As friends and family tried Tuesday to make sense of the apparent suicides of two Mokena teenagers, officials at three local schools dispatched counselors for grieving students.
“Our junior high teachers told kids what happened and tried to explain to them that there are better ways to solve problems,” said Mokena School District 159 Supt. Roger Reardon, in whose district the shootings occurred. “It’s a tragedy, but we are trying to use it as a teaching tool. We don’t want to let these teenagers die in vain. We want to learn from it.”
Counselors were at the Mokena Elementary and Mokena Junior High School campus, and at Lincoln-Way High School, where Shaun Dunkel, 19, and Jeffrey Niemiec, 17, attended school.
Mokena police say Dunkel and Niemiec climbed a 15-foot dirt berm behind the Mokena campus Sunday night or early Monday. There, not far from their homes, the best friends placed guns to their heads and pulled the triggers, police said.
Police said that the teens did not leave suicide notes but that the two had told friends that they wanted to commit suicide together. Late Sunday night they told a group of friends that they were “gone for good.”
Dunkel’s father and a friend found the bodies about 4 a.m. Monday. Two .25-caliber semiautomatic handguns registered to Dunkel’s parents were found next to the bodies, police said.
At Lincoln-Way on Tuesday, school officials set up a counseling center to talk to students individually. They also sent counselors into Dunkel and Niemiec’s classrooms.
“We are doing all we can to help our students work through their pain,” said Stacy Holland, spokesman for Lincoln-Way High School. “These deaths certainly have touched our students, faculty and administrators.”
By Tuesday afternoon, a makeshift shrine had been erected atop the berm where the shootings occurred. A cardboard cross, framed with five yellow bows, stood amid of slew of bouquets. A trickle of relatives friends and curiosity-seekers stopped to pay their respects or to simply reflect.
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A minor controversy erupted earlier in the day when family members complained to school officials after a custodian packaged up the memorial after it had been blown down. Reardon told the family that the new memorial, which sits on school property, can remain only through the week.
“Our hearts go out to the families of these two teenagers, but we have little kids who walk by the spot and they do not understand what is going on,” Reardon said.