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player ready...About 15 minutes were left in Geology 104: Introduction to Ocean Science, and junior Dan Sweeney was checking the time when the door beneath the lecture hall’s clock flew open.
In strode a thin young man dressed in black, a dark knit cap atop his head, a shotgun in his hands.
Time stopped. There was no fear, no panic in the half-full room — only an icy moment of bewilderment.
“Nothing seemed out of place,” said junior Doug Quesnel, 22. “It was weird he walked through there, but nothing seemed wrong until the shots went off.”
Many who witnessed the rain of gunfire in Cole Hall told a common tale: A tranquil afternoon of class was brought to a bloody end by a gunman who appeared suddenly and fired wordlessly into the mass of students.
Five people died along with the shooter, who took his own life seconds after opening fire, police said. Those who survived were left with searing memories of an instant when the unthinkable became real.
“It was just surreal,” said Sweeney, 22. “Even when the first shot was fired I couldn’t believe it was happening. It didn’t seem to register with anyone.”
The topic of the day was the properties of the ocean floor, and as always, instructor Joseph Peterson was doing his best to keep his 100-plus students engaged.
He was standing on a stage at the front of the 300-seat auditorium, clicking through a PowerPoint presentation, when a side door on the stage opened with a violent tug.
The face of the young man who entered was void of expression. There was a baffling, agonizing pause. Then he started shooting.
“It didn’t even sound like I thought a gun would sound like,” said Desiree Smith, a senior from Bolingbrook studying journalism. “It sounded like a cork coming out of a champagne bottle.”
The gunfire threw the room into screaming chaos.
“I dropped to the ground under my seat, and could see another girl down there,” Smith said. “We just stared at each other. I grabbed her leg and was squeezing it for about five seconds. Then we moved all of a sudden. Everyone was army-crawling toward the back of the auditorium on the floor.”
“As soon as I reached the door, I got halfway hunched over, and then started to run as soon as I got outside. I just ran. Everything went quiet around me and I felt I wasn’t running fast enough. I remember thinking, ‘He’s gonna shoot me, he’s gonna shoot me.'”
The aisles leading to the exit were choked with a mad scramble. Some students fell to the floor and were stepped on, while others tried to hurdle the crush.
“I was prepared for one of the bullets to hit me in the back,” said junior Shane Pope, 21, who was sitting toward the back. “I was prepared for that to be my last moment.”
Harold Ng, 21, a junior in communications, said the the danger didn’t register even after the firing started .
“I was still in the dream state and I didn’t think it was reality. It was like a video game,” he said.
It wasn’t until the other students in the class began to run in a panic that he too began to run, leaving his book bag and jacket on the floor of the auditorium as he fled. While running, he was shot in the back of the head.
“I didn’t feel any pain or anything,” he said. “I just swiped the back of my head with my hand, and then when I looked at my hand it was all bloody.”
He ran into neighboring Neptune Hall, where other students noticed his wounds and helped him.
The ambulance came in a short time and they were fast about it,” he said. “I have three pellets in my head, but they said I’d be OK.”
John Giovanni, 20, of Des Plaines left his notebook and iPod behind as he bolted for the doors in a crouch, thinking to himself that a moving target would be harder to hit.
“I was pushing through people,” he said. “You need to get out. You never know how good of a marksman he is. … My goal was getting out there and running as far as I could to be safe.”
Outside the building, the students scattered. Some slipped on the ice. Blood was everywhere.
Jillian Martinez, a freshman from Carpentersville, said she saw the gunman enter the auditorium from a side door near the teacher’s lectern at the front of the room.
“All I saw was the flash of shooting,” she continued. “He pulled out his gun. He just started shooting at all the kids. He just started shooting at people, and I ran out of there as fast as I could. I ran all the way to the student center; when I got there I could still hear shooting [from the classroom].”
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As the victims fled across campus, the panic of the lecture hall began to spread.
“Everything was crazy,” said sophomore Ryan Toms, 20, of Rockford, who was trying to drive out of a parking lot near Cole Hall. “There were people running down the roads trying to get away, and the roads were just jampacked with cars trying to get out, and so many police cars and ambulances and firetrucks trying to get in and there’s people in the way.”
Students holed up in their dorm rooms and apartments, some staying well after the university said the crisis was over. Parents streamed into the campus to pick up their children, and some weren’t so sure they would return.
Smith, the Bolingbrook senior, reached a nearby campus building and called her parents and boyfriend. She was then told to go to an auditorium for questioning with the rest of the students from the classroom where the shooting occurred.
There, she ran into the girl she had locked eyes with under the seats of the classroom.
“We ran to each other and hugged; I told her I kept thinking of her and wondering if you were OK,” Smith said. “She said she kept thinking of me and that she remembered my face and remembered me grabbing on to her.”
Smith said that the class’ teacher, Peterson, was also in the auditorium, despite being apparently wounded in the arm by the shooter.
“We were all relieved to see he was OK,” Smith said. “I lost it and started crying then, I could see the horror and shock in his face.”
Desiree Smith said she had been feeling uneasy about campus security ever since last year’s Virginia Tech massacre, saying many classroom doors didn’t lock. Now, after the worst has happened, she said it would be hard to return to any sense of normalcy.
“I think it’s going to be really hard for me and a lot of people. It’s going to be hard to be back in that room, now that this has happened. … I don’t understand why someone has to go into a room of people they’ve never met and feel like they need to harm them.”
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