Just after dinner Tuesday night, unemployed mechanic Stephen Buik allegedly opened fire on his family inside a brown frame home in Villa Park with smiling pumpkins on the front stoop and chalk drawings on the driveway.
Before he turned the .380-caliber semi-automatic pistol on himself, he allegedly wounded his wife and 17-year-old stepdaughter and killed their only son, 7-year-old Alex, police said.
Their 9-year-old daughter, Bonnie, who witnessed the shootings, was not injured, authorities said.
On Wednesday, Buik was charged with murder and attempted murder. Buik and his stepdaughter were listed in critical condition; his wife remained in serious condition.
While details from those horrifying seconds emerged, family, neighbors and friends were still trying to figure out what ignited the attack. Police said Wednesday that the shooting began with a domestic quarrel, although they said it was unclear what the alleged quarrel was about. A relative of Buik’s said he had taken medication for depression, but authorities declined to comment on whether that had any bearing on Buik’s alleged shooting rampage.
Police learned of the shooting just before 6 p.m., when Buik’s wife, Kathleen Buik, made a frantic call to 911. She had been shot, and authorities said a review of the 911 tape revealed the sound of another shot, believed to be that of Stephen Buik’s self-inflicted wound to the right temple.
Authorities said Stephen Buik, who had been drinking before the rampage, shot his stepdaughter, Linda Anderson, three times in the back and then shot Alex in the head and chest. Then he allegedly fired a bullet into his wife’s upper chest.
About 6 p.m. Officer Genaro Esposito entered the front door of the house at 813 S. Ardmore Ave. and found Anderson lying next to the television set in the living room. A wounded Kathleen Buik was on the living room couch, next to her daughter Bonnie.
Esposito spotted Stephen Buik in the kitchen from the reflection on a glass door, authorities said. Buik walked into the doorway between the kitchen and living room, bleeding from his head wound, police said.
Stephen Buik was lucid, but Villa Park Police Chief Ronald Ohlson would not reveal what Buik said to Esposito.
Alex’s body was found in the basement.
Investigators found blood throughout the kitchen and a trail of blood on the steps leading to the basement, Ohlson said.
Buik has a valid firearm owner’s identification card for the weapon used in the shootings, authorities said.
Police said they had been called to the Buiks’ house on previous occasions for undisclosed reasons, but they said the calls were not related to domestic violence. Buik’s only previous criminal record is for minor traffic infractions and a drunken-driving conviction in 1984, court records show.
“I know they had a rocky marriage,” said Robert Murphy, Kathleen Buik’s brother-in-law. “I heard vaguely that they had troubles. And I guess they did.”
A half-hour before children began arriving Wednesday morning at Westmore School in Lombard, where Alex was a 2nd grader, teachers and staff held a meeting to set up a plan for the day ahead, said Principal Adele T. Lynch.
She said that teachers handled the announcement of Alex’s death individually in each classroom.
“We tried to make it very pointed but not sensational or in any way create any uncertainty in the children,” Lynch said, adding that the general approach was to continue school-day routine as normal as possible.
“I can’t tell you that it was normal,” she said of the atmosphere at the school, “but at the same time, everybody rose to the occasion to carry on and do the best we could under the circumstances. We supported each other.”
Later in the morning, Lynch had a chance to talk with Alex’s teachers about a boy who, she said, “had a smile for everyone.
“We would probably best characterize him as an active, typical 7-year-old, a very sweet and positive child,” Lynch said. “He always wanted to please. He was polite. He was just a happy little guy who was very popular with his peers, and because of his popularity, the students are experiencing a real loss.”
In the neighborhood, many residents remembered Alex as a little boy who loved to skate and ride his bike with his best friend, and who had a fancy for his pet iguana.
“I miss Alex already,” said Harry Kirkaldy, the 77-year-old patriarch of the Villa Park neighborhood where the Buiks had lived for about seven years. Kirkady’s driveway is the neighborhood meeting place, where adults and youngsters stop by for chats that sometimes stretch for hours.
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“He was over here every night,” Kirkaldy recalled on Wednesday. “He and a lot of the kids. That’s who I feel sorry for: the kids. Grownups, they get over things but the kids don’t. They can’t ever forget about these things.”
Alex held a particular appreciation for pets, Lynch said. When teachers would conduct lessons on science, Alex was an enthusiastic participant, bringing snake skins and fossils to class, Lynch recalled.
“Alex was somebody whom we really cared about,” she said.
But neighbors said they had a much different impression of Stephen Buik, who told neighbors he had been living off an inheritance for months.
“The father has caused a lot of problems,” said Cathy Harper, a neighbor. “He’s very argumentative. He yelled at the slightest things.”
Harper said that last spring, Buik shouted obscenities at a child who was watering tulips without permission in Buik’s yard. The child’s father later confronted Buik and the two quarreled, Harper and others said.
On Wednesday, Buik remained under police guard at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, authorities said, and he will be taken to the DuPage County Jail upon his release.
Ohlson said investigators were waiting to talk to Kathleen Buik and Anderson when their conditions improve.
Stephen and Kathleen Buik were married on March 30, 1985, according to DuPage County court records. Kathleen Buik had three children from a previous marriage: Linda; Janet Anderson, 19, who was not home at the time of the shooting; and Steven Anderson, 18, who lives elsewhere.
Buik’s alleged shooting rampage was the second such incident in three days in Chicago’s suburbs. On Sunday, Karl Bingham, a 48-year-old from Bolingbrook, shot and wounded his wife and son before killing himself.
Statistics from the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority indicate that during the last decade, the rate of domestic homicides has remained fairly constant in Chicago and in Illinois.