET telling students to avoid Kings Common and buildings in the area. The university was locked down, and all classes were
canceled through Friday.
The university urged all students to call their parents to reassure them that they were safe and to aid in accounting for everyone.
David Shaffer got a call from his daughter, Lisa Mikolajewski, a senior, minutes after the shooting. She told her father she had not seen the shooting but was calling to let her parents, who live in Phoenix, know she was safe.
“She’s very upset right now because cell phone coverage is spotty and she can’t find out about the condition of her friends,” Shaffer said. “I advised her to get to her apartment, which is off campus.”
“She did not sound too shaken up; she was more concerned about her mother and me worrying,” Shaffer said.